[ISEA2015] Workshop: Kate Hennessy, Trudi Lynn Smith, Craig Campbell, Fiona P. McDonald, Thomas Ross, Stephanie Takaragawa Miller, Glenn Alteen & Tarah Hogue – Terminus: Archives, Ephemera, and Electronic Art

Workshop Statement 

Description: Since 2009, the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective has staged annual exhibitions in major North American cities (Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, New Orleans, Philadelphia) that explore the intersections of art and anthropology. Archives, ephemera, and Indigenous articulations of new media, identity, culture, language, and resistance have emerged as central themes in contemporary art-ethnographic practice and as a central interest to the curatorial work of the collective. New technologies, both materially and conceptually, present opportunities to push theoretical, disciplinary, and aesthetic boundaries. However, the implications of digitization and circulation of archival information present particularly interesting challenges for artists and scholars who seek to both represent and exploit the potential of digital archives. Building on the collective’s recent exhibitions, and in conjunction with an exhibition of new media artist Geronimo Inutiq’s Arctic Noise project, co-curated for ISEA 2015 at the grunt gallery in Vancouver (Terminal City), Ethnographic Terminalia invites workshop participants to demonstrate and discuss electronic art works and theoretical frameworks that disrupt material, figurative, discursive, cultural, and political manifestations of the archive, broadly conceived. Duration: Whole Day  ethnographicterminalia.org/2015-isea-vancouver

  • Kate Hennessy, Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Canada. I am a cultural anthropologist with a PhD from the University of British Columbia (Anthropology). As the director of the Making Culture Lab at SIAT, my research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. My video and multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies to address Indigenous and settler histories of place and space. Current projects include the collaborative production of virtual museum exhibits with Aboriginal communities in Canada; the study of new digital museum networks and their effects; ethnographic research on the implementation of large scale urban screens in public space; and as a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective, the intersections of anthropology and contemporary art practices. hennessy.iat.sfu.ca/mcl
  • Trudi Lynn Smith, University of Victoria, CA
  • Craig Campbell, University of Texas, Austin, US
  • Fiona P. McDonald, New Knowledge Organization, US
  • Thomas Ross Miller, Berkeley College, US
  • Stephanie Takaragawa, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Chapman University, Orange, California, USA.  chapman.edu/our-faculty/stephanie-takaragawa
  • Tarah Hogue, Curatorial Resident, grunt gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada. In conjunction with ISEA2015, grunt gallery is pleased to present ARCTICNOISE by Geronimo Inutiq. ARCTICNOISE is a media installation that draws on archival film footage and sound materials sourced from the Isuma Archive at the National Gallery of Canada, as well as sound and film materials from the artist’s personal collection and other ethnographical material. Conceived as an Indigenous response to Glenn Gould’s celebrated composition “The Idea of the North”, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MeTImOtqYc) Inutiq will appropriate Gould’s piece as a musical score, paired with new voices and imagery to produce a layered and multi-vocal work. The project is presented as a prototype, intended to shift and morph with each subsequent iteration allowing Inutiq to continually incorporate additional voices, perspectives and critiques into the work itself. At its crux, ARCTICNOISE intends to initiate conversations between various communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and to provoke thoughtful exchange about the roles of Inuit orality and materiality in a post-colonial space within the context of new media artwork. New media, with its appropriative and collage-like nature, is employed as a specific strategy to foster a multi-vocal and multi-generational approach to these sensitive issues. The hope is that by reframing archival sources alongside contemporary technologies and materials, insightful and affective connections will emerge. As a multimedia work, ARCTICNOISE aims to re-purpose past Inuit visual and sound media in an attempt to conflate temporalities of past and present with the aims of repurposing and mobilizing understandings of Inuit art aesthetics. grunt.ca
  • Glenn Alteen, grunt gallery, Vancouver, CA