P r e / a m b l e:
A 2 day festival of Art and Psychogeography

NOVEMBER 1 & 2, 2003

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PRESENTED BY:
Western Front
Upgrade 2.0
Special Airplane
Kate Armstrong
Year Zero One

OTHER LINKS:
What is Psychogeography?
Algorithmic Psychogeography
Guy Debord's Theory of the Derive
Why Psychogeography?
Social Fiction
Glowlab
Psychogeography.net
Simon Levin and Laurie Long

W A L K : GPS Bandoleer Drawing
Meet at the Western Front
Date: Sunday, November 2, 2003
Time: 1 pm

M. Simon Levin and Laurie Long will be on hand at the Western Front to offer participants an opportunity to take out the 2 custom designed GPS bandoleers (used in the S.A.L.T. project) to do a local mapping/ drawing activity using a series of questions as algorithmic guidelines.

T A L K : Relational Aesthetics: About S.A.L.T. and C.H.A.R.T.
Western Front
Date: Saturday, November 1, 2003
Time: 5 - 6:30 pm

M. Simon Levin and Laurie Long will give a talk in which they will look at two recent projects, The Centre for S.A.L.T. Expression and C.H.A.R.T.

The Centre for S.A.L.T Expression is an exploration of an Australian wheatbelt community's relationship to their over farmed and hyper-salinated land. This fictional organization intervenes into a small country town (pop. 800) to reframe people's daily lives as mark-making creative acts. Presented within the context of land care issues this project brought real social agency to the shire of Kelleberrin, developing and delivering educational curriculum for school kids and supporting a project which included social services for the aboriginal community. In addition, focus groups were facilitated to re-vision the town's future identity.

C.H.A.R.T: is an exploration of the people's relationship to rivers in the lower Fraser valley of B.C.. A fictional mapping and monitoring station, C.H.A.R.T intervenes into the Surrey Art Centre transforming the TechLab into part environmental awareness agency and part security post. Examining the diverse experiences and perspectives that the public has with naturally running fresh water, C.H.A.R.T. digitally records these relationships to create data streams that reflect the many currents and tributaries that come together within the river metaphor.

These projects will be presented in the context of Relational Aesthetics. Through Long's social documentary work and Levin's collaborative art practice, they link community through new media to the local landscape. Both projects use a modified GPS technology to create a means of representation for inter-personal connections, which at the same time subvert the surveillance/navigational intentions of the technology. The new media applications then become an entry point into a dialogical and often intimate exploration of our own topographical relationships.

BIOS:

M. Simon Levin

M. Simon Levin has been creating site-specific projects that explore relational aesthetics using a variety of custom designed tools for the past 15 years. These projects investigate the often-blurred boundaries between the private and the public resulting in poetic interventions into space and place. His teaching and inter-disciplinary art practice has led him to create numerous site-specific art projects for public and private spaces in Canada, USA, Mexico and Australia. Simon co-founded collective echoes, a non-profit arts organization committed to producing collaborative public works. Within a model of co-mentorship, this collective teams up young emerging and established artists with a community to explore and to create art that is relevant to the concerns of that community. These projects fused pedagogy, community development and public art to explore innovative approaches to contemporary culture making.

In developing large-scale projects such as a photo agency for inner city youth, cultivating a vertical community garden downtown, or developing various subversive tele-communication systems, Simon has worked with diverse populations of people. As an extension of his art practice, Simon works with artists and non-artists in the making of public works as a way of pushing social awareness of how public space operates and for whom it is designed to do so. By fostering critical thinking in cultural workers, he believes in the social agency of art making. He has co-authored with Vancouver Art Gallery's Public Programs, a Grade 11 and 12 curriculum on contemporary public art and published a catalogue on the public projects of collective echoes. He was recently the artist in residence at International Art Space, Kelleberrin, Australia with Laurie Long where they launched his GPS applications. He is now artist in residence at the Surrey Art Gallery TechLab expanding his explorations in the use of GPS technology, and relational aesthetics with C.H.A.R.T.

Laurie Long

As an independent filmmaker Laurie Long has spent the past decade working in a broad variety of roles in productions ranging from guerilla style performance poetry videos and independent documentaries, to extreme sports television. Her work has been broadcast extensively in Canada, screened theatrically and exhibited internationally.

Most recently working as artist in residence at International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia, Laurie collaborated with artist M. Simon Levin on Centre For S.A.L.T Expression - a site-specific multimedia production exploring relational aesthetics in a remote Australian farming community stricken with land salinity.

Her ability to make people comfortable in front of her camera has gained her remarkable access into the lives of her many documentary subjects. From exploring SM dungeons and fetish parties, to train hopping with a paraplegic graffiti artist, Laurie explores the lives of characters engaged in exceptional circumstances. In her commitment to exploring diverse voices in marginalized cultures, she works toward changing the demographic landscape of representation in the mainstream media.