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Keywords:
global media spaces, telematic performance, networked art, online
communities, online video, public exploration of the private
sphere, cultures/languages/identities, nomadism, better-life,
visual ethnography.
Introduction:
"Where are you from?" synthesizes many of my personal explorations
regarding the hybridisation of media around issues of place and belonging.
The work questions the relationship of culture and technology that
appear to characterize the world of globalisation: migration, nomadism,
hybrid identities, language convergence, and electronic mediation.
My aim is to explore where the "better life" is located
in our mobile contemporary imagination. I was awarded an individual
2002 Canada Council Media Arts Research Grant to develop the project.
I conceived "Where are you from?" as a transnational
interdisciplinary piece that will bring into play Broadband, IP
protocol and large-scale connectivity. Video-taped stories from
individuals in several world cities, will be Webcast Live during
weekend performances. The project juxtaposes culture and technology
to explore the boundaries between how we imagine the world and
how that imagination influences understanding of our place within
it. It is entwined with a set of existential concerns famously
encapsulated in the title of the 1897 painting made by French Impressionist
Paul Gauguin: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are
we going?"
Specifically,
I have chosen to frame the project around my personal geography
in 6 cities. These cities are Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Mexico
City, Buenos Aires and Paris. Because I have lived in these cities,
they are not foreign or exotic locations for me. I am familiar
with these places, the people that inhabit them and their languages.
These cities occupy a relative relationship to notions of centrality
or periphery in the cultural universe that is to say, Buenos
Aires may be a center in the imaginary of a migrant from Peru,
but a periphery for a nomad/passer-by from Tokyo. On the other
hand, a globalised center like Paris, contains numerous peripheries.
I am interested in this intermingling of centers and peripheries
as they relate to local and global environments. In my "Where
are you from?" project, I seek to reveal these complex relationships
in stories that integrate images of self and translocal experiences.
This Webcast project brings Live performance and creative media
to a public space where citizens-at-large are able to shape the
work. It offers networked experiences and the distribution of
culturally significant ideas about place and belonging beyond narratives
of origin.
In each
city, I will create communicational spaces in carefully selected
locations where a hybrid population spends time: public buildings,
parks or plazas. Using performance strategies, I will construct
dialogical situations in a nomadic structure. Passersby are invited
into this structure to share personal stories on the Internet
to deterritorialized viewers world wide. I launch conversations
with a simple question that everyone can relate to: "Where
are you from?". Through my prompting, based on a system I
have developed and tested through research in 3 languages and in
6 world cities, I involve the visitor in a discussion about a better
life.
The
project addresses the characteristics of globalised urban environments
and their population, what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai fittingly
calls the ethnoscape, that is to say "Šthe
landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which
we live". Further he adds: "This is not to say that there
are no relatively stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship,
work and leisure, as well as of birth, residence, and other filial
forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere
shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and
groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies
of wanting to move". ("Modernity at Large", pp33)
Pat Badani
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