Visible City Project + Archive
The Visible City Project (http://visiblecity.info.yorku.ca/) seeks to understand the different roles that artists play in imagining and helping to design 21st century cities. The project seeks to discern how art practices function in specific contemporary urban contexts as a tool for enhancing communication and renovating democratic citizenship.
A new generation of artists using media technologies are exploring the meanings of translocality, public spaces and mobile networks that are distinct configurations grounded in place—indeed, often several places at once. The Visible City Project has come to focus on groups of artists who are using various aesthetic, community-oriented and interventionist approaches to communicate across distances (either geographical and/or cultural) in collaborative and political ways. The new collective projects are often informed by a particular view of globalization, a belief in the power of the imagination and media technology (internet, cell phones, projections, digital video, radio) to effect social change and design new forms of civic association that reconfigure boundaries—whether it is disconnected places in the city or disconnected cities in the world. While continuing to build upon the established case studies of Toronto, Havana and Helsinki, the project will extend into other Asian and Latin American cities.
LOT: Experiments in Urban Research
LOT (League of Tangents) (http://lot.info.yorku.ca/) is a Toronto collective that was formed in 2007 by a number of artists and researchers associated with the Visible City Project.
The members of LOT have a number of ongoing projects which include:
- “Cul de Sac: The Abandoned House Project,” a collaboration with the Public Acccess Collective that will result in a multi-media exhibition at an abandoned bungalow in Willowdale, Ontario.
- “Indigenous Oral History Sound Project” (Julie Nagam): a site-specific sound piece in the area surrounding the Humber River Valley of Toronto; an intervention that challenges the dominant historical account of the area from indigenous perspectives.
- “Short Horizon” (Anna Friz): a sound project that works with binaural acoustic field recordings and recordings of sounds transduced from VLF (Very Low Frequency) antennas in order to create deeply textured compositions.
Full project descriptions and more information about the collective are available on LOT’s website.
