Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Moore, Scott
Master of Fine Arts - MFA
University of British Columbia
With social and environmental challenges facing the earth, can there be an approach to show how to re-calibrate our relationships to things and places? In my artistic research, I have been utilizing various methods of looking at domestic objects through drawing, video, and 3D scanning to question how we relate to them and the wider world. The resulting works are installations comprised of a few real things presented alongside their, and many other, digital counterparts. The installations are composed of objects that should be relatable and recognizable through their ubiquity. I hope that the re-presenting of these familiar objects allows us to experience defamiliarization. Therefore, generating the ability to re-consider their relationships to the objects within our existing realities. Oranges, squash, apples, computer cables, hard drives, books, vases, flowers, etc. highlight the aggregate elements that compose our families. Taking notice of a kabocha squash, clay vase, or the cast of the sun resting on a cluttered dining room table becomes subscendent (moving towards relations) sites of connection. Working in ways to reveal the existing unseen and seen objects leads to potential moments of intimacy and relationships.
Flattening, Translation: Life Still LifebyScott MooreB.F.A., Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, 2008A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OFTHE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OFMASTER OF FINE ARTSinTHE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES(Visual Arts)THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA(Okanagan)November 2022© Scott Moore, 2022 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled:Flattening, translation: Life Still Lifesubmitted by Scott Moore in partial fulfillment of the requirements ofthe degree of Master of Fine Arts.SupervisorSupervisory Committee MemberSupervisory Committee MemberUniversity ExaminerSamuel Roy-Bois, Faculty of Creative and Critical StudiesTania Williard, Faculty of Creative and Critical StudiesShawn Serfas, Faculty of Creative and Critical StudiesDr. Daniel Keyes, Faculty of Creative and Critical StudiesiiAbstractWith social and environmental challenges facing the earth, can there be an approach to show how to re-calibrate our relationships to things and places? In my artistic research, I have been utilizing various methods of looking at domestic objects through drawing, video, and 3D scanning to question how we relate to them and the wider world. The resulting works are installations comprised of a few real things presented alongside their, and many other, digital counterparts. The installations are composed of objects that should be relatable and recognizable through their ubiquity. I hope that the re-presenting of these familiar objects allows us to experience defamiliarization. Therefore, generating the ability to re-consider their relationships to the objects within our existing realities. Oranges, squash, apples, computer cables, hard drives, books, vases, flowers, etc. highlight the aggregate elements that compose our families. Taking notice of a kabocha squash, clay vase, or the cast of the sun resting on a cluttered dining room table becomes subscendent (moving towards relations) sites of connection. Working in ways to reveal the existing unseen and seen objects leads to potential moments of intimacy and relationships. iiiLay SummaryThis is a paper to support Life Still Life a collection of installation artworks that were installed at the Lake Country Art Gallery as part of Plastic Grass: UBCO MFA Exhibition. I am utilizing physical and digital sculptural projections that present common objects, hat, projector, squash, tablecloth alongside their digital counterparts. This strategy is to allow space for the viewer to re-consider their relationships to the displayed objects. The artworks production unfolded through a series of explorations into a variety of mediums, exposing its final form as digital sculptures that question perception, image, labour and the everyday.ivTable of ContentsAbstract .......................................................................................................................................................iiiLay Summary..............................................................................................................................................ivTable of Contents .........................................................................................................................................vList of Figures .............................................................................................................................................viAcknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................viiDedication....................................................................................................................................................ixSection 1: Introduction................................................................................................................................1Section 2: Labour and or Protestant Work Ethic: Reflection and Opening. .........................................6Section 3: Flattening (translation) and dislocation (previous work).....................................................143.1 Flattened through space and time .................................................................................................163.1.1 Location and Process .................................................................................................................183.1.1.1 Loss as in lost or lossy, the inability to regain what was once. ..........................................29Section 4: re-generation and re-materialization .....................................................................................31Section 5: A shadow cast across a chair, a table, subtle and fuzzy as the clouds pass by and sharp and crisp of an open sky. (An Invitation) ................................................................................................37Works Cited................................................................................................................................................46Works Consulted.............................................................................................................................49Appendix.....................................................................................................................................................51vList of FiguresFigure. 1. Clara Peeters Still Life with Flowers, a Silver-gilt Goblet, Dried Fruit, Sweetmeats, Bread sticks, Wine and a Pewter Pitcher…………………..………….………………………………………………8Figure. 2. Scott Moore - Geyser after Kwan/Stocking……………………………………………………..19Figure. 3. Scott Moore - Zoom Invite (Detail)…………………………..…………………………………..22Figure. 4. Scott Moore - Zoom Invite……………………….………………………………………………..23Figure. 5. Scott Moore - strawberries, fire pit, beer cans, tabletop, table leg, chairs…………………25Figure. 6. Fire Map - K61884 MAP Public Info 36x48L 20210903………………….………………….27Figure. 7. Scott Moore - Single Gang 24fps..……………………….……………..……………………….31Figure. 8. Scott Moore - still life still…………………………………….………………………………….33Figure. 9. Scott Moore - Projection/Projector/Projection.……………….……………………………….39Figure. 10. Scott Moore - Camper………….…….……………………….……………………………….43viAcknowledgementsDefining where we end and begin is a complicated endeavour. It holds on for a moment if we consider our bodies, but begin to slip away when we jump to thoughts and ideas. We are a composite of all of our experiences, thoughts, interactions, conversations, etc. To pick apart every aspect of where and how ideas were generated is akin to trying to disentangle all of the components in an ecosystem. We can get to a proximal idea of how we understand its working, but it relies on faith and trust in the complex relationships that cannot be separated. The gorilla girls noted that the ‘genius’ that was piled upon (almost exclusively) male artists does not account for the systems and structures that the artists were working within and helped producing the art. I had much support and inputs in continuing my learning. Generating understanding of how to create art and life in this place and time. I am especially grateful for the support and knowledge of my supervisor Samuel Roy-Bois, for guidance in this process. I am also appreciative of the input of time, effort and thoughtful discussions generated by my committee. Tania Williard, Shawn Serfas and former members Renay Egami and Hussein Keshani. Many thanks to and acknowledging the support of the following: Michaela Bridgemohan and Natasha Harvey for generating much potential! Sherry/Xiaoxuan Huang (also with Michaela and Natasha for YOKE), Natalie Rice, Andrea Routley and the rest of the MFA writers and Poets. Instructors who I was able to support through TA, Patrick Lundeen and David Doody. As well as all of the first year sculpture students who I had the pleasure of learning with while TA’ing. I was also supported by many of the staff at UBCO: Joanne Gervais, Kaila Kalinocka, Philip Wyness, Cassandra Northrup, Lacia Vogel, Lindsay Farrugia, Michael Doerksen, and the UBCO IT staff! As well as all of the connections carried forward, my grandparents, Beryl and Roy Moore and Bill and Janet Forrest, all of the aunties, uncles and cousins and rest of kin. Brian Jungen, Gertie, Gus and Mr Mike, Larissa, Raphi and Sasha, Allie, Kevin and Alma, Wanda Lock, Katie Chapman, Liz Magor, Christian Kleigel, Erica Stocking, Anabel and Margaret, Kevin Schmidt, Holly Ward, Deirdre McAdams, Jacob Gleeson, Michael Turner, Judy Radhul, Sam Scott, Shabnam, Nasim and Noor, Ed Chan, Candice Hopkins, Christopher Kukura, Amy Kazymerchuk, Bruce, Susi, Amy and Julia, Lynn and Joe, Espe, viiNancy Duff, Penny Treen, Howard and Kurt Louis and their cousins, Tiziana La Melia, Julian Hou, Hannah Rickards, Petrina McNeill Nancy Holmes, Denise, Kenney, Aleksandra Dulic, Jane Dennis, Brittany Reitzel, Sam Neal, and countless others who have slipped my mind, but your presences are with me. I especially acknowledge all of the support from Lindsay and Leroy Lorraine, Matta our dog, cats Okie and Kal, horse named Leo, my family Mare and Bernie, brother Craig and his partner Miranda Myles, Doug, Carol, Michael and Derrick Lorraine. viiiDedicationThis thesis and support paper are dedicated to Lindsay and Leroy Lorraine and working to build meaningful reciprocity and relations to this place and its people.ixSection 1: IntroductionWith social and environmental challenges facing the earth, can there be an approach to re-calibrate our relationships with things and places? In my artistic research, I use various methods of making to encourage fresh ways of seeing. These installations and works could allow for re-introductions of the presented objects into our existing realities. Oranges, squash, apples, computer cables, hard drives, books, vases, flowers and more, highlight the aggregate elements that compose our families. Taking notice of a kabocha squash, clay vase, or the light cast by a digital sun re-creates familiar scenarios. Things and objects resting on a cluttered dining room table becomes a subscendent (moving towards relations) site of connection. Timothy Morton, eco-philosopher, likely coined the term subscendent, as in the spectral opposition of transcendent (rising above relations). "Subscendence happens when a set of things begins to exit its concept and becomes its entities. When a set of things emerges as downwardly causal on its components, then there is subscendence." (Morton and Boyer 74). If to transcend is to rise above, then to subscend is to sink within . I am working in ways to reveal the existing tensions between 1seen and unseen aspects of domestic daily objects to attend to potential moments of intimacy and an unfolding relationality.Can a re-representation sourced from a digital scan of actual objects generate the possibility to re-consider and re-connect to our actual place and space? I am consciously using re-representation, as adding the ‘re-' captures two parallel thoughts. One is because in the work presented in the exhibition, as I will explain in more details further, the digital objects that are presented are the third or fourth representations Subscendence is the taking of a higher-dimensional object and transforming it into a lower dimensional 1object. Examples: Thoughts to Words, Strategies to Plays, God to Christ, Cubes to Planes, Planes to Lines - Subscendence implies a loss of data. All the 3-dimensional qualities of a cube get lost as soon as it subscends to a 2-dimensional square. And the qualities of an ideal life can be lost as one lives it out in real time.The alternative can be transcendence. At the human-level, beauty can be an exercise in transcendence, compiling raw data and understanding it as a part of a higher-dimensional concept. - https://www.dialogues.ai/articles/subscendence1of those objects . The second is for re-representation to function as a moment of defamiliarization, a 2translation of Viktor Shklovsky's ostranenie. Shklovsky was a Russian Formalist theorist, critic and writer who created the concept of ostranenie (Art as Device and Art as Technique ), later defined by Alexandra 3Berlina as the "idea of emotional and cognitive renewal of the habitual" ultimately allowing "emotional reconnection to the world" (Berlina). I am utilizing digital technologies as a methodology of defamiliarization to refresh our ways of perceiving digital and real objects. My most recent project, still life still, 2021/22, is an installation consisting of a projection of a table containing squash, apples, oranges, a cake, flowers and a tool bag and many more. These images emanate from a projector and single board computer installed atop a plinth and are projected upon a large screen across the gallery space. The table and objects are lit by a digital sun that mimics the location and shadow of the real-time sun. The projector is installed on a low plinth along with real things, a tablecloth single board computer, a book and hat. The objects are included to suggest where the digital objects originate. I am interested in how the digital objects function as re-representations of the originals, layered through digital processing and output images that are mimetic of paintings. The assembled things hold within themselves the complexity of being both essential and simultaneously overlooked. They can contain values of labour and efforts, complex dynamics of global value networks , and central concerns of 4existence. still life still carries forward a common thread of my interests in highlighting the mundane or ubiquitous while using the domestic as a device to emphasize our contexts of existence. My work The first being the original scan, resulting in a digital object, the second being the importing of it into a 23D modelling software, the 3rd being the render and the fourth the representation presented within the gallery. I am simultaneously working from two separate translations, as each interprets Shklovsky’s words with 3subtle marked differences. Seeing multiple texts translated that are saying similar but not equivalent thoughts and ideas, highlights for me the curiosity that is translation and that language hold so much potential for both clarity and fuzziness. Formerly referred to a global supply chains, but changed as a chain portrays linearity, of which the 4global value networks are not, they are closer to rhizomes (Ricciotti 191-212).2proposes a closer looking at the objects that support our domestic existence. This is to open the possibility for a more engaging process of being in the world. For me, art making is a meditation on the objects, things, and materials intertwined within our domestic existence. The work considers our relations to our objects that vacillate between seen and unseen. Through emphasizing these collected objects I am hoping to generate an appreciation and curiosity about the world around us. Throughout my lived experience, I have noticed a lack of appreciation for the everyday creativity and labour of constructed, arranged, built or grown things. My work attempts to accentuate my appreciation and gratitude for these objects’ existences.We live in an ever-expanding, interconnected digital sphere and a permanently interconnected ecosphere . Digital interconnectedness is heralded as 'the future', as some preach about the potential of the 5metaverse and its ability to augment and enhance lived experience . The emerging paradox is that our 6 7digital connection is unseen while wholly supported by physical architectures supporting the invisible processes. Aspects of our daily existence are explained in science through isolating and reducing, yet overlooking the actual complexity of an ecosphere’s interconnectedness (Mazzocchi 463-466). We live in a moment that spans both the digital and real, straddling complicates our existence. If we can acknowledge the idea of that complexity, then maybe we can generate new ways of being. Finding moments to re-experience the world can generate new ways of relating to our surroundings. An example of this could be noticing the varied qualities of light contained within shadows that draws our attention to the texture of the fabric in our house, therefore, we can recognize forgotten qualities about our tablecloth. I think that re-representing far traveled objects like oranges, power cables or diapers in their digital forms Science is continually discovering interconnection and muddied boundaries as more and more 5disciplines specialize and go deeper in specific scientific research. This however can lead to detachment from other arms of research that are also specializing in similar directions. Persistent digital world’s.6 In one sense our digital is also presently physically and ephemerally interconnected, the cables, fibre, 7pipes, servers, hubs and switches that composes the internet. This physical architecture is also the structure that is the ‘cloud’ of cloud computing. Physical hardware manifests the ability for almost infinite wireless connection, as long as some entity invests in the infrastructure for that connection. 3allows for the potential to generate new ways of relating with them. Can we re-consider the values contained in rhubarb from our garden or in bags of oranges from a supermarket? The presentation of tangible things, with digitally re-produced things, is about opening possibilities. The possibility for us, as viewers, earthlings etc., to hold a notion that 'this existence' may not be wholly fixed. Gilles Deleuze, prolific and influential French philosopher, political activist and radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, write about the notion of becoming, where each moment is experienced anew. An 'old' thought holds the potential for generating new possibilities (Smith and Protevi). Becoming for Deleuze & Guattari was also linked to the rhizome, where each idea, thing, and node was a site of potential for new possibilities.My interest in our existing, built, grown, and ecological world comes from an appreciation for the tactile, the material aesthetics imprinted from my experiences through familial livelihoods in labour and in the trades. Labour holds within itself a tension of seen and unseen, where laboured actions are only, actually, visible during the act of work. Labour becomes hidden as other processes cover or obscure it. An electrical box contains a receptacle within a wall and connects to the wires that snake through the walls, these wires creating circuits for lights, receptacles, etc. This infrastructure is generally unseen. Our existences are framed through our senses and subsequent relations to our world. My awareness of the electrical circuits in my house simultaneously shifts between being present and absent. The receptacle and wiring continue to exist, but slip from my conscious mind, only re-gaining an awareness if I need to make use of it. Re-capturing the awareness of the tactile world is akin to the recognition of my breath, and define the essence of the work I created for this exhibition. During my upbringing, my family did not always explain values; concepts and qualities were implicit in how my family attended to tasks and cared for jobs. This care while doing and attention to detail has been inherited and absorbed into my art making. I approach thinking about the things, objects and materials that appear in my artworks as equal to each other, worthy of reciprocity and attendant care. These objects are the product of many, many, many systems, hands, visible and invisible forces, fungi, cooperation, and mutual aid. My work attempts to illustrate these complex issues through simple and accessible representations. Whether grown down the 4street or assembled from pieces across a global value network, each object, thing, and material holds multitudes of seen and unseen complexity within themselves. I am interested in presenting these prevalent objects for their visual accessibility, while illustrating the complexities of the ubiquitous and domestic. These objects materiality functions to bridge real and digital space, having been present in both, I am trying to present a certain amount of discord within the digital image, through allowing as much processing and final images to be generated by the computer or app. In one sense I’m celebrating the beauty generated by the digital processing, while also pointing to the hollow and false outcomes produced through the digital. Technology has be championed as be all and save all, especially the digital spaces, this is a false equivalency of being able to inhabit the real world. 5Section 2: Labour and or Protestant Work Ethic : Reflection and Opening.8Reflecting on memories of my upbringing allows for a re-considering of the values imparted by my family . I observed many people work at certain tasks with attentive care: helping garden or pick wild 9berries with grandma or a great aunt, helping grandpa gather and split firewood or re-build gravel and stone pathways with materials at hand, with a religious approach to reducing, reusing and recycling. My grandparents’ unsaid lessons of gardening were about supporting the soil through composting and regeneration so it could continually support next year's crops. Carrots, corn, rhubarb, potatoes and the asparagus patch are some of the bounties from Grandma’s garden. Organic gardeners actively build their soils by replenishing the nutrient compounds through composting, additive gardening methods, and vermiculture . These lessons became entrenched in the importance of care and intention while doing. 10These actions of replenishing the soil and caring for a garden are reciprocal and long-lasting. Gardens are also laborious and require dedication. I came to understand that care and attention are requirements for living a reciprocal life. I genuine curiosity to look at the things around me, grown to built and everything in between. This looking, drawing, translating of the things that comprise my space is a way to locate myself and consider how I exist within the world. I reference this labour in the broadest and most general definition of lowercase ‘l,' labour, which encapsulates many meanings and definitions. I build on this context of labour as an autobiographical foundation that allows space for considering the aspects of complex systems and structures of my lived experiences. I understand that there are many flaws with PWE, especially discriminatory as an opposition against 8Catholicism. It is also somewhat of a constructed notion that I am using as a one of the structures to bump up against. In family I mean not just biological family, but the community of kin, aunties and uncles etc. that 9become support structures. Utilizing worms to additionally process the soil, through feeding the worms rested compost, they 10concentrate the nutrients as well as adding beneficial microbes to the soil.6I grew up with instilled values of preventative maintenance, seeking out, and fixing, problems to prevent unexpected failures in the future, as an unexpected failure may disrupt one's ability to show up for work. Most of my family were sustained through work in the trades. It came naturally for me to dabble in the trades, a mechanics shop, maintenance for my Dad at a sawmill, and construction for an uncle. This upbringing generated a fascination with labour, the built, constructed, grown, menial, domestic, mental, communal, and labour union aspects of the trades. Many of family members have an engrained Protestant work ethic, which is a cultural vestige long detached from organized religion. There is an unknown complexity in these social and cultural structures that have instilled the values of hard-work within my family. I will be referring to these values and the structures as the Protestant work ethic because it is, I think, relatable to the reader . Although the values of diligence, 11discipline and frugality are not wholly protestant (Andersen et al. 1756-1793), they are prevalent within my family. My family has little connection to organized religion or intentional spiritual endeavours and are ostensibly agnostic. Further they still value many PWE principles, especially valuing hard and diligent work (Giorgi and Marsh). My ancestral lineages are from the United Kingdom two or three generations ago, and France thirteen generations ago who arrived during the first wave of settler colonialism. Through the generations my family has absorbed protestant values through social and cultural connections of work and church. Carrying with them cultural contexts and social pressures of the PWE. These values are then distilled and altered through time. Some values fading away and others being adopted (Boudon). I want to be aware of what social, cultural and other views that I am passing on (to be aware and think critically)PWE evolved from Martin Luther’s original framing of salvation through obligations to always work ardently as a sign of devotion. Diligent daily work becomes a devotional action, celebrating god. The dropping of the spiritual complicates the relationship to work There exists a tension stemming from the unawareness of PWE’s existence in my family. Bringing with it an inability to relate labour to re-generative and spiritual. Work and labour is a doer exerting efforts to alter the state of some material. This Even if there are flaws in Max Weber’s theory, which can be controversial (Bell).117act of doing builds a connection to the materials that we are working with. When working physically with my hands in a garden, there is reciprocality of caring, for the plants, soil and the built ecosystem of the garden. A well-tended garden provides bounties, abundance, and a reciprocity that can be maintained indefinitely with regenerative gardening . 12As we are within ourselves inhabiting the world, we contend with existing tensions of social or cultural pressures of being in a prescribed way. One internal pressure for me is a feeling of a ‘need’ to work. The phenomena that I have noticed is that I find it challenging to be within myself, or be within a moment. However, sometimes, hearing the crickets or frogs can re-connect me to the 'where and how’ I Regenerative gardening — as in putting nutrients, carbon etc. back into the soil in a sustainable way - 12not relying on chemical fertilizers.8Figure. 1. Clara Peeters (Antwerp, 1588 -1621) Still Life with Flowers, a Silver-gilt Goblet, Dried Fruit, Sweetmeats, Bread sticks, Wine and a Pewter Pitcher, 1611. Oil on panel.am in the world. This allows a detaching of myself from the voice inside that requires production and busyness. I find it helpful to recognize this unconscious ‘desire’ to be constantly busy. Mindfulness draws awareness to the unconscious desire . Through intentional thought and reflection, I can counter the 13disquiet of ‘not’ working. I have begun attempting tasks without digital mediation such as podcasts, audiobooks or streamed music. Actual boredom is rarely accepted these days, and any mental availability seems to be filled with some form of digital mediation (Möring, LEINO, and Majkowski). Attendant care allows me to complete these daily tasks without a device. This 'care while doing' is a form of gratitude, as action and reciprocity (Kimmerer) and moving towards a devotional action. The awareness and intention of my actions while doing become a form of devotion, re-connecting acts of labour and work as a devotional action for this world and the beings and things within it. These actions and intentions parallel how I think about trying to process existing in the world. Through and with the things around me. It is the act of scanning or drawing these objects that I realized is an act of care and devotion for me. These actions allow for a kind of spiritual practice. Becoming aware of the sunlight’s cast generates many things: the possibility of mirrored reflections in adjacent windows, long shadows that draw attention to their source. An awareness or perception of the feeling of the space around me, a boundlessness of light and space. Perception can be understood in various ways, and I will be using cultural ecologist David Abram’s definition as it provides us with a unique poetic complexity. Abram understands perception, through French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings , as:14“an activity that necessarily involves both a receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one’s inheritance) to those I’m using mindfulness, to describe intentionally becoming aware of the state of ones mind. I will also 13mindlessly check my email on my smart phone, if I am not thinking about it. Translated from MP’s native French to English as one of many translations.149contours. It is this open activity, this dynamic blend of receptivity and creativity by which every animate organism necessarily orients itself to the world (and orients the world around itself), that we speak of by the term “perception.”In Spell of the Sensuous, Abram writes at length about perceptual awareness and unawareness, especially parsing all aspects of where a clay bowl begins and ends, “from the perspective of my bodily senses, there is no thing that appears as a completely determinate or finished object. Each thing, each entity that my body sees, presents some face or facet of itself to my gaze while withholding other aspects from view.” (40-41). A clay bowl holds within itself the ability for ourselves to know only certain aspects of the bowl from moment to moment. This bowl, for Abram, remains simultaneously seen and unseen. We hold the ability to complete and approximate the entirety of the bowl. Yet when actively looking, we are confronted with more that could not initially be seen. We understand that the bowl has an inner structure, yet to see it would require the bowl's destruction. Though, at the same time, we can hold the notion of the bowl as a whole object; our mind completes the bowl in its entirety in our heads. We know where our body is in space, in relation to the world through proprioception, which, as noticed by Abram and Merleau-Ponty, is captured within perception. Perception, though, is an elusive concept that Abram captures in his re-wording of Merleau-Ponty:“Perception, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, is precisely this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange between my body and the entities that surround it. It is a sort of silent conversation that I carry on with things, a continuous dialogue that unfolds far below my verbal awareness—and often, even independent of my verbal awareness—and often, even, independent of my verbal awareness, as when my hand readily navigates the space between these scribed pages and the coffee cup across the table without my having to think about it, or when my legs, hiking, continually attune and adjust themselves to the varying steepness of the mountain slopes behind this house without my verbal consciousness needing to direct those adjustments.” (41).10Teasing out how perception ‘works’ is complicated. Many senses are working simultaneously to interpret our lived worlds. Sometimes with so many stimuli that our brain actively shut off the signals to us (Ayers 2018, Bundy et al. 2020, Damasio 2021). Perception, along with most experiences, remains wholly unique and simultaneously universal. Each experience of colour, flavour, etc., becomes a new experience that builds up upon prior knowledge, compounding and informing the current occurrence. My describing of experiences to others become an act of translation, from experience into thought, thought into language, language into words and text. The notion of translation has become an underlying force within my work. I am employing the translative power of technology to compile my images.The Oxford English Dictionary defines translation in a few ways. The most pertinent to me is the following;translation, n3.— The expression or rendering of a thing in another medium or form; the conversion or adaptation of a thing to another system, context, or use. Also concrete: something created as a result of this process (“translation, n3”).Translation is a form that likens one mode into another. I am positioning translation as encapsulating most aspects of alteration or mediation. This broad scope and re-positioning of translation is intentional and, I think, allows for an opportunity to re-consider our relations as being mediated through various translators. “A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and age has exhausted all the divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and unconceived delight.” (Shelley 26)” Artists, poets, and writers were the original translators, translating experiences from ‘reality’ to other forms accessible across time and space. 11David Abram proposes that the written language was the technology that allowed for stories to be detached from the land . 15“As the technology of writing encounters and spreads through a previously oral culture, the felt power and personality of particular places begins to fade. For the stories that express and embody that power are gradually recorded in writing. Writing down oral stories renders them separable, for the first time, from the actual places where the events in those stories occurred. The tales can now be carried elsewhere; they can be read in distant cities or even on alien continents. The stories, soon, come to seem independent of any specific locale.” (p.111) We have reached a moment where the role of translation has been handed over to machines. Deep Neural Networks, a form of artificial intelligence, is where data is input and translated into digital ‘knowledge’ to be parsed, re-parsed, and sent to their destination. In that our existences are being pushed towards more online and digital mediation through digital photography, as provided by our smartphones — almost always within reach. These observations prompt a number of questions: is there a transition towards more of our lives being mediated through translations? If so, does this eventuality allow for there to be less concreteness in our structuring of beliefs and thoughts? One of the key forces driving my research during my MFA has been the proliferation of digital mediation concurrent with physical existence, as we experience being translated into our digital selves by joining Zoom meetings on a daily basis. I rely upon translation as a method for generating possibilities for seeing this world. French philosopher Bruno Latour describes “translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents.” (32). I understand Latour’s definition to function within a variety of modes, such as myself modifying my experience through the act of describing it, writing it etc. Or more literal translation is where a real object is mimicked as another artificial material. Artificial grass for instance, is for me a “To members of a nonwriting[sic] culture, places are never just passive settings. Remember that in oral 15cultures the human eyes and ears have not yet shifted their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to the written word.” (p. 99).12form of translation, a mimicking of one known quality into an approximation of it. Plastic Grass is not coincidentally the title that our MFA cohort decided on for our thesis exhibition at the Lake Country Art Gallery. The title holds a paradox within itself, where the material of plastic grass is both a burden and a benefit. In its replacement of real grass, there begins a lessening need for water and mowing while still fulfilling a symbolic role of cultural normativity (Francis 152-156). Artificial turf is also burdensome, one more plastic matter that will exist as microplastics and nanoplastics for an unknown duration (Chamas et al. 3494-3511). Seemingly single entities such as lawns also contains within them representations of English manors, while also becoming translated into symbols of freedom and containing social values (Schindler 401-411) . Artificial and real lawns can share similar symbolic values that can be interchanged 16is a fascinating eccentricity. As in each are distinctly different materials yet their values as pristine objects is relatively equal. There is a compressing of the complexities that are required for actual grass into products that mimic the pristine which equates to a flattening of anyones experience of Artificial grass. There is also an aspect of lawn care that is admirable, as the home owner has a relationship of care and 16attention with the grass—even if it results in pollution, fertilizers and lawnmower emissions.13Section 3: Flattening (translation) and dislocation (previous work)The method of making my thesis was a process of discovery, linking past moments to present situations, incrementally revealing new ways of working. Making begins with prototyping, trial, error and refinement. Ideas that fostered new working modes evolved into fixed yet flexible approaches of making. Each work evolves through iterative processes, where all previous experiences inform the decisions moving forward. My method of creation is tied to previous bodies of work, where my attempts were at presenting the world in a new light. For me uncovering ways of working is inseparable from making the work. Each informs new possibilities in the other. This method of creation centres around questioning how to mediate and understand these current moments we are living in. A moment that is both present in the world and online. We inhabit both real and digital space simultaneously, drifting between various levels of presence in each. These past two years, informed by the pandemic, should compel consideration of the tension between our seemingly entangled lives. Lives becoming simultaneously entwined in both digital and real worlds. There is a complexity of our changing abilities to be connected during the pandemic that afforded us the ability to work from home, without travel and commutes, as well as severely limited abilities of working together in person. It brings to mind an awareness of what is gained and lost through these constant digital connections. A digitally connected life does not entail being online all of the time. We are, however, able or necessitated to be constantly connected to email, search engines, news, apps, and notifications. These digital mediators are all aspects that draw us away from the physical world. Even writing on a computer pries us away from the real . This digital life is a dream of the future, with 17unlimited connections and mediation everywhere. This romanticization of these technologies becomes a utopic cornucopia. It is convenient to send an email, snap a photo, or get directions at will, but at what cost? This enveloping of the real and digital space has now become reality. As we hover between two As does reading, writing and driving, etc. 1714states it flattens our experiences, denying us from being wholly in either the real or digital worlds. The digital realm is made of images portraying perfection, transcendence and abundance—a space where we are divided within ourselves into two separate existences. This simultaneous bifurcating of ourselves into digital and real selves is the result of the digital and real overlapping. So we have a coming together and layering of the digital and real and a separation in ourselves. There is an aura about new or existing technologies, that they allow for more ‘x’ for less ‘y’ or some similar formula. There are some aspects of this digital world that affords amazing possibilities . These technologies though can often be hyped as 18saviours, and that through adopting them we will have salvation. This digital world can be a facade of possibilities, solutions and technology as liberator. It feels like we are being encouraged to abandon our real and tactile world. Our present space and our online existences become decontextualized, lacking specific and proximal referents. Decontextualization disrupts connections to the previously known. Forest fires decontextualize familiar landscapes. Pervasive digital images are decontextualized through detachment from local contexts. This moment of digital re-producibility and mimicry, with phenomena such as deepfakes , generates online imagery ultimately consumed in the physical world. I live in this moment 19where, for me, most aspects of existence have become decontextualized from their original sources. Spiritual and work values become decontextualized through familial, social, cultural and generational time scopes. Protestantism originated as an ability for generating devotional acts and accessing spirituality through ones daily actions. My experience of this decontextualized form of Protestantism (and PWE) is a flattened approximations of spiritual practise. One disconnected from tangible understandings of spiritual potential. The ‘work’ rituals become practised without attaching spiritual values, or have been lost within the cacophony of progressing capital culture. The teachings then are of hardwork, callouses, hardhat hair For example - being able to meet in online classrooms to continue some semblance of learning or work. 18This doesn’t account for the people who were ‘required’ or in positions where they were public facing. Where images or videos of anyone can be stitched into photos or videos they did not originally appear 19or take part in. https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-is-deepfake15and of sacrificing bodies for wages. Can we see that the flattened existence that we experience through the digital can also be a benefit, if we can use that experience as a reflection point. 3.1 Flattened through space and timeObjects become flattened and decontextualized when represented through acts of photography, painting and drawing or viewed on devices, TVs, smartphones, projectors, etc. These flattened representations rely on our ability to project spatiality into the surface for the illusions to function. This is evident in images such as Clara Peeters painting, Still Life with Flowers, a Silver-gilt Goblet, Dried Fruit, Sweetmeats, Bread sticks, Wine and a Pewter Pitcher, where one can know the physical properties of items with the image. Still Life, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a. Inanimate objects, such as fruits, flowers, dead game, vessels, etc., as represented in painting [and] b. A painting of such objects” (“still life”), has a long history, depicting aspects of the domestic and daily life. Some were loaded with allegorical devices, especially in Vanitas (Clarke) and Memento Mori (Langdon) , where images of 20skulls and rotten fruit symbolized death and decay among others. Other still lifes were less explicit in allegorical imagery, but did glorify the spoils of imperial forces and colonization (Woodall). Objects depicted within the works cannot be simply regarded as “value-free commodities or even chiefly as markers of wealth. [The objects within the still lifes] remain stubbornly social items” (Silver). These painting then hold a complexity of displaying, and celebrating, daily life while also holding markers and lauding colonial endeavours. This is a function of time passing and awarenesses evolving to understand past and future actions. Smartphones began shifting daily experiences of handheld access to images and proposed novel interactions that have altered how we experience digital images. This was in a way anticipated by British Columbia interior based and internationally recognized artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. As they began creating immersive video walks for viewers to experience on small video players and Painting styles, closely related that highlight the certainty of death among others. 2016headphones. The videos are shot and played in the same space the viewer is walking through . This 21mimics what is currently possible through smartphone augmented reality (AR) technologies. Where we as viewer can overlay digital objects into our perceived environment — as we experience both our ‘real’ space and the digital ‘real’ space simultaneously. Apple computers defines their AR as the following: “Augmented reality describes user experiences that add 2D or 3D elements to the live view from a device’s camera in a way that makes those elements appear to inhabit the real world” (ARKit). AR experiences allow us to hold smartphone screens in our field of view while it overlays images ‘into’ our physical space: generating new ways to perceive our spaces, a blending of real and digital spaces. The linking of our present space within the screens undermines older relations to ‘traditional’ screens . Kate 22Mondloch frames this older relationship as “looking at media screens and our propensity to view them as windows onto other representational or informational spaces--concentrating on the spaces depicted "on" or "inside" the media screen-has special consequences for the complex spatial dynamics of screen-reliant installation art spectatorship” (20-33). Not only this, but our relationships to digital images is forever changed due to smartphones. And we have also changed how we utilize these technologies to ‘document’ our lives. Digital Images become manifested through electrical currents passing through diodes. Our screens allow us to consume and create images and video at will. 3D scanning technology can momentarily re-animate objects through software and UI and UX design . We can manipulate and turn 23the 3D objects in digital space in the same way that we can interact with things in the real world, but are still limited in the ability of seeing objects from one viewpoint, and not able to perceive the entirety of the object simultaneously. This perception in digital space then is related to our perception in real space. Yet https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/alter-bahnhof-video-walk/21 TV’s, computers screens, projection screens.22 UI n. Computing = user interface n1. and UX n. Computing user experience.2317this re-animation is mediated through and remains within our screens . AR therefore muddies the 24boundaries of real space through generating virtual spaces that re-represent the present moment with overlaid ephemera . The AR experience is mediated through the screen, where the real merges with the 25overlay. Scanned 3D digital objects, experienced either through augmented reality (AR) on our devices or projected onto a screen, are remaining flat as we see them. I am interested in this tension between 3D scans, and resulting models, and how we distinctively perceive the difference between a 3D model and tangible object. Working with real things that have been translated into digital through 3D scanning allows for these questions of perceptions to be broadened. The link between perceiving in real and digital spaces becomes further complicated as we experience a merging of the real and digital realities. 3.1.1 Location and ProcessIn 2014 we were able to move to the Okanagan and had little time to do anything but reclaim the property from years of farmer's collections and neglect. I made one substantial work, Geyser after Kwan/Stocking, 2017. I installed a broken sprinkler pipe to 'create' a geyser - which required the viewer to travel to the work, or happen upon the site. The simple temporary gesture of generating a spray pattern where there was not one before, was a compelling aspect to me. I was thinking about the gesture of the geyser becoming an out-of-the-ordinary sight; some neighbours might have suspected a leak, and others may have paused and noticed the trees blowing in the wind. I am interested in ways that we can become open to re-seeing and reconnecting with what is around us. In hindsight, the making of Geyser after Kwan/Stocking was an action of defamiliarizing a moment in the landscape. Geyser after Kwan/Stocking is a work referencing an existing public artwork by artists Vanessa Kwan and Erica Stocking, Geyser for Hillcrest Park, 2012. I titled my work with the attribution as to cite and create awareness for the original. In one sense I was aping the concepts of Kwan and Stocking, a notwithstanding the ‘hologram’ technology that utilizes a pyramid shape polycarbonate and an image 24projected 4 times to ‘float’ or project Tupac into ‘real’ space. Pokémon GO was the first large-scale phenomenon of AR becoming normalized. 2518visual interruption within a seemingly fixed landscape. I admired the complexity of their work that through relatively ‘simple’ visuals also pointed to multitudes of seen and unseen complexities that surround the water usage of the site . In another sense I wanted the title of my work to act as a beacon 26that could point viewers back to the original work. Kimberly Phillips notes in her summation of the work that “Kwan and Stocking envisage that the geyser will cultivate a sense of communal wonderment and play, gradually attaining a reputation less like that of a civic monument and more like a mysterious element of the natural world” (Phillips). Although having only come across the above quote in the writing of this paper, it is of a similar sentiment that I was thinking about when making the work. Could this https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/PublicArt-GeyserforHillcrestPark.pdf2619Figure. 2. Scott Moore, Geyser after Kwan/Stocking, 2017, irrigation pipe with crack installed in irrigation system.interruption of the landscape generate curiosity and connections within the community?While employed as a studio and farm manager, I maintained a semi-regular drawing practice that mainly consisted of drawing everyday objects that would accumulate or happen to be in front of me, such as a pencil case, cups, flowers and plates. This drawing of domestic things has been a long-running aspect of my practice of representing the everyday. I now see that these drawings were about me noticing aspects of the domestic as they slipped in and out of view—the seen and unseen simultaneously. A coffee mug might sit for a few days, forgotten about until noticed again and becoming the subject of a drawing. This attentive drawing was, in hindsight, a method for investigating how I relate to the things in our world. I began expanding my drawing practice from pencil on paper, to using used motor oil as the drawing medium. Living in a rural setting provides both seen and unseen benefits and challenges; more contact with "Super, Natural British Columbia " comes with added reliance on vehicles. Trips to town 27become planned (bi)weekly or monthly, and there becomes a self-reliance or self-sustenance with remote living . Additional or excess driving consumes various petroleum products, gas or diesel to fuel the 28vehicles, and tires, grease, and oil that lubricate multiple components . Engine oil is frequently changed, 29generating between 4L and 12L of used motor oil per oil change . One of my instilled values was the 30ability to maintain a vehicle, from tire changes to oil changes. I had an abundant supply of used oil, waiting to gather enough to make a trip to the oil recycling that seem worth it . I started with fine paint 31brushes, testing the possibilities of used motor oil as a medium. The oil sat within the paper's surface and https://www.hellobc.com/ - I use the ‘classic’ BC tourism slogan, intentionally with an awareness that it 27is both cheeky, potentially problematic, and also accurate - if approached with attentive care and reciprocity. Care and reciprocity originating in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings, lectures and book - Braiding Sweetgrass Not meant in a romantic way, but in a practicality of beginning to foster a garden, preserving garden 28and other fruits and vegetables in the freezer during times of abundance. Motor oil, Transmission - either gear oil or automatic transmission fluid, gear oil for the differentials, 29power steering fluid, brake fluid, windshield washer fluid. Vehicle dependent, smaller cars require less oil and pickup trucks more.30 In the ‘worth the getting covered in smelly oil’ sense of ‘worth it’3120resisted building up. It had a beautiful flatness. Next, I was prototyping drawing tools, modifying ink pens, customizing graffiti pens, using fillable calligraphy pens and others, but none excelled. Bamboo dip pens were an option but were not readily available. The idea of making a quill pen, or bamboo dip pen, presented itself. I started researching historic pens along with experimenting with nearby materials, such as reeds, thistle, burdock, tumbling mustard, along with others. The most successful versions of the dip pens were created with tumbling mustard. Tumbling mustard, or Sisymbrium altissimum in botanical nomenclature, is characterized by minnesotawildflowers.info as “A common weed of landscapes, nurseries and waste places, Tall Tumble Mustard is easily recognized at first glance by its open, thread-like mass and pale yellow flowers. The plant becomes brittle when it dries out and can break off at the base, tumbling about in the wind to spread its seed”(Sisymbrium altissimum (Tall Tumble Mustard)). The first drawing experiments were with the oil as a drawing medium were things and scenes from my everyday: firewood rounds, an old truck, and sketches of grandpa's camper. The flora crept in as subjects, thistle in bloom, burdock and its hook like seed pods, tumbling mustard. Using pens made of the plant material to draw the plants felt quick and light, with an air of jokiness. I also appreciate the cyclical link of plant matter being used as the implement to draw itself with used motor oil, which at one point would have been a plant - the long nod at the drawing with the materials of its making . The final 32drawings were to mimic botanical illustrations, on botanical paper, of Sisymbrium altissimum. The pandemic supply issue had begun, and the 2nd wave was upon us. The botanical paper was no longer readily available, and with a SSHRC mindset I wanted a more ambitious project. The mustard pens and 33oil drawings were however instrumental in informing my SSHRC proposal. It was titled Tumble Mustard Akin to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961 and all of the others works that 32have referenced this idea since then. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council3321Pens: germinating/ broadcasting/ casting/ presenting art across time and space. The pandemic time of disconnection prompted me to try to link together an ability to foster connection amongst people. Most lives were being mediated through Zoom and lacking tangible 34physical connections. The project was grounded in a metaphor of entanglement (Bohm) within existing communications systems to investigate our locality or non-locality as we inhabit both online and physical realities. I began to assemble kits of mustard dip pen, cotton rag paper, walnut ink and a letter, in Aside from front line workers3422Figure. 3. Scott Moore, Zoom Invite,(Detail) 2021, 22”x30” St-Armand cotton rag paper, mustard stalk quill pen, walnut ink, 2 mustard stalk postshindsight, with overly contrived requests, packed within handmade cedar boxes. I explained in the letter that wild mustard was an introduced species and mirrored the locations of settlers and farmers, growing in the interstitial zones between crop, ecosphere and other sites of disturbed soil. The boxes were sent out to the MFA cohort as a starting point, hoping for an eventual wider distribution. The participants were asked to reflect on their place and location within the Okanagan valley and to respond in some way. This project was an attempt to highlight these shared landscapes through cultivating an attentive curiosity for the receivers. I am unsure of the outcome of the project, but am grateful that it functioned as catalyst for future works. An opportunity presented itself for making a projected triptych on the Rotary Centre for the Arts, as part of Light Up Kelowna, which generated an opportunity to expand outside of the mustard pens 23Figure. 4. Scott Moore, Zoom Invite, 2021, 22”x30” St-Armand cotton rag paper, mustard stalk quill pen, walnut ink, 2 mustard stalk postsproject. I made a three-channel video specifically as a projection, exploring the potential of re-found footage and images from my smartphone camera roll. The work sisymbrium altissimum, 2021, used three screens independently, three-channel video and two-channel audio; although all interconnected. The left channel is of a butterfly gathering on pollen from a tumbling mustard plant; sisymbrium altissimum is its Latin name. On the right channel is a video of a butterfly collecting pollen from a scotch thistle, onopordum acanthium. All of the footage was captured on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Syilx and the Secwépemc peoples, the place I lived at the time. The centre channel is of a found brochure, ’Tumbling Mustard' and describes the presence and movement of tumbling mustard in Canada and North America. A list is present on the page, denoting where tumbling mustard is likely to be found. All the locations are sights of disturbance, industrialization and places where humans are likely to be. Re-syncing of the audio and video together points to the fact that it had been a disjointed and bifurcated experience moments before. The video plays, and the sound of the videographer can be heard as the foliage crumbles underfoot. The butterfly holds onto the flower as the wind blows the two around the frame. In the background is a typical Okanagan/Shuswap landscape, treed hillside; as we get closer to the foreground, a fallow field filled with browning grass and tumbling mustard.In the audio’s background, a slight din, a familiar sound, some nature, and a distinctive bass line hints to the viewer that this is an inhabited landscape. The video ends as it started with three still images and the two-channel audio track playing the sounds of 'nature.' Thematically, I am trying to show the relationships present within a given space and place. These relationships are inherently loaded with complexity. Most Canadian landscapes will have shadows cast by the history of colonialism, and the ignored and forgotten treaties, but this situation is even more complex and loaded in British Columbia. BC is predominately unceded territory. It is important to consider these histories when referencing or using the land, landscape or constituent parts. After the video work, there was natural slippage towards wanting to combine and connect the physical works with the online reality that we existed within . I tried to integrate aspects of the digital 35 Online courses along with online presentation of works.3524back into the physical world. Through taking a now ubiquitous and recognized form of a Zoom meeting invite and hand lettering it. I was exploring the tension of the recognizable form and distancing the viewer from the ability to click and join the meeting simply. The work, Zoom Invite, was a hand-lettered link for a zoom meeting, that ran the show's duration, and was hung with small pieces of mustard stalk. I subsequently began work on strawberries, fire pit, beer cans, tabletop, table leg, and chairs, a project that attempted to capture an inconspicuous location through three components within one artwork. I think about ways of making as encompassing gestural actions that includes drawing and sculpture. The work consisted of three gestures, drawings, sculpture for the specific location, and translating GPS hiking 25Figure. 5. Scott Moore, strawberries, fire pit, beer cans, tabletop, table leg, chairs, 2021, (selection) drawings, table leg, 3D models of trail GPS data, presented digitally. maps into digital 3D objects. The sculptural intervention eventually took place at the site I was walking to: which was an old camp in the bush. It was probably a log processing place, large and cleared, stripped of most of its nutrient topsoil. Sapling and moss had begun creeping around the perimeter. There was a fire pit, wild strawberries, a junk pile, old chairs and a plastic monobloc table with a missing leg. I 36carved a wooden leg to replace the missing leg. I was making the table whole again as it waited to be re-discovered34. The drawings, either pencil or oil, were of the periphery, all of the minute details of the surrounding area, wild strawberries, fire pit, wild rose flower, beer can, table and table leg. There were five smaller pencil drawings, two medium oil drawings, a digitally manipulated print of a GPS tracking map, three digital map forms as a boomerang, and looping videos of extruded GPS maps. This project was an investigation into generating a method of creating a work for a place that was both seen and unseen and that I could honour an innocuous space as well as suggest a wayfinding guide for similar experiences of one’s location. The majority of my earlier works, drawings, mustard pens, and Zoom Invite, were lost in the 2021 White Rock Lake Fire as it consumed 83 342 Ha of land, destroying much animal habitat, livelihoods and many buildings, vehicles, and possessions, along with 60 years worth of woody and plant matter, branches, leaves, needles and deadfall. The most striking aspect of fire is its capability to flatten nearly everything. It is somehow the flattening of time through the erasure of structures, which held a memory of construction in themselves. It also flattens or erases labour, as the burned objects have disappeared or have become fragments of themselves. The objects become scrap metal or buried debris, negating the visibility of labour through the building's destruction. The end state is an empty, hollow void where time, effort and labour were spent building a place of potential. That potential is still there, just in another form. Although fire is destructive, “The Monobloc is a chair[table], known in every corner of the world, despite the ubiquity of the white 36plastic it can be regarded as an item that is completely without context.”26with rank 5 or 6 fires stripping nearly everything from the soil, fungi, lichen, carbon, nitrogen etc., there 37are still pockets of potential where it didn’t quite burn hot enough. A handful of plants may be able to take hold. Even if the elements are overwhelming, a bit of organic matter begins to accrue and furthers the chance for the future. Inhabiting the digital realm can be a dislocation, a removal of oneself from a present location. Zooming into online classes was analogous to my experiences of evacuation from wildfire: a process of dislocation and relocation, a re-consolidating of values, fraught with the extremes of positive to negative. 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The data isrefreshed from operational systems nightly tothe public map. Wildfire data may not reflect thecurrent fire situation, and therefore should onlybe used for reference purposes.Wildfire data from the incident is updated whenpracticable and the occurrence of individual fireupdates will vary . The information is intendedfor general purposes only and should not berelied on as accurate because fires aredynamic and circumstances may changequickly. The levels of current fire activity within±0 0.8 1.6 2.4 3.2 4kilometres1:75,000Map Date: September 3, 2021Perimeter Date: 2021-09-01Hectares: 83,342 haFire PerimeterBranch BreakDivision BreakHighwayPipelineTransmission LineWhite Rock LakeK61884Public Information MapFigure. 6. K61884 MAP Public Info 36x48L 20210903 - White Rock Lake Fire perimeter Sept 4th 2021A dislocation occurs when one fixed element becomes detached from its proximal location. The lead-up to the fires and evacuation was a slow disruption, unfolding over weeks of the heat dome to the constant smoke, flattening the space to a level grey then to black. The fire had passed, burning down the valley to the south. It had rained; we settled for a late dinner and a show, a sigh of relief and finally precipitation. The feeling of dislocation became immediately recognizable, a final packing of the sacred beings and things into the truck, camper and horse trailer that had been pointed up the driveway for almost a month. Re-location occurs through having access to things that are also symbols of shelter and care—resourcefully built and constructed with specificity and intent. These are the values symbolized to me by my grandpa's camper built in the early 70s. We were privileged to have the truck and camper to contain our lives, cats, dog and family, to become like a turtle. A friend’s property became our home, camper and animals present. The camper met the needed requirements for a week, then an auntie and uncle offered their travel trailer for more spacious accommodations. We were parked beside the shell of a house that held the potential for a place for us to live in the future. The hope eases the pain and weight of the dislocation, generating uncertainty as one tries to begin stable rhythms and routines. We were evacuated for two weeks when the fire jumped 2.5km over all existing fire breaks and roared up the valley. It was another week or more till we were granted temporary access to see the remnants of much of the valley. The hills were seen in their naked form, rockier than anticipated. Buildings flattened, lumps and piles of tin remained, the vertical sticks that used to be trees coating the landscape like the upright quills of a porcupine. A familiar place nearly unrecognizable. The strangest part was that the house still stood unscathed from fire along with a few smaller buildings, holding within the walls a kind of sad magic. The houses functioned as time machines: the indoor refuge, the comfortable home they had been only a month prior, belongings, bowls, plates and tables still as they were located. The comfort remained as it always had been before the fire, as long as one did not look outside, where the present became the reality of the loss.283.1.1.1 Loss as in lost or lossy, the inability to regain what was once.Nostalgia is a desire to re-gain moments of the past. Can there be a space where loss is not equatable to bad? Grasping onto ideas of permanence limits our opportunities to generate new possibilities. We cannot re-incarnate a chicken nugget into a chicken; we cannot yet generate electricity out of nothing, and it is hard to put mass amounts of carbon back into the earth. In trying to gain back what was lost, we imagine and romanticize prior moments in time through processes of nostalgia. The de-contextualizing nature of digital images along with their proliferation causes an erasure, while containing the ability to obscure through filtered digital media, celebrating colonial impacts. Generating images and videos that become fixed and flattened, detaching themselves from their current reality moments where we have lost the present and are left with our memories; good, bad, mediocre and everything in between.Memories are a form of translation; each time revisited, we are re-remembering the experience and refreshing its potency, yet our memories are fallible. We are fallible, and the process of living and creation generates loss. The hope of regaining what was lost fuels us to desire the magic of science. Or, in the words of American intellectual and technology critic Evgeny Morozov, Techno Solutionism, where technology purports to offer simple solutions to complex problems. Joana Moll likens our current relationship with the digital world as being an “amalgam of interfaces, interactive possibilities and limitations [that] largely mediat[e] (and prescrib[e]) our relationship with the world and deeply influenc[e] the construction of our reality.” Our current existence is experiencing more and more proliferation of loss. Lossy images are the quick and ubiquitous file formats that are beginning to lead to inexact approximations. Approximations though that are mimicked through our experiencing of similar situations uniquely. Loss is encoded into our life through re-telling or attempting to convey our experiences in any other form other than our actual presence. This loss allows for creative moments and building of understanding where we translate the experience into something more through poetry, story or visual art. It is the awareness of knowing that we lose some aspect of the experience in translation that allows for generative reflection.29Our experiences are now mediated through not only being in the world but also being simultaneously connected, more or less, constantly through the internet, that we can no longer focus on the world that we are in. We also have to contend with that experience while being enmeshed within the real and digital sphere simultaneously. The experience of being is now a mediated and translated one where we can have access to podcasts, audiobooks, videos, and video games at nearly every moment if we let ourselves indulge. So our experience in both realms is one of loss, potentially imperceptible, but less than. And that our experiences can move towards, as Hito Steyerl describes, In Defense of the Poor Image, the poor image. “Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their efFigureies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.”As Steyerl says, we need the poor image to oppose the highly codified and shiny, Transformers, etc. There isn’t necessarily anything lost in experiencing those films as bootlegs of bootlegs. The constant state of mediation can, in some sense, then be construed as a positive means, in which we pass the time while subsisting until we are offered up other opportunities, even if those opportunities become more difficult to spot in moments of absorption. It is the awareness that moments slip away, thoughts half finished drift into the space between keyboard clicks, sometimes to return altered but on a new path. We are existing in the world that is structured on regimented time and that it can slip away or become flattened into feeling like all of the same experience — even though days or weeks apart. I have been utilizing drawings and other forms of observation as questioning and investigating how I exist within the world. It becomes a method for processing my place within something larger. 30Section 4: re-generation and re-materializationOnce the pain of dislocation has subsided and new routines become familiar, the ability to begin to generate new work emerges. Our friend's house, where we rented for the winter, was being finished and became a place of refuge for our family. While assisting in its completion, I re-noticed the attendant care of the electricians; their wiring was meeting code and installed with aesthetic considerations. The wires were equally spaced, each forming wavy ’S’s' into the tops and bottoms of the receptacle boxes. The resulting forms reminded me of sculptural considerations. I began drawings these receptacle boxes and wiring to considered how they were being made and their resting forms. Could I remake them as sculptures using each of lumber, electrical box, marettes and wire? How to highlight the artistic hand of 31Figure. 7. Scott Moore, Single Gang 24fps, 2021, digital sculpture, monitor, Mac mini, power and HDMI cables.the electricians? I considered casting or 3D printing. Both posed unknown hurdles, complex casting and how to scan for 3D? I found possible solutions in a variety of 3D scanning apps for smartphones. One app in particular, Trnio, showed the most potential. The resultant scans held potential and possibilities for something exciting. I continued to hold the thought of having the final forms 3D printed. My thought process was to scan a thing made with attention and care for 3D printing, generating a sculpture twice removed from the hand. The play in that gesture seemed fruitful. I, however, did not make it to 3D printing, some due to limitations of scale, but mainly because of new possibilities presented by Blender, an open-source 3D computer graphics software allowed for sculptural making in digital space. The first digital sculpture was Single Gang 24fps, 2021, single-channel video, monitor, computer, is a looping video of a digital sculpture of a scanned single gang electrical box on a digital plinth, as the sculpture 38and plinth rotate constantly. Construction is continually progressing; once the walls are framed, wired and insulated, drywall is installed, the seen and accessible becomes unseen and inaccessible, generating new possibilities. I could have asked the electricians where another jobs site was and if they would be ok with me using it to create more artwork, but that option felt unfamiliar, detached from this known place. I began scanning parts of places where I was walking, a mushroom - maybe a bolete - an ingenious fabrication of support structure and hoses to utilize a clean drinking source on the side of the road and a set of pliers. These explorations were beginning to feel close, that I was grasping at something unknown yet familiar. Trying large objects and small, a cup on the table, a can of smoked oysters turned soap dish, the table itself. For the works included in Plastic Grass, I continued using the 3D scanning app to translate real objects into digital versions. My process for these works consists of digitally scanning real-world objects and things and compositions of accumulated objects, predominantly on my(our) family table. The table happened to be the surface that collected and functioned as a living space. The table was lovingly crafted, ‘gang’ is the terminology used to determine the number of switches/receptacles/circuits that were 38possible in an electrical box, the boxes could be ‘ganged’ together creating a double, triple or quad gang boxes. This also stuck with the term single gang.32appearing older and more rustic than it was, while also being a place of coming together. Tables hold symbolic value and signify a gathering place of commensality (Kerner, Chou, and Warmind). They become sites of seen and unseen rituals and relations. Through capturing a variety of objects, from individual things to assembled vignettes, I am able to gather visual representations of my domestic life. The 3D scans are then imported into Blender and composed or re-composed to be output as a digital image or video file. The things that appear in my works are directly from my lived experience, most found their way onto our table. These are objects that hover between presence and absence, often fading into the din of daily domestic life. I do not always take notice of or consider my kitchen implements. Yet they assist in 33Figure. 8. Scott Moore, still life still, 2021-22, digital sculpture, projector, plinth, book, hat, tablecloth, raspberry pi, projector screen, rocks, power and HDMI cables.living a fulfilling life. The unseen are the objects that fade into the periphery of our daily lives. Also unseen is the cumulative labour and production that allows these and many more objects to come into existence. We often attempt to hide the structures of support that power our devices. The unseen made visible creates a tensity of the seen and unseen in both the physical installations and the digital image or video.These images or videos are constructed with conditions of variance, rotation, and moving digital shadow from a digital sun that unfolds over the duration. This series of works visually reference still life’s as they re-represent real objects in the digital. The re-representation attends to the abilities of unconsidered objects to be ‘made strange’ (ostranenie). These images and videos portray the world in a manner that disrupts conventions, requiring the viewer to reconsider what is in front of them. This includes unveiled aspects of the installation, making evident the components, computers, power cords and HDMI cables required for the displays. This includes installing the projectors and monitors in relation to the viewer and room. The viewer interrupts the projected image through the proximity of their body between the projector and screen, or requiring the viewer to get close to the work. They are highlighting themselves and complicating the viewing of the image as a method of acknowledging the projector. There are parallel complexities that are equally not understood: the computational processing of an iPhone and cloud based app to render a near facsimile digital object and the global supply chain paramount in the iPhone itself being made. I am interested in whether this complexity of unseen processes within these 39things can be noticed. In combining physical and digital sculpture, I am attempting to encourage possibilities of re-establishing connections with current realities. This sensitivity of re-representing the already real world is intentional and functions to engage and alter our relationships with known and ordinary objects. I am focused specifically on these objects as they represent the domestic, the lived with things of being in a comfortable and safe place. A comfort, though, does not come from the structures, things or objects And all electronics being made.3934necessarily but comes from the relationships. This work marks an observance of the domestic ritual and an act of gratitude for these gifts. In this context, there is an inherent tension between the accessibility of these goods and the negative impact on the environment.Pairing the real and the digital objects, in one sense, puts them in opposition and allows for them to be compared and contrasted. There is also the ability to see that they are intimately connected and that the digital exists in relation to the real. The work still life still functions in the same way as Merleau-Ponty denotes that we exist within perception. We become ourselves through the process of interacting with the world. Another work, ProjectorProjectionProjector, digital projection of a 3D rendered scene, projector, bench, squash and raspberry pi, 2022, consists of a projector balanced on a bench supported with a chunk of glass and squash; the projected video is rendered from a 3D scan of itself. I see the projector and its projection as mimicking perception, where in this instance, the digital world is still based on the real tangible world. It requires the material components to generate each essential aspect of the internet and the devices we utilize to gain access. We may be able to become detached from the real by entering the internet, yet we are still existing within the confines of a constructed reality. The reality that I witness is one dislocated from location and relation.Scanning is a deep looking with the object simultaneously with my phone and eyes. The camera utilizes built-in;“ARKit combines device motion tracking, camera scene capture, advanced scene processing, and display conveniences to simplify the task of building an AR experience. You can create many kinds of AR experiences with these technologies using the front or rear camera of an iOS device.”(ARKit).App developers can utilize Apple utilities such as ARKIT, that "combines device motion tracking, camera scene capture, advanced scene processing, and display conveniences to simplify the task of building an AR experience” and “Analyze the video from the cameras and the accompanying data, and use ray-35casting and depth-map information to determine the location of items” and “Identify items in the physical environment, including planar surfaces, images, physical objects, body positions, and faces.” (ARKit).The digital technology may be a shortcut for some aspect, all might make things easier, quicker, but at what cost? There is a real value in being connected to a place, location and community. I will continue to relate to the world around me through looking, drawing, documenting or some yet unknown way of recording the things that accumulate and compose my life. I am curious about how we gathered the tastes and preferences for how we live. In one sense maybe my processing through making is a method to understand our existence and consider all of the structures and systems that we are in relation to. These technologies feign seeming ability to reproduce our existing world and structures effortlessly. Yet the technological capabilities remain unseen — possibly even under appreciated. This parallel’s similar under appreciation for the existing world, but also the attendant care required to produce it. Even though the industrial agriculture exploits workers, exploits the earth and water, there is still a requisite amount of care and attention required to grow this food. Even though we have seen construction and tons of other industries become corporatized, there are still people putting in labour that is meaningful — although maybe not ideal. 36Section 5: A shadow cast across a chair, a table, subtle and fuzzy as the clouds pass by and sharp and crisp of an open sky. (An Invitation)This section will be a conclusion of sorts as well as an opening to more possibilities, akin to how this entire process has unfolded for me. With the sage wisdom and wit of a friend I’ve titled it as they suggested: an invitation. Invitation to consider, locate and reflect on where and how we are in this world. To strive for subscendence! The re-connecting to our world, community and places. That we can generate an awareness and ability to carry with us our openness and groundedness as we inhabit real and digital space simultaneously. Acknowledging our relationship to objects and the world we share allows us to consider how we exist within it. And generates the possibility of not needing or wanting to build that oversized house with the extra four rooms or not wanting to travel to others’ sacred sites as a tourist. The re-orienting of ourselves to our present will allow the possibility to re-learn and re-consider the myths or realities that we were sold under capitalism. Products readily appear in our stores with most aspects from construction to shipping being obfuscated through the global value networks. This structure allows for most aspects to be seen, with people maybe catching glimpses of each action. We see only parts of the whole, which is mimicked in our experiences of our built and grown worlds. The majority of the labour of a finished house or car is hidden, unseen from view and hidden under the walls and panels. The entirety of the house or car can be within our present view, but the labour of the construction remains outside of our prescribed perception. The labour contained within a finished wall encapsulates many trades, electricians, framers, plumbers, insulators, drywallers, mudders and tapers, painters, finish carpenters and labourers. The quality of the work is also erased as housing becomes a tool of financialization and speculation. Which stems from desires to fulfill the wants of the markets: for example big houses and condos that can function as financial capital (Soules).Fields can be ‘quickly’ regenerated through the fertilizers, thanks to the military-industrial complex (Russel and Williams 260-265). The process of industrial agriculture is one of stripping, pouring, 37and dousing the fields to try and bend them to the will of the science. The challenge of being in this moment can be the pull and feeling of needing to go fast, with an ever-increasing speed at which we are bombarded with images, news, etc. if we choose to partake. We also require slowing down. Slowing down as both taking more time to accomplish tasks and putting in the required time and effort to generate healthy soil, relations, water, etc. The cycle of re-generation that exists within ‘organic’ gardening is a process of composting and building soil through care and collaboration. The piling of organic materials allows them to be decomposed by micro-organisms to generate a rich and nutrient hummus. A material that then can be returned to the garden, earth, to replenish and continue the cycle. This form of gardening could be considered a form of invitation, the intentional bringing together of rich soil, water and seeds within an environment to produce a place where seeds and plants can thrive. This mechanism can be viewed as a form of invitation. The wildfire experience generated a reflective moment that allowed for a new process to adapt in relation to my existing context of being displaced and learning a new space. This shows that we can find ways to navigate when there are challenges—an experience of a generative endeavour of discovering a way to find comfort in a new space. The context of how and where we live is as important as the locations for which we are making the work. We can find routine, comfort, a retracted place, and the ability to withdraw and hold a feeling of comfort close. We are not present within our places, be they populated cities or suburban sprawl, to properly rural, we inhabit these places while having superficial connections to them. Relationships that are not reciprocal as we mimic the extractive values of our culture. The values were brought and instilled through colonization and capitalism. We live in a place that is unceded, uninvited guests on this land here through the machinations of colonization that we are slowly becoming more aware of. There is an inherent desire to explore ‘other’ places, one based on the frontier and explorer myths, of seeing and capturing what was not ours. It is a striving for and desiring for ‘more’ experience and consumption of other peoples’ sacred 38locations. This is paralleled through initiatives like Scan the World(StW), which is partnered with Google ; StW’s mission is:40 https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/scan-the-world?hl=en4039Figure. 9. Scott Moore, Projection/Projector/Projection, 2022, digital sculpture, bench, projector raspberry pi, oil, wood, glass, rock, power and HDMI cables.“Scan the World is an ambitious community-built initiative whose mission is to share 3D printable sculpture and cultural artefacts using democratized 3D scanning technologies, producing an extensive ecosystem of free to download digital cultural heritage. In making culture accessible, communities are encouraged to share their scans, stories, and creations with the goal to bring tangible heritage to the masses. Share your stories with us at stw@myminifactory.com!” And “We believe in culture, in art, in knowledge, and we believe that all of this must be accessible from everywhere to everyone.”This initiative raises many potential questions about the availability and accessibility of scanning technologies. Scan the World affirms that they “want to raise awareness of decolonisation by building object-based narratives fuelled by the people these artefacts belong to.” StW notes that works by creators dead longer than 70 years are public domain and allowed to be scanned. StW seemingly has benevolent goals of supporting cultural heritage, accessibility, education and preservation. Although StW speaks of democratization and decolonization, there is presumed access, not dissimilar to the original collectors that built the collections of these very institutions. Are these technologies enforcing current modes and methods of imperial and colonial forces, or are they actively attempting to decolonize? As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay notes, museums are still the institutions housing stolen artifacts:“It is no secret that millions of objects that had never been destined for display in white cubes were looted from all over the world only to be carefully handled and preserved in Western museums as precious objects. Once looted, these objects were made inaccessible to the people who had created them and to the communities in which they had been produced, used, and exchanged. This breach between colonized people, who were dispossessed of so many of their artifacts, cultural practices, and infrastructures, and the objects they made, which museums, archives, and libraries now handle according to imperial principles and procedures of classification and a discourse of salvation and preservation, is one of the founding principles of imperialism, which has never been abolished. Under imperial temporality and spatiality, this 40breach is not conceived as an open debt that Europe owes to colonized peoples whose cultures were destroyed in the process of “rescuing” rare samples of these cultures to enrich European and American institutions.” 41Some have heralded the possibility of 3D scanning to ‘democratize’ who has access to objects within museum collections, yet this access can re-problematize the objects’ original theft. However, in this case, in an extra form, as we are aware of the structures and systems of power. With the power structures and systems so engrained, I am trying to approach one of many root causes in a micro mode, a re-connection to a local. I am also interested in how my works subvert projects like Scan the World by highlighting the ubiquitous and familiar objects surrounding us that these omnipresent objects are equal to those contained within StW. Objects that contain considerably more complexity than first glance. The unseen labour and transport from across the globe to the unseen labour and effort from down the road. Considering my relations to my specific location through the domestic and everyday allows new possibilities for me to move forward. This way of being and thinking has allowed me to re-connect to tangible and embodied experience, appreciation for the doing and building of reciprocal relations. Throughout the MFA process, I have experienced various forms of defamiliarization with existing circumstances, places, spaces, objects, etc. It has allowed me to re-consider existences and modes of being and making. Ways of making that would not have occurred had I not been confronted with familiar ephemera made strange. I have been able to shift methods of inquiry across mediums and materials. With the used motor oil drawings, I was inquiring about the material value of used oil. I sought methods to re-consider and re-structure my relations to location through plants deemed to have nuisance use-value, specifically wild mustard. I began considering wild mustard’s proliferation as a symbol that mirrored similar movements and visible traces of settler colonialism. Could I connect to a wider public, empowering a re-consideration of creativity and defamiliarizing the artist's role through the mustard pens project? Could I also highlight the engrained tension of a place located on unceded territory? Although the https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2551-the-right-to-live-where-one-s-culture-was-museified4141mustard pens project ultimately fell apart, it was a catalyst to begin sisymbrium altissimum, 2021, a work that expedited the connecting of loose threads to find the language that was defamiliarization. strawberries, fire pit, beer cans, tabletop, table leg, chairs, 2021 led me into discovering Blender as a means to manipulate the maps into 3D. The arc to this present moment leads across diverse mediums and forms, linked through a desire to interrupt typical processes of perception. Creating space for the viewer to carry with them new perceptual structures. These prior works and absorbing a potential within defamiliarization lead to the works that are single gang 24fps, 2021, still life still, 2021-22, projector/projection/projector, 2022, and camper, 2022. All works that come from real world things. Translated through 3D scanning into 3D models and then into Blender for compositions and finally rendering. To see the world in a new light, I need moments of defamiliarization, moments that remove me from daily, habitual and comfortable ways of seeing. In presenting these works I am hoping that the ubiquity of the objects makes them at first entirely accessible, letting the viewer in. Second I hope that viewer begins to consider and relate to these objects. Every object and thing holds within itself multitudes of complexity. The table, fruits, vegetables, cake, pizza, flowers, computers, vases, and others are all parts that encompass both the edges and cores of my existence. It will be a new bag of apples next week and some items might be around for longer, but this assemblage points towards what is the substance of my daily existence. This work contains a tension in that it holds very much every part of me and is also inherently accessible, I become both seen and unseen in this work. I find this seen and unseen tension parallels how the included things are within the world. That an apple is just itself, that slips out of sight, but also contains the much more. Many apples grown in the Okanagan were developed at the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre, selective breeding for taste, texture and better flavour , funded through research 42and grants from the federal government. The apples can also hold the histories of the unceded land that the orchards now occupy. Along with the hands, machines, irrigations systems etc., that support, prune https://profils-profiles.science.gc.ca/en/research-centre/summerland-research-and-development-centre/42summerland-research-and-development42and pick from the trees.This example is equal to every object and thing included on the table. These ubiquitous things that appear bountiful and abundant. A still life becomes a celebration for these bounties and an opportunity to re-examine how to not take for granted the accessibility to avocado’s year round. My method of making is about fostering a moment of potential, in a small scale, subscending to the daily, domestic and relatable. In this work I am highlighting relatable objects in an attempt to elevate their perceptibility. My family life is fruitful because of the support, a care that lacks words, an appreciation that I do not say. It is noticing and appreciating objects in my daily life that allows for me to be present in this world. Outside of my brain. Linking the ability to find moments of defamiliarization within my current existence has been helpful and important to my existence in the world. Seeing the cast of a shadow drawing an analogue of itself across the floor, or table. I cast a similar shadow, there is a 43Figure. 10. Scott Moore, Camper, 2022, digital sculpture, plinth, book, monitor, raspberry pi, power and HDMI cables.connection between myself and this world and the things and objects within it that should be a daily reminder of my relations.Relations that stretch backwards, and forwards, carrying with them belief and value systems that are translated and flattened through time. Values of hard and diligent work were based in reciprocal systems of spirituality, ecology, environment, religion, craftsmanship, labour, family and community. Work used to symbolize a form of gratitude and care, its meaning has been compressed over time, losing its original contexts that highlighted reciprocal connections with specific place. These connections to place have become disconnected and decontextualized through settler colonialism. With familial generations leaving places that were familiar and connected, coming to unknown places and attempting to build connections. These conditions that we experience in our lives from flattening and lossy to hyperreal and lossless as we navigate our lives which are becoming more entangle between real and digital realities. These states of being and the entangling of digital and real are not inherently good or bad. They fall on a spectrum of encounters that should inform and shape how we can exist in the world. All of these experiences have the potential to generate possibilities for new outcomes. It is about allowing or actively generating space for attentive reflection on the various phenomena we experience to foster potential. Accepting the invitation after moments of defamiliarization allows us to re-consider how we are in these places and the recognizing the functions that support our current ways of being. As well as generating moments that allow for consideration of the unseen supports that proliferate most things and objects in this world. Considering our relations to the world around us can lead to recognizing the labour and care that are required to generate, grow build or manufacture the things around us. Recognition and appreciation of these unseen aspects should then be extended to our digital worlds. We can then hopefully carry with us an awareness of systems and structures that are seen and unseen. In one sense this work feels very much like an invitation, similar to how this section began, of moving towards really looking at what is around 44us, leaving bread crumbs for our future generations to build from. This paper will function for me as a moment in time, and reflection of the past many years that lead to and supported its writing.45Works CitedAbram, David. The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, 1997.Arantes, Lydia M. "Unraveling Knitting: Form Creation, Relationality, and the Temporality of Materials." 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"Artificial lawns: Environmental and societal considerations of an ecological simulacrum." Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, vol. 30, 2018, pp. 152-156., dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2018.02.002.Giorgi, L., and C. Marsh. "The Protestant work ethic as a cultural phenomenon." European journal of social psychology, vol. 20, no. Nov-Dec 90, 1990, pp. 499-517. Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA), https://search.proquest.com/docview/57530903.46Greenwald, Jordan. "Objects, Lost and Found." Qui Parle, vol. 21, no. 2, 2013, pp. 169-177. dx.doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.21.2.0169.Grootenboer, Hanneke. The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Dutch Seventeenth -Century Still Life and Trompe l'Oeil Painting, University of Rochester, Ann Arbor, 2001. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/rhetoric-perspective-realism-illusionism-dutch/docview/250854611/se-2?accountid=14656.Kerner, Susanne, Cynthia Chou, and Morten Warmind. 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Canadian Policy used the Protestant Work Ethic to Injure the In- digenous Peoples. , 2019.49Mourenza, Daniel. "'Barbarism? Yes, Indeed': A Barbaric Theorizing of Technology." Parallax (Leeds, England), vol. 24, no. 2, 2018, pp. 159-175.Shiga, John. "Translations: Artifacts from an Actor-Network Perspective." Artifact, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 40-55. dx.doi:10.1080/17493460600658318.Sonnema, Roy B. The Early Dutch Vanitas Still-Life, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1980, https://go.exlibris.link/1vWMl60q.Weber, Andreas. Enlivenment: toward a poetics for the anthropocene. vol. 16, MIT Press, 2019.50Appendix51Hello, I’m writing to you, and have sent you this package, it will become clearer later in the letter. I’m trying to form, or gesture at creating a moment for you to exist within, even if for only a brief moment. - first, the wild mustard pen may disintegrate immediately - its made of the shaft of dried mustard from the unceded, traditional and ancestral lands of the Sylix/Okangan and the Secwepemc/Shuswap peoples. This area is referred to by many members of the Okanagan Indian Band(OKIB) as head of the lake. This piece of wild mustard is most likely tall tumble-mustard • sisymbrium altissimum; it could also be loesel’s tumble-mustard • sisymbrium loeselili. I keep meaning to reach out to the OKIB Language Nest to see if the Sylix/Okanagan have an nsyilxcən word for mustard. Mustard is typically an introduced plant that is also known as a tumble-weed; an efficient spreader of seeds through tumbling across the land in the wind. This description of mustard doesn’t wholly encompass the location or the knowledge of the place where the mustard was found. - second, I’m sending this package to you - along with the wild mustard pen, there is a walnut ink, some postcard sized paper.- third, the paper is blank, the pen is unused and untested, although based on functioning versions that were tested. The walnut ink will make marks on the paper that will last for a while, probably quite a long time.- fourth, here is a botanical drawing of the mustard from The Illustrated Flora of British Columbia, in future iterations of this letter, this botanical drawing will be replaced by a drawing, made with a wild mustard pen, of the mustard in the botanical drawing style.- fifth, I’ve sent this package as an invitation, a prompt, a proposition to - I’m not looking for anything specific, in terms of form or shape, or even ideal outcome - I’m asking for an expression of creativity on the provided paper- anything you do with passion and integrity (Sheldon Solomon, an experimental social psychologist was on a podcast; The Inspire Wire in 2018 around 1:18) writing, drawing, mark making etc ( you get the idea). Think about a time you’ve crossed paths with mustard in a place that you are familiar with, or maybe it was a fleeting moment that sticks with you - mustard is it’s own family also known as Brassicaceae info is from Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia and the Inland Northwest by Lone Pine publishing.- sixth, could you respond in whichever way you see fit, and mail the postcard to anyone you feel like - think of it as a traveling artwork that is for you, the postal workers - maybe the postal machines, and the recipient- seventh, hopefully this prompt will give you a moment, dare I say permission, to be with yourself for a even a brief fraction of time in nature, maybe there is a location with mustard close to where you live and you could stand with it, prior to responding.- eighth, I am aware that by creating this project and asking for your participation is to complicate the notion of authorship. I am intentionally looking to problematize the authorship and to act as a facilitator for possibility. With that in mind you are the creator of the work on paper with the wild mustard pen and walnut ink. - this box is sent not as a a replacement for - but as a reminder that we are complex . We sometimes need a tactility, to brighten and broaden or contain the whole highlight or contrast. Can we try to encompass experience all?- A subjectively visual or poetic representation of how you place creativity.Thanks again and best, Scott
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Visual Arts
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Roy-Bois, Samuel
Flattening, translation : life still life
Text