Drawing a Line: Scajaquada Creek (2010) was a duration-based performance on September 23, 2010 where the artist traced the pathway of a buried section of the Scajacquada Creek using a push broom and water from the creek itself.  The drawing began begin at Forest Lawn Cemetery and wove through the Hamlin Park District, along Main, East Delavan, Jefferson, Florida, Wolhers, Northland and Donaldson Street, and across the Kensington Expressway.

The Scajaquada Creek was buried in the 1930s and is covered by streets and rights of way that weave through the East Side.  Daylighting is the process of uncovering diverted or buried streams to their original pathways.  Throughout the US, daylighting initiatives have sought to \ improve neighbourhoods through the restoration of creeks, rivers and streams, while respecting property rights, local businesses and the structural integrity of existing buildings.

By redrawing the pathway of the creek through the East Side, a series of historical Black neighbourhoods that have been ignored within public policy, bisected by freeways and scarred by race riots, Thompson’s performance reintroduced the Scajacquada to its surroundings through temporary gesture, the systematic marking of territory, and ritualized artistic labour.

On April 30, 2011, Thompson created a second version of this performance at Broadview and Queen, the neighbourhood where her father grew up, using water drawn from the Don River.  In the performance, the artist performed a series of actions to mark the location of Napier Street, a small street originally extending west from Munro Street between Thompson and Matilda.

In 1968 homes on Napier, Munro, and Thompson Street were destroyed in order for the city to construct the Don Mount Court Housing Complex.  Both homes where her father had lived were demolished – 7 Napier, where the family lived from 1951 – 54, and 33 Munro, where they lived from 1954 – 65.  Munro Street was leveled from just north of Queen to Dundas Street, and Napier was destroyed entirely.

Don Mount Court was intended to improve the neighbourhood by providing residents with centrally located low-income housing.  Instead, inhabitants were alienated from the surrounding neighbourhood, and by the late 1970s, the development had become unstable, with crumbling buildings and high rates of criminal activity.  In 2004, the Don Mount Court Development Corporation (a branch of Toronto Community Housing) leveled the development and replaced it with mixed-use housing. While Munro Street has been partially restored, Napier Street remains a tennis court.

The performance shifts the parameters of site-specific practice from the body’s position within physical space to the liminal space articulated by the moving body.  Writers such as Miwon Kwon, (One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity) and James Meyer (The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity) conceive of ‘site’ as a temporary set of artistic parameters that move beyond geography by integrating social, institutional or cultural dialogue.

In Drawing a Line, the line is drawn in segments by pouring water from a bucket and pushing it with the broom until the line disappears.   As the gesture is repeated, the line gradually evaporates, leaving no trace of the activity.  By marking the location of Napier Street, our understanding of public space becomes more nuanced – gesture becomes a form of personal and spatial encoding, drawing together personal history, public policy, gentrification, and migration.

By performing the imagined locations of the artist and audience, and the remembered locations of her father, Drawing a Line represents a discrete moment in space and time, a temporary marking of territory that disappears as it is rendered.

The artist created the first version of Drawing a Line in 1997, while an undergraduate student at York University.  The drawing was made with an industrial blue chalk line, and extended along the length of Thompson Street, where her father played baseball.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

2011            Performing from the Edge of the Body (MFA Thesis Exhibition) p|m Gallery, Toronto
2010            Beyond the Multitude (Curated by Jordan Dalton) Buffalo, New York

Networked Derive (#ntwkder) is a collaborative performance between two geographically-separate locations. Using mobile phones, twitter feeds and a simple mapping system, performers drift through their cities guided by maps of the other.

Participants use maps that have a city on each side. The derive starts when one team reports its location to the other. The other team uses a pushpin to mark the location of the first team on the first team’s map, and then turns the map over and travels to the spot indicated. The second team then reports their location to the first team, who repeats the same process, leading them to a different site. The choreography of the piece is created by variations in the maps and the speed the information is exchanged.  The patterns of holes become a form of notation.

Photo by Marius Hague, NIME 2011 and SID Exhibition, the Norwegian Museum of Science, Technology and Medicine, Oslo, 2011

Swinging Suitcaseis a portable sound piece that generates and broadcasts the sound of a flock of house sparrows in response to the act of swinging.  The piece consists of two hard-shelled suitcase containing accelerometers, microprocessors and flash memory cards containing short sparrow vocalizations.  When a suitcase is picked up, the birds will begin to make noise, which calibrate to reflect movement, accelerating, and multiplying in response to the gesture of the user.

House sparrows are small tan and brown birds found almost exclusively in urban environments. Originating from the Middle East, variations of house sparrows are located in almost every part of the world due to a relative lack of enemies, high reproduction rates and their deliberate introduction into unpopulated areas by humans. The birds are generally located wherever there is human activity and at different points in history have been associated with rats, mice and other pests because of their tendency to also eat grain.  During China’s Four Pests Campaign in the late 1950s, sparrows were eliminated in the hundreds of thousands.

While we understand that machines do not have feelings, if an event occurs that triggers a deeply ingrained social behavior, we will automatically respond according to the ingrained social conventions that we know.  The vocalizations of the house sparrows housed in the Swinging Suitcase are arranged into responses that range from single chirps to social chatter to scolding and correspond to three different user states, walking, swinging and shaking.The piece is designed to be ‘just intuitive enough’ – while the ‘birds’ do ‘respond’ to motion and gesture, there is a layer of unpredictability that creates a reciprocal dialogue between the user and the piece.  Interaction becomes confounded when the gestures of the user become repetitive and the vocalizations become more complex – the ‘birds’ become ‘restless’. The natural response to a change of sound is a change of motion, which in turn changes the vocalization pattern.  As the user continually relearns the piece, the gestures become more complex, reflecting the advanced cognitive state of the user and shifting exploratory gesture into the realm of performance. There is a disconnection between what starts as prescribed interaction between the seductive quality of a familiar object and quickly evolves into improvised responses and awkward performance. As you ‘play’ the birds, the birds ‘play’ you

By performing the piece in different places, especially those places where birds should not be, users create social situations through non-verbal modes of communication.  Not unlike carrying a boom box, the piece enables the user to articulate his or her presence through sonified gesture, playing with and against the various acoustic ecologies that shape the urban environment. The piece has been performed in pubic spaces such as cafes and subway trains, strapped onto bicycles, used to confuse city birds and numerous other forms of intervention, trickery, and play.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

2011            SID Exhibition New Interfaces for Musical Expression, (NIME) Norsk Teknisk Museum, Oslo (Download Catalogue)
2011            Performing from the Edge of the Body (MFA Thesis Exhibition) p|m Gallery, Toronto
2010            Beyond/In Western New York Biennial Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, Buffalo, New York

Produced in the Department of Media Study,  SUNY at Buffalo as part of my MFA thesis, Performing from the Edge of the Body (2011)

Citizen’s Band Radio is public frequency that enables short-distance radio communication between individuals. Citizenband is a collaborative performance that senses, intercepts, and rebroadcasts the ubiquitous frequencies that permeate our citizens within urban environments. Radio waves, microwaves, satellites, and cell phone signals will be reimagined through signal processing, handmade electronics and performantive improvisation.

Commissioned for the Deep Wireless Festival Toronto, 2009

]]> http://jessicathompson.ca/archives/440/feed 0 http://jessicathompson.ca/archives/416 http://jessicathompson.ca/archives/416#comments Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:08:24 +0000 admin http://jessicathompson.ca/archives/416 Freestyle SoundHack (2008)
Workshop and Performance

Freestyle SoundKits are wearable sound pieces that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment.Freestyle SoundHack is a collaborative performance in the form of a workshop. During the performance, the artist will give her project to the public by teaching workshop participants how to make their own Freestyle SoundKits, to distribute as they wish, using whatever sounds they choose. Freestyle SoundHack was produced through the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

2008            Give It Up p|m Gallery, Toronto
2008            (in) visible Cities Performance Art Festival with Shawna Dempsey/Lorri Millan, FASTWÜRMS, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Nhan Duc Nguyen. Winnipeg

Give it Up is a live breakdance battle that takes place between two geographically separated spaces linked through a live web stream.  Part performance art, part social experiment, the project explores hyper-socialized space of web-based performance through an open-source model of participation, and examines the complex relationship between relational practice, collaboration and the practice of art making.

In the performance, dancers and a DJ were joined via a web stream and asked to engage in one-on-one and two-on-two battles.  Breakdance battles follow a call and response structure where dancers engage in a dialogue through gesture in order to engage, respond to or one-up their partners.  Battles are judged based on technique, level of complexity and showmanship. When footage of breakdance battles are posted online in forums such as YouTube, the battle structure becomes virtual — as videos are posted, other videos are posted in response.  By splitting the battle between two locations, physical interaction becomes compounded by the opportunities and limitations of the web streams, while subtle moves such as popping & locking are difficult to translate, the cameras afford the opportunity to engage with the mechanics of perception.

Give it Up was performed between two locations in Buffalo as part of collisions|collusions at Big Orbit Gallery, Buffalo, New York (video below by Zu Pon (Trey) Loe) and between Toronto and Buffalo as part of Give it Up at p|m Gallery in Toronto.

Thanks to:  Shane Depree  (bboy depree) , Solomon, T.J., Ryan McNerney,
J.R. Noble (DJ Simple) and bboy Afternoon and the Toronto crew.

Want to see what happens when you don’t have a web stream?
 Battle @ Buffalo happens every month at the Verve.

Freestyle SoundKits are wearable sound pieces that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment. When the piece is engaged, each step the wearer takes is broadcast as a single electronic dance beat. The piece enables people to create user-defined performative spaces that reference both the cinematic and the fantastic, where the acoustic ecology of public space is activated through collaboration, improvisation and one-upmanship.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

2008            FREESTYLIE: LAL, Jessica Thompson & Grace N’ Style (Curated by Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot), Art Gallery of Mississauga
2006            Conflux 2006 Glowlab, McCaig-Welles Gallery, New York