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Underground in the Aether 
Hannah B. Higgins, Vincent Bonin, Allison Collins, Luis Jacob, Jee-Hae Kim, Felicity Tayler
VIVO Media Arts Centre, 2625 Kaslo Street — Saturday, April 8, 10AM – 5PM, 2017

Robin Simpson and Joni Low invited me to participate in Underground in the Aether, a symposium responding to the themes of collectivity, selfhood, and communication circuits in the exhibition Hank Bull: Connexion. Organized by Or Gallery, in partnership with Burnaby Art Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre and Doryphore Independent Curators Society, the symposium took place as the closing event for Spring Fever: Vancouver Independent Archives 2017.

My contribution, “The Spirit of Those Spaces Where Networks Overlap,” takes Hank Bull’s article “The Relican Wedding,” (Centerfold, July 1979) as a case study, highlighting the “politics of publicity” that are enacted in a transitional moment for news media, intermedia art, artistic subcultures and national culture. Continue reading →

An abstract for a paper delivered on a panel at the 30th annual 2 Days of Canada Conference: The Concept of Vancouver.

Co-panelists for the “Activist Cultures in Vancouver” session were Markus Reisenleitner and Heather Smyth.

A blurry snapshot of an issue of the Georgia Straight, c. 1968. Note city Alderman Harry Rankin’s critique of urban development on same page as publicity for Intermedia.

A friend gifted me a well-traveled copy of Jeff Derksen’s tract, How High is the City, How Deep Is Our Love? (Fillip Editions, 2011). At the time, I was thinking through Roy Kiyooka’s description of “Our City” in Transcanada Letters (Talonbooks, 1975), which shares an epistolary model of imagined community with Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. This paper will explore an echo I perceive in Derksen’s call to action for imagining the city through a renewal of neo-avant-garde critical practices and Kiyooka’s description of an imaginary city conjured through the affective accumulation of “poly-morphously peverse” identity shifts. Derksen’s text reflects upon the dialectic arising between the affective relationships generated through the lived experience of a city and the fixed identity categories imposed when our desires are solicited by the governing discourse of urban planning. The inhabitants of Kiyooka’s city have collectively adopted pseudonyms and alter-egos, which, he muses, are part of their shared practice of accessing a “so called real-self” in association with the psychedelic, multisensory and collaborative environment of Vancouver’s Intermedia Society (1967-1972).

Neither a return through restorative nostalgia, nor a projection towards an avant-garde for a future art city, this paper will pay attention to how these past and present calls for mutable identities respond to a continuous process of urban development in Vancouver. Historical context includes a discussion of the final few issues of Tish and the Georgia Straight newspaper, as well as the conflict between Leftist discourses that coincides with the dissolution of Intermedia Society.

An advertising firm specializing in social media marketing contacted me this week. They inquired if I would be interested in carrying a text-based ad on this poorly-trafficked site, promising a fixed upfront annual fee.

I failed to see the advantage that advertising with me would bring to their client(s), and told them as much, asking “Who are your advertisers and what is their target demographic?”

For $150 a year, the company will draft a blog post to place on this site. This is dependent upon their client’s evaluation of my site content for compatibility. As an example, I was directed to a post on a blog devoted to family vacations at Disney resorts. Embedded within a heartfelt description of one anonymous family’s vacation experience was a hyperlink to the  Virgin Atlantic airline company (there were no other links in the post content).

This earnest rendition of familial bliss was produced by a team of content writers – subject to approval by the blog’s creator (Disney).

Phantasmagoria?