B.5.1 Cam Hunters Presents: Statement on Declining Online Imaging and Recording

Cam Hunters (STÉFY McKnight and Julia Chan)

With the movement towards and increasing reliance on videoconferencing platforms for remote work, events, and teaching and learning due to COVID-19, we as artists, performers, instructors, and academics have been thinking of how to include video conferencing into our pedagogy in a way that centres care and compassion.

There are many reasons why someone may not want to appear on camera online or be recorded during an online session or meeting. On-camera gatherings on video-conferencing platforms such as Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, Microsoft Teams, Big Blue Button, Google Hangouts, or Google Meet may be triggering or retraumatizing for participants who are victims/survivors of digital abuse. Participants may be uncomfortable having their personal and private space, home, or office (or lack thereof) broadcast to others or those in positions of authority (such as employers, teachers, professors, et cetera). Participants may not wish to reveal family members, partners, friends, or any others who may be sharing their space at that time. Members of oppressed, marginalized, and/or highly surveilled groups may be reluctant to appear in digital spaces where security and privacy levels are unclear. Whatever the reason, we believe that everyone should have the ability to decide whether they wish to appear online or be recorded, without penalty.

In 2020, Cam Hunters created a Statement on Declining Online Imagining and Recording to be shared and circulated amongst our colleagues and peers. This paper will examine the creation of this document and some of the challenges of the current digital environment, as well as the ways that we have worked to incorporate the statement into our practices, teaching, and labour.

B.5.2 Digital Approaches to Research-Creation

• prOphecy sun, Simon Fraser University
• Reese Muntean, Simon Fraser University

Since 1911, drones have been used by the military for missile and weapons testing, surveillance, aerial refuelling, airstrikes, cargo transportation, and geological surveying and mapping (Remy, 2011). More recently, drones have migrated into everyday cultural arenas such as theatre, installation, film, photography, performance art, and sound. Thomas Stubblefeld suggests that the majority of drone art does not take up the inhered, political entanglements of violence, between military and civilian, and is instead pointedly re-imagining, re-appropriating this technology into new spheres (Stubblefeld, 2020). Indeed, contemporary artists use digital technologies such as drones as actants to help them translate, transform or generate new aesthetic fragments and encounters with ethereal visual and auditory landscapes. This paper builds on these ideas and introduces Carrying Others, a series of artworks that take up vertical privileging and surveillance tools for creative production and dissemination. Carrying Others features a series of aerial vignettes using drones that survey and surveil the landscape. Referencing Michele De Certeau's ideas on how pathways unsettle existing patterns and habits — mental, physical, and emotional — this work illustrates a spectrum of methods and potentialities on how pathways become meaningful or transformative as we breathe new life into them. This lens-based work brings the view up close, following a body meandering through a Vancouver park, next to water passages along their journeys elsewhere, investigating movement and unknown perspectives rarely seen or felt. Ultimately, this speculative artwork presents an improvisational layered account of discovery, evaluation, and reflection — revealing how bodies meld with objects to become other, and how new physical geographies and potentialities of flight and surveillance can carve space in urban landscapes.

B.5.3 The Pliability of Paper: Mothering, Teaching, and Making Art from within the Rectangle

Monique Motut-Firth, Visual College of Art and Design

The digital fluidity of visual movement in our contemporary moment is dizzying; we are physically moving through time and space while flipping between different screens; images slide past us as digital scrolls, flicker from buildings, pop up as digital windows collapsing and reopening. We slide them up and down and push them aside as they fight for more and more for our attention; we subscribe to them, block them.

As an artist, Arts instructor, and mother firmly entrenched the tactile, the shock of being sent into the digital realm one spring afternoon in 2020 was an exhausting affair. Using cut-out paper to explore contemporary culture, I had been making paper collage machines that were meant to draw attention to surveillance capitalism by creating machine-like compositions from consumer products that looked back at us — the viewer. This reality became all too real during the global pandemic of 2020. Interacting with my students through the screen, my children participating with their peers and teachers digitally, Online openings; all the art and artists on display from our own little rectangles, imagine my surprise when I realized that I too had become of these digital images.

I have become a digital image present on my own screen. I can be shrunk, expanded, collapsed, muted, and shuffled. What does this mean as an Arts educator, parent, and artist? How can the paper materials of my artistic practice better mirror the deepening of this new digital space? This proposal seeks to explore some of the complexity of at once navigating a fluid, complex digital experience and the adaptation of both a teaching and artistic practice by pursuing the pliability of paper through digital space.