C.3.1 GAZE\\corridor

• Jevonne Peters, Western University

This presentation introduces GAZE\\corridor, an experimental audio portrait exploring the ideas of perception and art – how we perceive art, the importance of art, how we interact with art, and its influence. The experimental work is inspired by the written works several theorists — George Lamming, Neil deGrasse Tyson, John Berger, and Tina Campt.

This is a study and reflection on several theorists' views on perception and art, as captured through multiple interviews, programs, and AI-generated or hired voice actresses and actors who give voice to their written thoughts.

In the context of perception and our relationship with art, the topic can be divided into four segments. Each segment considers a selection of ideas:

1. Seeing Art: Perspective and what we see greatly affects us.
2. The Importance of Art: How a person thinks is connected to the way they see the world, and art has a fundamental impact on the shaping of the consciousness, and our culture.
3. A Dialogue with the Image: The two-way conversation that occurs when perceiving and interacting with an image.
4. The Power and Influence of the Image: The effect on our desires and behaviour.

This is told through sound. Various selections from each of the references were cut, rearranged, and seamlessly stitched together to give a cohesive narrative for each person.

keywords: art, perception, image, sound, influence

C.3.2 “Environment is Everything:”Embodied Knowledge, Participatory Praxis, and the Ethics of Long-Term Care Design

Willa Granger, Florida Atlantic University

COVID-19 has exposed the structural failings of America’s long-term care industry. Issues ranging from funding, to staffing, to regulatory oversight often materialize in the physical and spatial landscape of nursing and assisted facilities, a building stock produced for yet greatly in absence of the input of older adults; as the intended users of such buildings, patients, staff, and family-members remain largely unheard within the vernacular of long-term care design, further complicating bioethical ideas of patient autonomy when such buildings are understood as an extension of the healthcare process. The silences of older adults—in terms of perceptions, experiences, hopes, and grievances—likewise define the traditional archive, and foregrounds elderhood as a social category of difference operating at the margins of the historical record. This paper offers initial insights on an extended interview project conceived in response to this archival silence: one that asks and listens to older adults, caregivers, and staff members about environmental perceptions in long-term care. While sociologists, gerontologists, and geographers have deployed such a method in health care settings, this research is particularly curious about how the discipline of architectural history—and its adjacency to architectural practitioners—might be called upon to construct and bear witness to intimate built environment histories. This empirical project will work towards theorizing the spatial and material practices of institutionalized older adults; it will critically assess the gaps between senior-care buildings as designed and senior-care buildings as used, ultimately with an eye towards identifying and repairing these disconnects in future participatory practices. This research is therefore both a contribution to and a critique of the biopolitics of aging, eldercare, and architectural praxis. As a constructive intervention, I situate feminist geographical approaches alongside the social motivations of participatory design, arguing for a more intimate and contextual process for the future of senior-care architecture.

keywords: aging, architecture, nursing homes, medicalization, bioethics

C.3.3 Storytelling through Sight, Silence & Sound: Sankofic Rituals for Locating the Self

Myrtle Sodhi, York University

Malidoma Somé (1999) frames storytelling within a ritual that boosts imagination, supports our efforts to locate the self, connects us to ancestral knowledge, and supports our re-envisioning of our society. This African Indigenous framing of storytelling is the foundation for my artistic projects which all involve civic engagement. I position my art making as storytelling and want to open opportunities for the community to locate themselves in the story. This can be characterized as a form of “indigneous technology that is aimed at returning people to their origin - the Spirit world” (Somé, 1999, p. 71). Storytelling then becomes a localizer and a technology that carries the community to another space while connecting it to the “common energy of Spirit” (Somé, 1999). I am interested in this and other complexities that storytelling through visual and sonic arts offers.

My visual and sonic art pieces will support a discussion on locating oneself in stories using Afro-Caribbean indigenous storytelling practices such as Kwik Kwak where the storyteller must gain ongoing consent through participation from the audience throughout the storytelling gathering by inviting silence, and receiving direction and input. The use of sound and silence as spaces for consent in art experiences speaks to the African Indigenous values of relating, reciprocity and interconnectedness. Dylan Robinson asserts that “(s)ensory experiences…is relational at its core – a form of connection between us and to life around us wherein we are simultaneously sensing and being sensed” (Robinson, 2017, p.87). It is this interconnectedness through sensing that allows the audience a return. I will share how my artistic practice serves as a repatriation practice that seeks the return of the audience from a sonic exile caused by the imposed values of colonization in the arts.

Reference: Robinson, D. (2017). Public writing, sovereign reading: Indigenous language art in public space. Art Journal, 76(2), 85-99.

keywords: storytelling rituals, Afro-Caribbean, sonic art, integrative art, civic engagement

C.3.4 Sounding Strata in Port Hope

Taien Ng-Chan, York University

Since 2014, the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan) has held performative art-mapping events in art galleries, universities, parks, trails, city streets, and on public transit. The methods that we have developed in our strata-walks and KM2 (“Kilometre Squared”) projects aim to focus attention on the multiplicity of sensory, socio-political and historical layers that make up place, particularly hidden and alternative narratives. Our most recent project is a series of 23 sound collages for a variety of GPS “hot spots” around Port Hope, Ontario, which use field recordings, found sounds and interviews with locals. This wide variety of approaches is consistent with our method of “strata-mapping”—a practice of focusing one’s attention on a single “layer” of place, with the understanding that it is one layer out of infinite layers. Each of these sound collage pieces are geolocated so that the sounds can be listened to in the context of the environment, and include juxtapositions of conflicting histories and memories as well as sounds, which will provoke the listener to see the place with new eyes. This presentation will include some short listening sessions and contextualize the sound collages with the specifics of site to provide a glance at some of the more overt socio-political layers of the project.

keywords: locative media, sound, public space, oral history, mapping