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Reading Group: Archiving Unrest

The HPU led an Itinerant Reading Group as part of Michael DiRisio’s exhibition ArchivingUnrestat the Worker’s Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. We discussed a chapter from Karen O’Rourke’s Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, focusing on the political practice of perambulation and critical cartography.

https://wahc-museum.ca/event/reading-groups/

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stratawalks walks

Galway

A Strata-Walk in Galway, Ireland as part of the conference Transient Topographies: Space and Interface in Digital Literature and Art
April 21, 2018
Meet at the Moore Institute, Hardiman Research Library, National University of Ireland at Galway

HPU Founding member Taien Ng-Chan led a Strata-Walk around the block in conjunction with an experimental site-specific soundtrack that was made in the 48-hours preceding the conference, and presented a paper on locative media practices.

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stratawalks walks

Workers Arts & Heritage Centre

Presented as part of the artist-projects/conference Art & Social Strata March 24, 2018 at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre (51 Stuart St, Hamilton).

This public walk and talk takes the area around the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC), particularly the newly built West Harbour GO Station, and analyzes the social strata that affects this particular place and space. Strata-Walk (WAHC Version) aims to provide participants with strata-mapping skills in order to highlight the different layers of place that make up Hamilton’s fast-changing downtown core.

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stratawalks walks

Windsor Armouries

Please join IN/TERMINUS and the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit for a participatory Strata-Walk in downtown Windsor, as part of the Triennial of Contemporary Art
Meet at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

The metaphor that downtowns have a “heart” or “soul” lends emotional weight to the dense historical and cultural layers that define city life. Our collaboration combines stratigraphic cartography with the military practice of reconnaissance, enquiring into the relationship between the historic military presence in Windsor’s urban centre and current locations of its “heart and soul.” Windsor’s Armouries represent a late 19th/early 20th century civic structure that traditionally occupied the “heart” of the city, representing a form of fortification and security that has lost relevance. Starting from the Armouries (soon the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts), our participatory “strata walks” map ways in which traditional forms of security and surveillance have shifted, disappeared, or morphed into new contexts.

This project was written up in Canadian Art

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other walks walks

McGill AHCS Speaker Series

Speaker Series – Hamilton Perambulatory Unit: “Walking thinking making mapping: mobile research with the HPU”

The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit invites you to a performative talk about practices of engaging with urban space, using some of the methods we have devised from our research. From Baudelaire and Benjamin to the Situationists and Fluxus, the city has long been fertile ground for creative practices. The HPU conducts public walks as creative propositions towards understanding the city and the self in relation to place. Our methodologies include stratigraphic cartography, locative media experimentation, sensory synesthesia poetry-writing, and found material sculpture-making. During this talk, HPU will give a summary of our past collaborations as well as conduct a short on-the-spot research project with the audience.

Department of Art History and Communication Studies Speaker Series
McGill University
Arts Building W-215, 853 rue Sherbrooke O, Montreal, QC, H3A 0G5

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other walks walks

Googlemap City Center Drift

The Googlemap City Center Drift takes as its starting point the spot where Googlemaps has placed its city marker. How does Google Maps decide exactly where the center of a city is? Is it according to the city’s dimensions? Should it be city hall, the cultural center, the financial center? Where do you think the city center should be? And what are the relationships between a digital information space as perceived by a dominant geolocation service such as Google and every day urban space?

In order to investigate these urgent questions, HPU members journeyed to the location, which Google Maps pinpoints as on Young Street, between Catherine Street South and Walnut Street South.

Young St. between Catherine St. South and Walnut St. South.
Hamilton City Centre?

Does this place coincide with what one usually thinks of as a “city center”? We didn’t think so, but then what does? We thought this mound of dirty snow could be the center. ​

Toronto’s city marker falls just shy of its city hall, and that is certainly logical since, given the size of the city, there must be many centers. City hall is a diplomatic choice (as a symbol only however; not as a reference to the hijinks that occur within city hall these days). By contrast, I don’t think Hamilton’s city center is its city hall, or this snow mound on Young Street. To me, it’s Gore Park, especially the corner that angles into Jackson Square. It seems that the city radiates outwards from that intersection. It is always moving, and it is always the same: colourful. But that’s just me. Where do you think city center is?

Corktown, Hamilton ON.

From the seemingly arbitrary spot chosen by Googlemaps as the center of Hamilton, we explored Situationist drift techniques, such as relying on our senses to guide us through the city, identifying areas of “attraction” and “repulsion” as well as “switching stations” that offer opposing directions of choice. We ended up exploring the neighbourhood of Corktown and its historic row houses and old stone buildings, the waterworks building (which we made Sarah investigate), and some interesting streets and underpasses. ​

Map of flows by Sarah Truman.

This is the map Sarah made while we were walking, indicating switching stations, the flows and areas of attraction and repulsion.

The idea for the Googlemap City Center Drift was influenced by artist Aram Bartholl’s project Map, which places giant red Google placemarkers, twenty feet high, in places designated as city center.

Aram Bartholl, Map, 2006–2019.

The beginning point of this walk is more or less arbitrary, as so it seems the Googlemap designation of city center. But the idea of center and margin is always usefully challenged by inquiry into these terms, along with a healthy sense of urban adventure that gets you out into the city, exploring. It could be as simple as a blind jab at a map to designate a starting point.

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stratawalks walks

Montréal Mile-End

HPU led a Strata-Walk (Montreal Mile End Version) as part of the 4th edition of Montréal Monochrome at articule artist-run centre in Montréal. MONTRÉAL MONOCHROME IV: STUDY HALL offered a framework to explore how artistic modes of production can challenge conventional systems of education. It was an opportunity to actively exchange knowledges on alternative, misrepresented and marginalized ways of learning and unlearning.

The theme of this edition signalled a concern with questions about conventional forms and spaces of education, and its intersection with other practices and other modes of cultural production. It indicated a growing interest in a body of artistic production that engages with knowledge production and sites of resistance. By and large, MONTRÉAL MONOCHROME IV: STUDY HALL was an attempt to critically respond to institutionalized education that perpetuates systemic oppression.

Articule
262 Fairmount O.
Montréal, Québec
https://www.articule.org/en/home

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stratawalks walks

Victoria Street/Avenue

Strata-Walk: Victoria Street/Avenue

The HPU led a stratigraphic walk to map the different layers of meanings, stories, and systems that make up a place. With the help of a list of prompts, the HPU explored the urban landscape in three different cities, on three different continents! It took place in Sydney, Australia (where HPU member Sarah Truman led with members of WalkingLab), Windsor (with HPUers Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan as part of In/terminus Research Collective’s Stories of the City exhibition opening), and London, England (with composer David Ben Shannon). Each group collectively mapped the “strata” of that street on that date.

Victoria Avenue (Windsor)

In Windsor, it was a very wet walk, full of weather, with heavy clumps of sleety-snow falling onto our attempts at mapping en route. We focused instead on note taking and chatting about the street and about the particulars of Windsor culture. For instance, many of the street names are French, pointing to the old city roots as a French settlement, but locals have anglicized the pronounciations (for example, Pierre Street is pronounced “Piry”). The US-Canada border is, by some strange twist of geography, north of our location. One participant decided to map the responses of strangers when asked to tell their favourite story. The group reached our destination towards the end of Victoria and University Streets and decamped to a nearby pub to finish our maps over some pints. Many thanks to In/terminus and to all those hearty souls who bravely came out for this wet and chilly walk!

Victoria Street (London) Strata-maps

Victoria Street (Sydney) Strata-maps

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stratawalks walks

Residency: WalkingLab

The HPU is in summer residency at WalkingLab, OISE (University of Toronto)!

In 2016, the HPU spent three months in residence with WalkingLab in order to further research and expand our methodologies, specifically our “Strata-Walk” technique that urge you to identify the different layers of strata that make up place as a way of provoking your attention, and can be adapted to any method of mobility. As participatory workshops, the Strata-Walks function as public pedagogy and relational art, where the emphasis is on the inter-relationships between people and environments, and the creative element does not lie in the making of an object, but in an event. The prompts can be used in groups or by a solo walker. As a method, it focuses on sharpening the mind’s attention to place, as well as the body’s. 

WalkingLab is an active laboratory for research and development on walking methodologies. It aims to generate a diverse range of walking research related to civic engagement and critical public pedagogy, experiment with different media and mobile technologies, and compose an anarchive that attends to the live, temporal and performative nature of walking research. http://walkinglab.org/residency/

Read our contributions to the WalkingLab blog, as those of other residents, here!

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Landline

LANDLINE: walking with a soundtrack, cellphones and strangers

In 2015, the HPU attended a theatrical performance called Landline by Adrienne Wong and Dustin Harvey of Secret Theatre. As described on the ticketing site: Using smartphones, the audience is invited to take an audio-guided experiential tour while texting live with a stranger in a distant city. Landline is ‘a curious exposure to the feeling of being alone together. Landline first premiered in Vancouver/Halifax. This iteration was between Granville Island in Vancouver, BC, and downtown Kitchener, ON, where HPU members Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan participated. More info: http://www.xosecret.org/landline/

We began as a group, getting earbuds and iPod shuffles ready, getting our cellphones ready, entering the number of a stranger who, at the very same moment, will be doing the same thing. We stood in a circle, counted down the seconds, everyone pressing play at the same time. The sounds of a city came into my ears, the sounds of Granville Island in Vancouver, where my unseen scene partner was now listening to downtown Kitchener. We drifted off into the city, each in our own solitude, listening and walking. Every now and then, we were asked to do something: find a spot that reminded us of someone we missed, find something to lean against, text our partner something. The hour quickly passed in a story about memory, loss, and place.

After it was over, we gathered again as a group to find that the organizers had connected the other group on a screen so we could meet visually, over snacks, if we wished. Then we drove home, talking about our experience in the car. Here we attempt to capture some of that conversation:

Taien: The piece ended with such a lovely and poignant mood… the experience was bittersweet and beautiful.

Donna: It was…but somehow manipulative?

Taien:   Yes, a bit… in the way that movie music is manipulative, signals a feeling or directs emotion (there was a lot of piano music used, which in movies always signifies “depth of feeling,” for instance). A little too easy, a short-cut to emotion, just as being asked to think about “absence” will often produce that bittersweet feeling. The piece was just as much or more about cinema than theatre… we experience cinema in a solitary way. Theatre is more about presence, of the actors, the audience.

Donna: Yes, definitely-very much like cinema. Sound track to walk? Directed walk/manipulated walk (but in a good way—it could have sucked)

Taien: I would definitely see it as locative cinema in that it connects you to the landscape through emotion and story. I guess it doesn’t matter quite so much what it is labelled as though. There’s too much emphasis on labelling. It was a hybridized experience.

Donna: I was certainly pulled into it – but I committed. I think everyone did. It seemed everyone had shared an experience so it was directed well. We were the actors/participants and we were fed our lines, then asked to improv and collaborate. The narrative was the director. The set was our feet in the space. and our heads – and our cell phones. It did not always synch up as dramatically as the narrative proposed. There was a bit of forcing.

Taien: I liked the connection to a stranger through the texting and felt that could have been used a bit more. But I agree, I think we committed and it worked quite beautifully. It was kind of sad though that the Vancouver people got beer and sausage at the end while we got water and granola bars (trading cultural stereotypes?!) A very successful piece overall, whatever however it is defined… The full moon certainly helped add to the atmosphere!

LANDLINE: A Game Of Unlikely Rendezvous from XOSECRET on Vimeo.