Temporal Tempest Database First Edition

The premier of Temporal Tempest features twelve projects by arts practitioners across Canada, including Quite Ourselves, Camila Salcedo, Tamil Archive Project, Kofi Oduro, nichola feldman-kiss, Karina Iskandarsjah, Candide Uyanze, Jasmine Liaw, Brigita Gedgaudas, Luis N. Del Angel, Rah Eleh, and Olivia Mc Gilchrist. Each project speaks to themes of diasporic futurisms through interactive digital worlds, coding, video performance, digital archives, and new media art. Themes of works that have been included in this database are: magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, folklore, and related sub-genres.

Diasporic Futurisms are defining futurisms as the presentation of alternative perspectives of the present, predictions of the future, and creative approaches to reimagining the past. The primary considerations born out of this research that supported the development of this database are:

  • What is the legacy of artistic representation of diasporic futurisms in Canada and how they have developed into the present in the arts and arts organizations?
  • How can we broaden visibility of creatives working in the genre of diasporic futurisms and create an inclusive platform for artists and arts practitioners to thrive beyond tokenization?
  • How can we engage futures without relying on common tropes that perpetuate, reify and oppress?

Preceding the construction of Temporal Tempest, we interviewed experts in the field, such as Wendy Chun, Rah Eleh, Camille Turner, Olivia Mc Gilchrist, Karina Iskandarsjah, and nichola feldman-kiss. These interviews helped affirm and build from our knowledge that: as we critique current systems of xenophobic oppression of the arts sector in Canada, projects like Temporal Tempest can offer possibilities for new structures of care, respect and imagination to replace them.

This space is intended to be rhizomatic–expanding over time. Calls for submissions are currently closed, but will open again in the near future. Continue to check our website and social media for updates.

Moving Trailer 2017 – 2019 by Quite Ourselves

Moving Trailer 2017-2019 is a retrospective of three years of the Moving Trailer project. Each year, Moving Trailer took place for a short period of time in a rented truck, which shifted between a state of moving and parked. The pause caused by the global pandemic cut short our already-fleeting public interventions. In this space, we felt an urgency to gather and share our archive. Opening the publication invites you
into scenarios unfolding in different locations in Montreal and Quebec. Always, the interior space of a rented moving truck keeps transforming into something else.

Moving Trailer 2023, CHEUNG LEE GLOBAL (Ahreum Lee & Joni Cheung (Snack Witch)). Photo by Sara Faridamin.


Quite Ourselves is an act of being “quite ourselves,” fostering playful idea sharing and exercises, experimental works and venues, and keeping an open roster for artists who identify with the mandate of the collective. QO was formed under the context of felt issues of minority status, identity, language barriers and experimental art practice which left members feeling marginalized and out of place in their original Montreal art scene. Since QO’s founding in 2017, the group has worked towards highlighting kinship and collaboration through artmaking and exhibition.

Website

Realidad Alternativa/Alternate Reality (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) by Camila Salcedo

Alternate Reality (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) is a video collage in which I utilize created 3D drawings, and found Google satellite photos, Google user 360º images, and YouTube videos to attempt to recreate the neighbourhoods I grew up around in Caracas. It also reflects on the banning of the Google Street View function in Venezuela, creating a gap in our digital-space –one potential way I would have been able to “travel back”. What do these spaces look like in my current memory and how can I fill in the gaps with the use of found footage? Created partially during my time at Residencia Corazón in La Plata, Argentina in March 2019. The sound design is by Felipe Martin.

website

Tamil Archive Project

Tamil Archive Project (TAP) is a decentralized artist collective founded in Scarborough. Home of Tamil Futures, Bambaram, Archive Division, and Healing Arts Dinner Circle. Since 2016, we centre communal care through combining art creation, knowledge sharing, digital culture, and archival practices into accessible events for the community .

Bambaram is a group of artists and coders from across the globe at TAP focusing on the intersections of art and technology in racialized communities. By investigating the evolving identity of art, they attempt to understand, reinterpret, and reclaim tradition, ritual, and art through their work.

Kolams are intricate patterns drawn by women on the front entrance of their homes as a way to mark occasions such as Tamil New Year on April 14th. An ancient art form combining advanced drawing skills and mathematics, kolams are rituals passed down through generations that take a lifetime to master. In the diaspora, they are a disrupted practice lost to the past. Each imperfect kolam by Aarati Akkapeddi, Alex Mahesvaran, Luxvna Uthayakumar, Vinutha Vasanthi Venkatesh takes over the screen in an attempt to reconnect to ritual, reclaim public spaces, and celebrate matrilineal histories.

Luxvna Uthayakumar

Creating this kolam was a process – it started out with the intention of using scans of objects and Adobe Illustrator to mock up a pattern. What I discovered through using the scans and the program was that I stretched the traditional way of making a kolam so far, in so many highly processed ways, only for the familiarity to come back around again. Presented on the gallery wall are the outlines that Adobe Illustrator created with my scans, something eerily reminiscent to the geometry of a traditional kolam.

Vinutha Vasanthi Venkatesh

Thinking about recreating and re-adapting the concept of a kolam through a digital medium that would allow me to create a deeper bond with the artform, I decided to use light. In this collage I adapted the process of long-exposure photography to capture 11 kolams as light drawings. As I ritualistically traced and retraced the kolams I had drawn on the floor with a small light held in my palm I found myself mimicking the actions of traditional kolam making and memorizing the intricacies of the patterns. 

Aarati Akkapeddi

These are four different kolams. Encrypted text for each kolam is clockwise starting from the top left: “06 01 1921”, “10 14 1938”, “11 06 1965”, “12 29 1992”. These are the birthdays in chronological order of my paternal grandmother, my maternal grandmother, my mom, and myself.

Alex Mahesvaran

This kolam is a visual representation of the word and popular toy called Bambaram in Tamil. The repetition of this word though the interconnecting shapes and lines form together the image, also commonly known as a spinning top in English. 

Vithurry Sivaloganathan

Tamil Archive Project’s bambaram members created a kolam on display for a day. The journey started with a grandmother in Tamil Nadu teaching her grandchild Vinutha in Texas to hand draw patterns, then digitally translated by Alex in Scarborough, and then outer patterns drawn by Luxvna of Scarborough on a window in Parkdale, with the intricate inner patterns freehand by Vithurry of North York, and erased by Vasuki of Toronto. This kolam was to welcome the Tamil New Year and share our hope for better times with the surrounding community who had welcomed us into this space.

Website

Digital Exploration of the Expansion by Kofi Oduro


Digital Exploration of the Expansion is a presentation and performance of a speculative fiction through live coding[1], creative coding, and other mediums that explores how the body can be reimagined. A speculative scientific report [2] made me think of producing a work that challenges the notion of what humanity is based on. What biology, what culture, what geology will occur if we thought differently? Thinking into the digital nature of my work, what if this realm was also controlled by how we used technology and how it uses us. By taking on a digital exploration that expands what is considered “body culture,” maybe we can engage in dialogues that expand past our normal range of ideologies. By adding sound and poetry, we will be adding a multisensory experience that engages the various senses[3], an integral part of our bodies that have to be included in any exploration of the body.


Illestpreacha (Kofi Oduro) is an Experiential Storyteller that transforms sounds, data, words and code into experiences that nurtures discussion, reflection, and interaction. With a decade plus of performance, event & audiovisual production, he takes inspiration from endeavours that are not normally together to create a harmonic experience for audiences.

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mean body \ i absolutely know i exist / by nichola feldman-kiss

one 3D whole body laser scan — 360 inkjet prints cold mounted to Sintra PVC foam board 14.5 x 8” each, installation variable 95’sq 2001-2005

mean body (as in Standard) is a performance document and database of surface anthropometric data sets (3D body shape scans) that I created while a guest artist with the National Research Council of Canada (2001-2003 and 2004-2006).

Inspired by study of established human body databases such as the Visible Human Project¹ and CAESAR², I embarked on a performative process to establish my own body shape as a baseline for scientific research. This gesture was motivated to critically engage with certain oppressive cultural norms, standard and averages that have prevailed in the colonial west, especially since the birth of anthropology, ethnography and photographic technologies… read more

feldman-kiss works as an artist. They are interested in categorical systems, liminality and the dissonance of inbetweens where meaning is leaky, slippery, defiant, fugitive, violent and erotic too.

normals standards means bodies skins borders boundaries. rules limits margins. edges thresholds and horizons. language Classifications definitions discipline expectation roles. Species tribe caste creed status containers boxes and compartments. viewfinders lenses screens. Nation States island prisons security fences (Human) zoos. Anthropology Ethnography Photography. index and evidence and Museology too.

The things feldman-kiss makes result from focussed looking, chasing references, finding out. Burrowing through the network into curiously real and visceral worlds. Alice fell through the trembling liquid crystal, landed somewhere factual, palpable, sensate. feeling Movie-ish. Big Screen. VR for its strangeness but for that people are flesh, embodied narrative –olfactory on fire. Witness…

feldman-kiss submits to art as life and process to live by, aiming to work intuitively, sensually and from their animality as a conscious migratory creature of our earthly bed. They are conspicuously bodied. Their artworks deploy body as instrument. Fact, agent, material. The body embodiment continuum. They do not create with the topic of bodies as purpose or intention. feldman-kiss’ work is not conceptual in that way. Their artworks are stills for persistent, unsettling and thorney awakenings of life enslaved to their times. Native of nowhere on Colonized land, mammalian. Historic / contemporary. digital. informational, touchless, late-binary. urban, Capitalist, millenarian (end times). They create with whatever surfaces then sticks around to assert itself.

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Birdfeed by Karina Iskandarsjah

Responding to the topic of “florals and banquet” for the DawatYan Banquet, BIRDFEED is the start of an exploration of plant genuses as a way to form connections across different cultures and histories. With immigrant narratives as the central focus, this video installation weaves together plant research, poetry, theory, and the artist’s personal journal entries.

Karina Iskandarsjah (b. Jakarta, Indonesia) is a Toronto-based visual artist and curator interested in cultural hybridity, technology, plants, and the deconstruction of power structures. Karina holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. She is part of the collectives Crocus and Glory Hole Gallery for 2SLGBTQ+ artists.

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Digitized Diasporic Memory by Candide Uyanze

https://demo.diasporamemory.com/

Digitized Diasporic Memory explores the relationship, intersections, connections, and divergences of experiences between Black diasporic people. With an understanding of diaspora as networked, rhizomatic, and tentacled, the project seeks to create a space for connection, in an environment where connection is not easily accessed or sustained.

The project visualizes audio segments from synchronous and asynchronous conversations between several members of the diaspora residing across Turtle Island. Each audio node represents a response to the previous participant’s contribution.

Digitized Diasporic Memory expands Le Cunff’s idea of personal networked thinking into collective thinking, or what can be described as mind-to-mind networks, wherein several individuals connect their ideas. The project is part database, part conversational archive, part open-access library, part collective memory bank, part digitized memory, and part chain of memories which bring to the fore the possible connections between Black diasporic experiences and narratives. It addresses the need for intra-diasporic validation, belonging, understanding across differences, and knowledge-sharing.

Candide Uyanze is an award-winning creative technologist working at the intersections of digital media, access, and open source. She’s particularly interested in exploring themes of memory, identity, and virtually-mediated human connection between members of the African diaspora. She does so using web, video, photography, and tech-driven interactive installations.

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calling tidal by Jasmine Liaw

‘calling tidal’ is an installation where participants/viewers may interact with a tank of water. With an animated floor projection, the piece emulates a colourful, cybernetic space where movement becomes communicative through audio-visual responses. The interactive projection changes based on presence and movement, including water movement, sound frequency, or walking. This use of transparent materials represents nature’s vulnerabilities to economic/industrial decisions by humanity. The piece emulates a portal as if the participant emerges into an urgent calling state with the natural world. Its vibrant colours represent the overwhelmingness and blinding intensity of the space that mirrors climate anxiety. Exploring the paralinguistic response, the immersion of the hand in the water triggers a waterproof JSN-SR04T ultrasonic distance sensor with Arduino. When the sensor is triggered due to the close proximity of the participants’ hand, a Cytron mp3 player shield plays the sound of a voicemail filtered glacier crashing into the ocean.

Jasmine Liaw is a queer emerging Chinese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist. Bicoastal, she works in so-called Toronto and Vancouver. Her connective practice focuses on conceptual realms of dance and digital/new media landscapes. Jasmine is compelled to explore her contemporary views of identity and the agency of climate anxiety.

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Žilvinė by Brigita Gedgaudas

Žilvinė is a screen-dance film investigating the connection between ancestors, nature, and descendants through the reimagination of the Lithuanian folktale, “Eglė Žalčiū Karalienė”. Drawing on pagan Lithuanian relationships with land and nature, the dancer takes on the persona of the “King of Serpents” (a character in the folktale) becoming all at once human, natural, and mythic. Combined with natural and drawn elements, Žilvinė creates a space where the past, present, and natural live with and around each other, reconfiguring relationships between ancestral and contemporary knowledge.

Brigita Gedgaudas is an emerging, interdisciplinary, trans*, and diasporic-Lithuanian artist. Eir practice draws on his engagement in W*acking (queer street dance) and Lithuanian folk dance. Embracing indeterminacy, Brigita engages with in-betweenness as they explore contradictory experiences of gender and cultural identity through experimental realms of dance and digital worldbuilding.

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