This website offers details about a workshop and a collective display of artwork created during International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) conference in August 2015 in Vancouver, BC.
ISEA is one of the world’s most prominent international arts and technology events, bringing together scholarly, artistic, and scientific domains in an interdisciplinary discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in art, interactivity, and electronic and digital media.
Our event, “People, Places & Things: A Mobile Cultural Mapping Workshop”, was a day-long geolocative narrative, walking, and mapping workshop, held in the Historic Woodward’s district of downtown Vancouver, within and adjacent to the Woodward’s campus of Simon Fraser University, on Saturday, August 15, 2015.
The day-long workshop took place in the historic Woodward’s redevelopment project in downtown Vancouver on Saturday August 15, 2015 at Simon Fraser University, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (See Google Maps).
Historic Woodward’s Redevelopment building, the site of our collaborative workshop and exhibition
The Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero states: “Every human being, without even wanting to know it, is aware of being a narratable self – immersed in the spontaneous auto-narration of memory” (Relating Narratives, 2000).
Cultural production is about people (both contemporary and historical); places (whether in physical, virtual, or hybrid spaces); and things (objects, artifacts, and archives).
In this workshop, participants explored the interconnectedness of people, places, and things through the creation of personal narratives. Participants combined narrative practices with locative mobile media and digital mapping tools using the Google Earth toolkit.
Dr. Martha Ladly has led this workshop in historic districts in Buenos Aires, Florence, Montreal, and multiple times in Toronto. The workshops and exhibition are a fun, collaborative, and informative day spent exploring local culture and history, creating mobile maps, digital art and narratives, in situ.
Workshop participants learn how to annotate local places and geolocate their stories using various open source mapping tools, and work with their data inside the Google Earth toolkit. Their workshop outcomes are shown and exhibited online and to the ISEA community.
Interior of Woodward’s building – the sculptural text of “Community” is a fit metaphor for the workshop’s themes.
PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS 