Artists-in-Residence
Feb. 6 - 21, 2020

Maria Lantin, Director of the Basically Good Media Lab at Emily Carr University, and ECU Faculty Member Alex Hass will be creating new artwork in an ad hoc lab space at the TAG Gallery from materials collected on walks through the North West Florida region. Materials and memories gathered during these adventures will be remixed by all who wish to participate in studio time with the artists. In classroom visits they will present the concepts of mapping and the dérive, co-creating new parameters with participants for new interpretations of the land of the area.

The Epic Walk Diaries
TAG Gallery
University of West Florida
Feb 6 - March 6, 2020
Opening Reception February 6th, 6pm

The Epic Walk Diaries are being exhibited in the TAG Gallery of University of West Florida as part of the STEAM2020 Colloquium. The STEAM theme this year is ecosystems and liminal spaces as metaphors for critical thought. The Epic Walk Diaries speak to this theme with a visual chronicle and poetic distillation of the artists’ walk along the periphery of Vancouver. Poems created from the walks are woven into a dynamic generative mix of macro and micro views of gathered materials. There have been a total of thirteen walks so far, from Aug. 26, 2018, to Nov. 1, 2019. Over half the city’s perimeter still remains to be discovered and distilled by the artists.

In the TAG Gallery iteration of the project, the visuals are complemented by 3 Bowls Walking, a recombinant sound composition by Simon Lysander Overstall, a media artist who develops works with generative, interactive, or performative elements. He is particularly interested in computational creativity in music, physics-based sound synthesis, biologically and ecologically inspired art and music systems. Simon’s composition remixes recordings from the Epic Walks in Vancouver with the sounds of three steel bowls discovered in a kitchen and other sounds, using various oscillations of probabilities that evoke the ever-changing rhythms of life and journey.

The Epic Walk projection scrim — a 12-foot circle with a hand-crafted canvas matting, is complemented with seating design created by Daniel McDougall, a student in Emily Carr’s Industrial Design program. Daniel is interested in the anthropological relationships of textiles in everyday life and what sustainable futures are possible for the textile and garment industry. Daniel designed and constructed the seating for the Epic Walk Diaries with the intention of welcoming the viewer into a comfortable space that promotes immersion into the project’s interpretation of nature.

This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by Emily Carr University of Art + Design.