Miami visitations

Arrived @MIA last evening, greeted by friend & colleague, Rita Wong, whose creative writing class at the Uni of Miami I'll be visiting tomorrow. A quiet evening - we picked up Larissa Lai who has been here a few days already. Today we may get to the everglades, or praps to south beach. All in all, a relaxing day before the lecture-visit tomorrow. Etceteras to come...
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Ashok Mathur
Canada Research Chair in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry
Thompson Rivers University
office: 250.852.6286
cell: 604.790.4910
web: amathur.ca
blog: http://ashokmathur.blogspot.com/

Trippin' 2 SF

Heading down to san francisco now, on the tarmac waiting for the green light. Will meet up there with Paula Levine, a wonderful artist i first met when she participated in the IntraNation rez i directed a coupla yrs back now. Paula intersects art w/technology, fusing both with an ascerbic and critical eye toward socio-political engagement. Want to work with her on a future project, just in nascent stages now, but worth meeting with her and colleagues to start ideas flowing. Will also connect with an old colleague, Sky Ward, who works at Berkeley creating possibilities for international students. May be a tenable option for TRU students sometime soon... Will see what she says, then talk to folks at the home institution and see what possibilities exist. A fast trip, just 48 in SF, then back to co-ord upcoming talks at Miami U, Chicago, & Toronto over the next 2 weeks. Will post more on those events soonish. For now, getting my head around the Bay area and how to engage/solicit artist-researchers in the pair of days upcoming...
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Subject: SanFran, GPS, parrots & more
Time of year when travel & activities are actively juggled - lots of items in the air as we try to bring things into/around CiCAC. Just returned from a very brief visit to san franciso for a couple of equally brief meetings. First off, met with Paula Levine, an artist-researcher i first met when she participated in the IntraNation rez i directed at banff in 2005. Paula teaches at SF state university, working on digital arts and technology. Her work is both technologically savvy and cutting edge and politically astute, so i look fwd to being able to do any sort of project with her. One current interest I'm sharing with others at TRU and elsewhere is the intersection of art + science, a way of integrating such knowledge bases to investigate everything from globalized militarism to alternative sources of energy to expanded media in the arts. If CiCAC can work as a thinktank on such arenas, perhaps developing networks through NSERC and other national/regional funding bodies and f
oundations, there could be something remarkable to build on for graduate students, public intellectuals, and artists from all over. Paula is also working with Henry Tsang and others (including Glen Lowry at ECI, CiCAC, etc) on a project that will look at how Dubai architects are essentially reproducing vancouver's false creek as part of a development plan. Such international approaches (that is, the integrated involvement of artists with critical attention to implications of such issues) is important to theorizing globalization and its variegated effects. More on this as it develops.

Also met with an old colleague, Skye Ward, someone i first encountered back in 1990 at the gay games in vancouver. At the time, she was part of Aché, a black lesbian collective working out of the Bay area. She had just started then at Berkeley and is still there as the summer sessions International Student Services Manager. While mostly we caught up on international engagements (like me, she has an interest in taiwan where she does a fair bit of recruitment) while touring the bay, i want to see what sort of arrangements could be made for tru students who might have an interest in studying for a session at berkeley. Might invite her up to talk to our internat study folks at some time if it's feasible.

The other point of note from SF was our sudden discovery of the wild parrots of telegraph hill. Some folks out there in blogland might have read the book on this subject, though more are prob familiar with the recent feature doc on the parrots. We were descending from the hill when we came upon a flock of very noisy, very green, very active birds, flitting from tree to tree on the leeward side of the hill. Spent some consid time photographing them. Will post images when I'm not settled into an airline seat composing notes on the bberry...

Yes, today off to calg for a brief and non-business visit, back in the 'loops sunday, then to van on monday so i can catch an early early tues flight out to yyz to catch my connector to miami where I'll be doing creative writing class visits for emily carr prof (currently visiting prof at UMiami). Then on the way back through toronto, partaking in a workshop session at an event sponsored by the Metropolis Project folks. Will be speaking to citizenship and artistic intersections. That toronto visit will also give me a chance to followup with folks at the South Asian Visual Arts Collective on future collab projects, so we'll see where that takes us.

More events to tell about as things transpire...

i confess!

FWIW, the presentation I did at Jacqueline Turner's class on 'blogs, youtube, and confession." Note that these are only notes toward a presentation, so there are lots of gaps and spaces - imagine them filled with all sorts of extemporizing!

"i confess!" notes
Images from powerpoint

Meta blog

Tomorrow, a metaproject of sorts, visiting Jacqueline Turner's social science class on "Blogging, YouTube, and Confession" at the Emily Carr Institute. I've been quite intrigued by the notion of blogging over the past little while, its possibilities and pitfalls, its nuances and newness. As a (one time) journalist, it recalls a type of reportage, a telling-the-world in a particular way, although, of course, its ubiquity means something quite else. There's a quotation attributed to Hemmingway, that journalism was only "literature in a hurry"; if so, then blogging may just be journalism on speedballs, a hurry-up-please-it's-time type of writing that bases itself in 'reality' if sometimes a virtual one. At any rate, tomorrow's talk will be intriguing. I plan on talking a bit about journalism, a bit about how i came (in)to blogging as part of an artistic practice, and a bit about confession (and autobiography in all its myriad forms). Since Jacqueline has her students reading some Augustine and Foucault, might use that as a jumping off point. This will be somewhat of a cross between a formal lecture and a face-to-face blogging encounter, and I'm strategizing was to make this function in just such a manner. One thing I have extolled in the past is the usefulness of working together with other artists to complement our various practices, and this is no different. I more or less volunteered to come speak to Jacqueline's class because we have worked together in the past; she, in turn, will be coming to Kamloops on March 30 to launch her recently-published book of poetry, Seven into Even (ECW Press), a co-launch with David Bateman's new book of poetry, Impersonating Flowers. To that end, I think I'll be incorporating some of DB's work on confession/autobiog into the classblogtalk tomorrow as well, using a clip from his Bravo-distributed short film, The Bather (that's a video-grab from the film to the left). What comes around comes around...Might post a precis of the blog/confession talk, or at least a ppt bit if I decide to go that route...