(im)permeable by Annie Martin

Situated throughout the interior halls of the Eau Claire Market, Annie Martin's (im) permeable exhibition calls on the specter of Walter Benjamin. At first glance, The New Gallery could be mistaken for another shop in the quiet, semi-deserted mall in the midst of redeveloped Calgary-- selling a handful of original and newly relined ladies' trench coats. Following Benjamin's ambivalent and curious criticisms of the Haussmannization of Paris to the urban phenomenon of shopping arcades, Martin follows the rite of the modern wanderer, the flâneur that finds inspiration within the crowd, yet always feels alienated from it.

The flâneur's motivation can be traced in Charles Baudelaire's prose poem, "Crowds," that begins, "It is not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is an art; and only that man can gorge himself with vitality, at the expense of the human race . . . The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege that he can, at will, be either himself or another. Like those wandering spirits that seek a body, he enters, when he likes, into the person of any man. For him alone all is vacant; and if certain places seem to be closed to him, it is that, to his eyes, they are not worth the trouble of being visited."

To inhabit public space freely and openly has been dominated mostly by men, as there is no traditional feminine equivalent to the idea of the flâneur. The flânuese remains atypical, and in a twist of cultural and economic saturation in the form of the modern day shopping mall, there is now a sense of safety and familiarity to the conflation of commerce and walking. Most inhabitants of the modern mall are women, children, and seniors, and it is here where Martin begins her investigation.

Focusing in on the presence of the wandering body, specifically the female body, Martin's construction of an aural-based phenomenology situates itself within the shopping mall--a centre for the fleeting commodity. Anonymous and transient, the bodiless trench coats not only signify the listless roamer of urban arcades, but now amplify that route of the m(a)llified flâneur. Hanging spaciously on opposing walls of TNG, each coat is wired to a live audio feed coming from elsewhere in the mall. Tangible and textile, the dislocated presence becomes re-embodied. The experience requires you to physically lean into each coat, to open up the retailored and feminized upholstery, and re-navigate your spatial surrounding through an imperceptible auditory sensation. The audience body fills in for the perceiving and receiving body of the flâneur, at once within the crowd, but alone.

As a muffled aleatory of estranged noises, each coat inhabits a fragment of the modern ephemeral, a portal into hearing the heartbeat of a crowd. There is a disjunction between the stillness of the coats and of the seemingly kinetic sound coming from within them. The perception experienced is different from physically absorbing a crowd in the moment; the experience is more of a reception, akin to eavesdropping into a wholly other place and time. The ontological prowess of aurality is tested against the white noise of a non linear, non referential soundscape, prompting more questions than ideas. Dependent on the time of day, and the actual fluctuation of pedestrians passing through Eau Claire Market, (im)permeable is at best a live reflection of our everyday--channeling the nuances and broadcasting their essence in an unfiltered form. Although the coats can arguably be read as filters (literally) embroidered in historical and gender significations, the audio is raw, untempered and most importantly, transient.

The result of listening in to your immediate spatial environment is ultimately left up to the audience to do what they may, but its existence continues as a gesture as to how we engage with the world around us.

The New Gallery

Alberta Media Arts Alliance 2008 Conference

(AMAAS) Alberta Media Arts Alliance's annual conference continues to grow in scope and size with each passing year, accumulating in 2008 at the Red Deer Lodge. But perhaps experiencing some growing pains in extending beyond earlier regional reincarnations and lineups, the connection to Alberta new media artists and projects has seemingly been relegated to just screening the annual Prairie Tales collection.

Mentorship and history were severely lacking at this year's conference, where the undeniable highlight ended up being the Prairie Tales screening at local drinking hole, The Vat Pub. Exposing the gems and crevices of new media art in Alberta, the booze fueled public screening at best drew laughs and raised eyebrows from the off-season snow boarders at the bar; and at worst, culled apt assessments of "bourgeoisie bullshit" from the less impressed. The bottom-line for (new media) art remains in its intrinsic ability to communicate thoughts and ideas, but unfortunately, the conference as a whole focused more on esoteric potentials of the medium than the quality and cultural engagement of work produced.

Guest speakers reflected a broad and dislocated spectrum of seemingly borderless and transgressive media artists, but each isolated into a formal speaker-to-audience setting, the lineup appeared little more than an uninformative show-and-tell. From Toronto-based David McCallum, who specializes in wi-fi locative media manipulation and performance to Fabiola Nabil Naguib's questionable site specific interventionist art, there was a sentiment that these were interesting people with interesting bodies of work, but within a new media arts conference, they and their work were simply not engaging and seemingly non-relevant to Alberta media artists.

McCallum's mouth-mirroring with his laptop camera as he channeled wireless signals into an electronic musical composition was borderline Narcissist reincarnated as a digital pirate. McCallum's steady and slowly self-realization/infatuation holds the potential be a sublime experience if it had not been a live performance--as presence, especially shared live experience, overwhelmed any sense of wonder over wireless channeling between a boy and his computer.

Similarly, Naguib's presentation fell short of the political mark. Showing slides of details from site specific interventions that were neither shown in full or discussed in context, the works appeared nothing more than bad visual art destined for cyber cafes. Repeated references to censored work also remained unanswered, but most frustratingly, it was the paradox between her challenge of the hegemonic structure of documentation and her simultaneously promotion of her new Desmond Tutu-backed book that instantly documents, legitimizes and perpetuates the form of historically-sanctioned prestige that she so seemingly decries.

Jumbled and overly precious, I can only wonder if media art of this caliber gives the form a bad name or if it is simply perpetuating it.