Saturday, October 31, 2009

Process: Google Sladdakavring


Been thinking of how to represent the Tongue Rug. Experimenting. Though it is decidedly ugly, if I flip the Google map upside down, the waypoints do look like some sort of makeshift sladdakavring.



Yet if I isolate the pattern, it does makes an interesting grouping albeit, spread out. Not sufficiently rug-like. More viral.



I’ve noticed that other tongue rugs are being created online. Individual tongues (blog postings) are starting to show up in search engines because of the tags. Dependent on the search criteria, the user has the potential to create their own Tongue Rug outside of my blog. I like the chance element in this process.

There is also another sort of tongue rug that is emerging, a pseudo tongue rug based on misleading tags. These “fake” sites dynamically load content into their pages by crawling the web for tags from blogs and YouTube. A sampling:

  • bestof vidéos de A à Z
  • cascapedia videos | TheGolfTv.com
  • Magdalene videos - Online Adult Dating Free
  • Whitefish, Ontario videos on TripAtlas.com
  • Fireball Planet Free Videos Online - Top Videos - All Free Videos
  • Gegevens van Julie – Wieowie
  • Bonaventure - Cafe.hr
  • laurentides videos - Global Videos
  • Hybrid Cars - Hybrid Vehicles

Were it a person creating these sites, they would realize right away that the content does not match. As the machine cannot make the differentiation, the Tongue Rug videos are popping up in unrelated sites through a mash-up process — like Tzara’s paper bag poem. I find it amusing that a user visiting the dating site, or an avid golfer, will be puzzled by these videos of slow-moving landscapes. Will they try and make a connection? Will they investigate further or just shrug it off? I like the surprise element in the process.

So there are several Tongue Rugs in this project separate from my own experiments — the search engine rug, the mash-up rug. Rugs that grow of their own accord. A disquieting process as well as I have no control on which sites my “tongues” could potentially end up.

 

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Process: Lac aux Loutres


Went to the Théâtre Corona in Saint-Henri on Sunday to join in on the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of RESO (Regroupement économique et social du Sud-Ouest). L’autre Montréal started off the all-day event with a bus tour of the Sud-Ouest. I’ve always appreciated their extremely well-researched tours; generously animated by Bernard Vallée, this circuit was no exception.

First stop was the Georges-Vanier building in La Petite Bourgogne, site of the first francophone public library in Canada when Saint-Cunégonde was annexed into the city of Montréal in 1906. Highlights was learning about the beautiful old buildings converted into artist spaces: L’Espace Verre in what was once Fire Station no. 21 in Victoriatown, and Quartier Ephémere in the Fonderie Darling building close to Griffintown, one the oldest working class neighbourhoods in Canada. We also visited the site of a new urban project, La cité des artistes, which will be situated in Les Bassins du Nouveau Havre on the north berg of the Lachine canal. The four original St-Gabriel Basins – which were built between 1848 and 1885 – will be excavated as part of the new development. The proposed plan also includes living/working spaces for artists, rental spaces for art and community organizations, as well as housing for families.



With all of the debate over the Turcot interchange reconstruction project and the threat of expropriations in St-Henri's Village des Tanneries, it was sobering to go through what used to be Victoriatown. This community, also known as Goose Village, was razed down in 1964 in preparation for Expo 67. All that is left now is what is called the Black Rock, a memorial to the thousands of Irish immigrants who succumbed to typhus in the 1840s. In Griffintown, we passed the site of St. Ann's Catholic Church, torn down in 1970, and the stable which houses the Old Port’s calèche horses – symbol of another era. In Pointe Saint-Charles, the seigniorial era is recalled by its toponymy. In 1663, the Sulpicien priests were granted land in the Pointe which is why the area used to be called ferme Saint-Gabriel or ferme des sulpiciens. At the end of the 1860s, much of the agricultural land had been parceled off in response to the rising industrialism along the Lachine canal and the development of the Grand Tronc rail yard. All that is left is a road sign – Rue de la Ferme.

It reminded me of my Gaspésie trip when I arrived to a point where I thought there was going to be a village called La Ferme, but did not see any dwellings. Perhaps a name on a map was all that was left of a small farming community? Here in Montreal, I wonder if the rue Angers in Ville-Émard, which runs from St-Patrick canal-side to a grove of old trees in a park, refers to Angers in France or simply indicates that it used to be an old farming road?

The overall sense that I gleamed from the tour is that the Sud-Ouest is lacking in monuments that reference its rich history since so many cultural and architectural landmarks have been lost. Bernard Vallée did mention some recent efforts like the official signage in parks which explain the site's history and public figures. I wonder if some of this memorialization is also taking place online, in an unofficial way? On a grassroots, collaborative level, rather than on a grand, monumental scale? The associative nature of the Web, its palimpsest quality, makes it the ideal tool to document layered narratives through time as evidenced by the many blogs on the subject of history, architecture and urban planning. I found this richly detailed blog by Andrew Emond that documents hidden waterways in Montreal by way of an interactive map quite interesting. Another blog of note is Walking Turcot Yards where I first came across a ghost lake back in 2007 – Lac aux Loutres.



Working on my pathmap the last couple of weeks, I decided to deviate from my initial list of lakes with the Lapalme-Legault-Angerbauer placenames. Much like I integrated Lac-à-l'Épaule into my pathmap by its association with George-Émiles Lapalme, I will also include Lac aux Loutres. The architectural firm Béïque, Legault, Thuault has proposed the Lac à la loutre project with the aim to transform the zone between the Saint-Pierre and Turcot interchange into a thematic parc. At the heart of the project is the restoration of the ancient Lac aux Loutres. This wetlands was once the bulging part of the Rivière Saint-Pierre – the precursor to the Lachine canal. The canal now follows Rivière Saint-Pierre's course and Otter Lake is embedded somewhere underneath the Turcot rail yards, having been filled in during the 19th century.

As this ghost lake is in my immediate vicinity, it is fitting to add it to the pathmap. This lost lake that has changed through time is also in line with the Tongue Rug project’s focus on the mutability of shifting placenames, maps and even geographical features through time.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Progress: October 23, 2009


Though online apps (Bikely and Google Maps) do give me a general view of the paths I’ve been tracing over the years, I wanted a more complete picture. I had been treating the paths too piecemeal, needed to map them out to see the whole tracing. Took the Quebec road atlas that I had used to plan my bike trips, and photocopied a slew of pages. It was a pain to piece them together as the legend was different on certain pages — the Gaspésie tip is not quite to scale with the rest of the map. Also, it was hard to be precise as some pages did not align properly despite my efforts. Nonetheless, it was a satisfying exercise sitting on the floor cutting and taping together this growing map, page by page. To my surprise, I was left with a ten-foot long scroll of paper. Had to affix it to the living room wall to be able to see it in its entirety.

 

I crafted some ad hoc tongue-labels to mark out the waypoints and highlighted the paths. Stepping back I was a little shocked to see that I had traveled all that distance. The map was a visual manifestation of my moving through space, but also the time spent reaching each waypoint. It sounds silly to say, but I find it amazing how the human brain can look at a squiggly line on a map,  and this abstract symbol can trigger memories, sensations and inner pictures about having been in that space — in the flesh. That tension between the conceptual and the physical.

The paths themselves were intriguing as well. Their varied shapes were of course dependent on the terrain, but they were also testament to my lack of experience in the beginning of the project. LE-3 starts from Ste-Agathe des Monts and is not attached to the network as I had received a ride up to the Laurentians and rented a bike from the campground. I had not yet attempted long solo cycling trips. Also, A-9 is full of loops and backtracking as I was lost for most of the day, not properly focusing because I was cycling with a friend.



I’ve been making vector paths according to the topographical maps, but the precision makes it very time consuming. Went low tech: took a photograph of the wall and isolated the path in Photoshop. I wanted a quick overview of the pathmap.

In the beginning, the paths did not touch, but over the years, they did create a network — a tracing that largely follows the St-Laurent and the Outaouais river. I was pleased with how the crisscrossing lines looked like discarded thread. The tracing was random in the sense that I was cycling to the bodies of water with one of my family names that were nearest to me, by whatever path which facilitated my travels, further complicated by my admittedly inconsistent orientating skills.



Put some tongue markings as well — a little breast-like but no matter — to get a sense of the tongue rug progress. I don’t get a sense of the sladdakavring yet, as the waypoints are too spread out. I will experiment with other renderings.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Process: Gabrielle in la Gaspésie


Saint-Tharcisius

Went to a public reading of Le temps qui m’a manqué by Gabrielle Roy at the Maison de la Culture Marie-Uguay. Published posthumously in 1997, it was intended to be the third section of her autobiography La détresse et l’enchantement.

Hearing her words spoken out loud by Marie-Thérèse Fortin was quite moving; in fact, the next day I went to the library to find the book so that I could read it on the train on my habitual Montreal-Ottawa commute. Quite fitting as the book mostly takes place on a journey. Memories resurface for the author brought on by the rhythmic nature of the train moving on the rails. She loses track of where she is as well as the time such that she is lost in her thoughts and emotions, rememorating her mother who had recently passed away.

Often while on my bike trips in search of my lakes, I’ve experienced that same sensation: at times in the moment (feeling the sun on my back, sweating or forcing my muscles), and at other times, absent, miles away in my thoughts brought on suddenly by a colour, a shape, or a smell.

I could relate to much of what Gabrielle Roy wrote about in this particular work, not so much as a fellow author — though the writing process does feature in my art practice, it is more of a tool to elucidate my ideas in my working process — but as an artist. The paragraphs where she described her creative process were the ones that resonated for me. I understood her need to search for a room of her own where she could write.

As a Franco-Ontarian, I was equally moved by the excitement she felt in discovering Québec, as an outsider in sorts hailing from Manitoba. I understood her desire to visit L’Assomption where her mother once had lived, the urge to reconnect with her roots.

She described her longing for a quiet place to write, but she did not seek out extreme solitude as she would make herself a “makeshift” family in her many refuges: her room in Rawdon in the Laurentians, her room at Miss Maclean’s house on rue Dorchester, and her much sought after room with the McKenzies in Port-Daniel.

This section where she recounts her train journey to the Matapédia Valley is riveting; the sense of traveling to the unknown, to find something one is searching for without yet knowing what it is. At the sight of a house on the hill in Port-Daniel, she disembarked from the train and negotiated to secure the best room in the house — prized for its view of the water.

While on my Gaspésie bike trip, I experienced a similar feeling. In search of my waypoint in Saint-Tharcisius, I cycled in circles through bright green fields and sparsely forested areas. I eventually found what remained of Angers bridge/pont Angers (A-10) – soft and shredded pieces of rotten wood embedded in the middle of a pathway in a field.

 

View Panorama
A-10 Angers Bridge / Pont Angers
July 7, 2003

 

While taking photographs in the round, I noticed the path lead to a little white house with a red roofed barn beside it with the bluish Monts Notre-Dame in the distance. A simple pastoral scene that struck me by its sheer beauty. I had to fight the urge to follow the path right up to the house and knock on the door. I could appreciate how the tranquility of the surroundings could help bring forth creative pursuits.

I could fully understand the happiness and relief in finding a room where she could deliver herself to her need to write — that feverish production period where all is heightened and the usual daily routines pass by the wayside or are done with haste (eating, drinking, washing, social events). The important thing is to not interrupt the flow, to keep at it while alight with all that buzzing.

She describes spending a night out in the storm by the water, shivering and feverish. These high emotions must have been due in part to the full consciousness of knowing that she was doing exactly what she was meant to be doing.

I was surprised to discover that Gabrielle only managed to work on Bonheur d’Occasion three times a year, when on breaks from her job. It subsequently took her three years to write the novel. How many times have I had to put my Tongue Rug project on the shelf because of pressing deadlines at work or my thesis?

Planning a train trip this summer to visit a friend in Winnipeg; 375 rue Deschambault will definitely be a stop-over.