Project Summary
The Epic Walk Diaries chronicle a walk on the periphery of Vancouver, at the boundary between land and sea, between chaos and order. We start at Vanier Park and make our way along the beaches, into Pacific Spirit forest, and around the Delta. We remain as close to the shore as possible, sometimes on sanctioned trails, sometimes in brambles and scrambles. Each walk begins where the last one ended. It is ongoing. During the walks we collect materials — plants, mushrooms, shells, woods — that call our attention. We talk about nothing and everything. We pause and listen.
At the end of each walk we create and publish a poem that captures what remains in memory — the emotional hotspots of laughter, realization, death, and life. We simultaneously start a one-week scan of a portion of the collected materials which are positioned on an open-top flatbed 2D scanner. The scan is done in bits and pieces, randomly picking a small rectangular area, scanning, resting, repeating. At the end of a week, 10-12 thousand scans have been recorded. These snippets, along with the poem fragments, are then reconstituted dynamically and endlessly using a TouchDesigner script. Excerpts of these animations have been made into video documentation.
For more information, you can also read a paper published on the Time Space Scanner at ISEA 2019.
Project Team
Maria Lantin – Artist, Programmer, Collector
Alex Hass – Artist, Designer, Collector
Support
This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
