Contributed this text to the Heritage House and Surrey Art Gallery publication on the wonderful work of Sylvia Grace Borda. Artengine was extensively involved with Borda’s project, Every Bus Stop in Surrey.
This text is a reflection on our work with her and the early days of art, technology and the public realm.
In the early 1990’s, net art was still in its infancy and access to technology for artists most often meant collaborating with large institutions and research labs. Increasingly North American artists, like Sylvia Grace Borda, started to develop their own skills with technologies like HTML and JAVA. A divide grew by the turn of the millennium in Canada. On one side, research laboratories, universities and large corporations could afford to hire and bring programmers and creative practitioners together to work on the latest computers to produce new interfaces or create immersive and interactive participatory projects, while on the other, independent artists often worked from their own homes and studio garages with limited resources producing projects at a different scale of breadth and depth to their counterparts. Artengine, incorporating formally in Ottawa in 1996, started as a hub to fill this creative production gap between institutions and artists, giving artists and the wider public access to knowledge of computing technologies and hardware through DYI workshops, mentorships, collaborations or the lending of software and hardware tools.
Many of Artengine’s earliest members and software engineers taught or coded outputs for artists and emerging digital learners in the Ottawa-Gatineau area. During these early years, Artengine supported artists, such as Sylvia Grace Borda, Germain Koh, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Adrian Göllner, who built and developed well known national net artworks and interactive projects. At this time, Artengine acted as an interface to develop software and related tools both for its own growing communities of users and visitors. Sylvia who was based in Vancouver, BC at the time, was working extensively for the federal government including the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) from 1998-2004 as a digital and cultural content producer and interface designer. During this period, she became an ongoing and regular visitor to Ottawa when we met her. In being introduced to her digital artwork and interests, one of our founders, Alexander Castonguay, offered Artengine’s services to help her experiment more freely with the creative potential of computer coding and the web. Of note, also in 2004, she was an exhibiting artist at the Galerie SAW Gallery (now known only as SAW), undertaking guest lectures at the National Research Council about digital audience engagement and learning, was a guest lecturer in digital media art history at University of Ottawa under the auspices of Artengine.
Much of Sylvia’s early digital work focused on art histories as well as geometric forms and structures such as ‘Minimalist Portraits’. While in Ottawa she was starting to shift her interest in how to harness the potential of having large amounts of content both mapped, interactive and made accessible online. The birth of ‘Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC’, was in part due to her collaboration with programmers at Artengine, including Michael Lechasseur, Mathieu Bouchard , as well as communications designer, Sean Beldon from FireBox.
In designing the structure and interaction for ‘Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC’, Sylvia understood the restrictive nature of display and output devices. She realized that large data sets, such as a city’s structure as envisioned through a set of pictures of bus stops, could be mapped and made interactive as well as appear as personalized space to a user — even though the image data bank used to support it, would operate in conjunction. Sylvia was fascinated with how the computer and the web as autonomous machine platforms could be personalized. Through Artengine, Sylvia was able to explore how computer logic and coding could be used to create visually exciting structures and to explore the relationship between the form of a city’s urban plan and code. While the latter, code, is part of user experience, Sylvia’s interface was a prescient example how traditional maps would transform into the ubiquitous Geographic Information Systems, in the form of map apps, with the help of locative technologies and real-time updates.
It was Sylvia’s vision and the coding work at Artengine that came together and would enable her mapped photographic project to be carried out as a successful visual experiment that ultimately worked to create both an objective and personalized user experience. That the project has received such long-term interest and appreciation is a testament to the projects ability to both understand and represent the physical landscape and as well as the codes that sometimes define it. Artengine is proud to have collaborated with Sylvia and to have contributed to this project. It not only inspired our long and continued exploration of the artists role in using technology to help transform the perception and experience of the urban environment around us, but arguably played a role in shaping how data appears visually online today.