Temporal Lines begins with a table and chair in the material world. An audience of one sits at the table, where there is a collection of domestic objects, a metal knob and a VR headset for them to wear. Once wearing the headset they find the identical table and objects represented in the headset. The metal knob (in the material world) can be turned in either direction. As it turns the representation is transformed. The effect on the representation by the looping of the knob is mediated by algorithm pulling the transformation on a spiralling arc, circling without arriving at the same place.

This video is an experiment in the representation of space as experience. Its near sundown, and a single hand held shot traces the edge of a body of water while riding on a bicycle. The construction of canal walls contains the water and makes the tracing possible. The video is an experiment in collage through engagement of a body and tools that extend its action and its perception.

This text appears in the YYZ publication, What is our role? Artists in Academia and the Post-Knowledge Economy edited by Jaclyn Meloche Ph.D. Reflecting on the question posed by the publication, I imagined a dialogue between my artistic, architectural and intellectual self, accompanied by a series of diagrams, on what a contemporary manifesto for artists and designers in educational institutions would be.

Video is dead because the generic has consumed everything. Video is dead in much the same way that the internet does not exist.[1] There is no singular and useful thing that we can call the internet. I raise this same question for video, is there any singular and useful thing called video? Has it collapsed under the weight of its own multiplicity? Has it consumed and been consumed? Have any media survived the incredible force of the digital revolution?

Galleries and museums are not places of the moment. They are, essentially, built for the past; they are houses for the artifacts of action. Contemporary artists are often challenged by this. They strategize to find a place for the present in spaces designed to organize and stabilize the past. They confront this past with a blooming and tumbling array of expressions of the now, but inevitably the representation of the present seems an impossible task. How can you hold on to the present for display? How do you represent the moment of now?

In June 2009, SAW Video commissioned seven media artists to create new video works from public domain materials in the film/video/audio collection at Library and Archives Canada. The result is Public Domain, a program of six new videos that premiered in Ottawa June 23rd, 2010 which toured across North America and Europe in 2011-12.