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• 1 2025-02-13T18:34:44+00:00 Home 22 plain 2025-06-12T21:50:48+00:00

  “As glaciers melt, deltas flood, and we row our lifeboats down the middle of the River Anthropocene, it seems we need any valuable tool we can muster to negotiate the rising tide pushing in from the sea.” (Neimanis 2017, p. 26)

  My purpose is to recover the sense of what it means to inhabit the world. (Ingold 2008, p. 1797)

  This work is an interactive documentary/research creation project that employs a range of analogue and digital documentary practices which include book making, watercoloring, embodied documentary filmmaking, and augmented reality to inquire into the climate emergency.
  
  It began from feelings of overwhelm at the scale of the polycrisis we are facing. We keep finding ourselves, to put it simply, flooded. Our response is therefore anchored in theories of embodiment (“the role of the felt sense and the body politic primarily in the process of making documentary films, and secondarily in the film’s subject matter, role in the media landscape, and impact of process on the filmmaker” (Monde)), asking what do our bodies already know about climate change? The conceptual cornerstone of the work comes from eco-theoretical notions of "solastalgia," that is, the distress caused by environmental change (Albrecht et al.).
  
  The Scalar ecology allows us to create an interactive, intertextual, living, creative and data-driven assemblage to deepen our connections and understanding of global and personal events. Linking out to other art works and news stories, and building in maps and monitors allows us to ensure Ultimately, our goal is to feel our way into a model or “method” that emerges from interactive film and media studies, as well as idocs practice and methodologies, but also Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk, for thinking and feeling our way into the climate crisis.
  
  There are multiple pathways through the work:
  The Water Series collects work about the threat of flooding and sea rise.
  The Fire Series collects works about forest fires.
  (Meta)reflections represents our dialogue, in the tradition of the epistolary narrative as well as the philosophical dialogue, finding common ground.
  Readers can also follow a non-linear path.

• 1 2025-04-28T15:37:30+00:00 Evacuation 2025 6 A page dedicated to the ongoing anxiety of fire evacuation notices plain 2025-04-28T15:57:22+00:00 This is the first fire evacuation notice I received this year, April 18, at 8:25 pm. It is close to my city, but not close enough to be of concern. It is in an area that is home to Elk Island National Park- home to numerous types of wildlife, including Canada's largest bison herd, The Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, home of irreplaceable artifacts, original buildings and records of Ukrainian immigration and settlement in Alberta. The village also harbours a large garter snake hibernacula. How do I know? My kids and I have seen it, we have watched with wonder, awe and a not a little bit of anxiousness as hundreds-- possibly thousands-- of garter snakes emerged during an annual visit to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in May, when the ground is finally warm enough for them to wake up, there is enough sun for them to seek heat during the day, and usually the ground is damp from snow melt. It is a wondrous thing to witness, the hundreds upon hundreds of slithery bodies, hungry, cold, maybe sleepy and a bit disoriented, wary about the world they are emerging into after a long sleep below the frost line. They will now disperse and some will travel long distances until the fall and they return to the communal safety of the nest.  It is an area which has wetland sanctuaries. You see, that area is mostly swamp, which makes it the perfect area for tundra swans, snow geese, moose, bison, deer, beaver, and hundreds of other birds and reptiles such as salamanders. When the bogs are so dry that wildfire becomes an issue, we should be alarmed. Swamps shouldn't burn.