Communication and Culture GSA

5:00 pm Conference Closing Remarks: Eaton Lecture Theatre

Abstracts

Racism and Commodification: Black Slaves in Classified Ads of The Montreal Gazette
Tamara Extian-Babiuk, Department of Communication Studies, McGillUniversity

“To be Sold: a Very Stout Negro Wench of about 25 years of age, she can Wash, Iron, Cook, and do any kind of House work. For further particulars apply to Mr. McMurray”. This classified ad ran in The Montreal Gazette on March 21, 1793. Though Canada is usually thought of as a place of freedom, in actuality slavery existed in New France—the former French colony now known as the province of Quebec—for over two hundred years. During this period, ads such as the one reproduced above constituted the dominant representation of Black slaves in popular discourse in Montreal. Using reproductions of Gazette ads as a visual aid, my paper will elucidate how popular cultural representation of slaves served to codify the Black slave body through the use of visual description, which both relied on and produced a series of racist ideologies (see footnote 1).
My interdisciplinary methodology involves a combination of Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial approaches to the representation of Black slaves in The Montreal Gazette. I will examine how these ads constructed slaves as property through visual description, vesting them with use value through the deployment of terms such as “stout” and “wench”, which connote robustness and fertility, as well as sexual availability. I will also recuperate colonial definitions of terms such as “Negro”, which illustrate the importance of visual description to the representation of race in material culture. There is little analysis which interrogates the representation of slavery in Canadian popular culture through a multi-disciplinary framework. However, the importance of visual representation should not be underestimated. Slave ads in The Gazette had serious consequences for slaves who were captured or sold into bondage as a result of their representation in ads; it is undeniable that “social identity is intimately connected to visual culture”.
For instance, “Negro Race” is defined as: “A race of which the physical characteristics are a large and strong skeleton, long and thick skull, prognathic jaws, skin from dark brown to black, woolly hair, thick lips, and a broad and flattened nose.” (Century Cyclopedia: 1889). It is significant that the term is not defined on the basis of social or cultural practices—or even geography, as might be expected—but entirely by visible physical traits (which are generally presented as distortions of European features or animalistic in nature). Of particular interest is the use of the terms “woolly” and “prognathic” (protruding), which liken blacks to animals on the basis of ostensible physical resemblance.

1. Stanworth, Karen. “In Sight of Visual Culture”. Symploke. volume 10. number 1-2. 2002. 107.

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First Nations on View: Canadian Museums and Hybrid Representations of Culture
Susan Ashley, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

Heritage, the shared past of a community and a society, is an essential part of identity. Museums are important public sites for the representation and authentication of heritage in Canadian society. But what happens when Western Old World ways of representing heritage are challenged by First Nations’ ways of presenting heritage? How does each define and shape those public things they want to remember, to keep, to pass on to future generations? Put the two visions together and we get a hybrid representation, a chaotic effect of two ways of seeing the world and being seen in the world. This paper, a work-in-progress, considers how First Nations have responded to issues of museum-ness by creating hybrid forms of presentation. In three museum (re)presentations, First Nations resist and twist old forms of cultural exhibition, offering new views of how it should be done, and in the process, changing Canadian museum practices.

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Doing It: Social Justice Education Through a School-Community Partnership in Media Arts
Andrea Fatona, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE/University of Toronto

In this presentation I critically reflect on my experience of developing and piloting a social justice media art based project entitled Can Racism – in a high school setting in a small town in Ontario in 2000. The primary aim of the project was to develop a pedagogical strategy that disrupted the hegemonic production of ‘culture’ within schools and art galleries. Can Racism employed the media arts as a tool for exploring the issue of environmental racism with nine white youth (15-19 years old) at a time when the Ontario public school system was being restructured and rationalized. The project incorporated artists and community members as ‘teachers’ and took place as a voluntary after-school project. I explore some of the nuances of the project and their pedagogical implications, specifically, (a) the participants’ engagement with video – as viewers and makers - and their experiences of employing video as a tool for enhancing activism; (b) the community collaborative aspects paying special attention to the inclusion of artists and community members as ‘teachers’; and (c) the time and space within which the project took place. The presentation also raises important issues about the use of video for interrogating issues of race, representation and marginality with white youth in non-urban locations. Excerpts of the student participant video completed as part of the “Can Racism” project will be shown. The presentation is based on my MA thesis.

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Caught in Traffic? Subject-agency in the Structures of Urban Automobility
Greg Dube, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

This paper explores the issue of subject-agency at a particular site of everyday experience: automotive and pedestrian traffic in the city. A central problem of questions of subject-agency relates to the relationship between – and the differential priority given to – structure and agency. Cultural studies’ handling of this problematic owes much to the Foucauldian reformulation of the terms of the debate, wherein the subject is conceived of as a discursive construction. Far from eradicating the subject (as many of Foucault’s critics have asserted), a more viable reading of this contingent view accepts that a full and meaningful subject-agency can be produced within the complex and contradictory “structures” of power/knowledge regimes, allowing us to imagine the ways in which more emancipatory subject-agencies could be produced by different arrangements of power/knowledge. Urban automotive and pedestrian traffic is a site at which particular forms of subject-agency (and thus citizenship) are shaped. This occurs not only as a function of the disciplinary practices of traffic management and urban design, but also by the inscription of disciplinary power engendered by the machinic technologies of transportation (which extend and hybridise the body) and the larger structures of automobility operating within the context of capitalism. Increasingly popular practices in traffic design give priority of movement to pedestrian bodies and inscribe different kinds of discipline on emergent subject-agents. With the potential for empowering forms of social interaction in the vast tracts of previously auto-only public space, subject-agencies produced in this disciplinary milieu may be better equipped to critique and challenge existing social arrangements.

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Dziga Vertov and Steve Mann: The Embodiment of the Master Metaphor of Vision
Angela Joose, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

The privileged status of sight in Western culture can be understood as part of the striving to see the world more clearly, to combat distortion and gain an “objective” view. At the turn of the century, new imaging technologies were put into practice as a part of a utopia hope for the future, progress in the modernist project to dispel myth. At the turn of the new millennium, the ubiquitous presence of technologies comprises a controlling system against which we must renew our vision once again. In both contexts, the use of imaging technologies offers liberating possibilities by bringing attention to controlling structures which conspire to remain hidden. Further, theoretical insight into the study of technology and culture is often concerned with questions of vision, and methodologies are often articulated through metaphors of vision. This paper makes use of Paula Saukko’s approach of “combining methodologies” to examine the way in which both Vertov and Mann synthesize human abilities with imaging technologies in an effort to see more clearly. Within this framework, the writing and practice of both Dziga Vertov and Steve Mann can be studied as embodied approaches to the meeting place of theory, technology and culture. Even though the works of Vertov and Mann can not be strictly categorized as cultural research, they can be understood as extensions of a bias towards visual metaphors in cultural theory, as well as part of the methodological practice of using a carefully constructed apparatus in order to see the world more clearly.

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Beyond the Hype: Understanding the (Dis)junctures in Hypertext and Hypermedia
Ganaele Langlois, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

My paper undertakes a critical examination of the discourses on hypertext and hypermedia developed within the social sciences and the humanities in order to understand the ways in which hypertext and hypermedia absorb, reflect and subvert cultural projections on technology.
Hypertext theory first invoked hypertext as a concept signifying the revolutionizing of culture through the undermining of the boundaries of print and the technological embodiment of poststructuralist and postmodernist concepts. However, this vision of a radical break can be put into question by analyzing the limitations in exporting theoretical concepts developed for one medium to a hybrid entity that allows for the creation of new discursive and social networks at the same time as it recycles older media forms.
A cultural and genealogical understanding of hypertext and hypermedia comes as a needed counterpoint allowing for an assessment of the continuities between technologies, and between technology and cultural practices. Thus, there is a shift from examining the nature of hypertext and hypermedia to questioning the ways in which they are being shaped on popular networks such as the World Wide Web through the emergence of power relationships that include, for instance, processes of automation, technical regulation and commercialization.
Finally, beyond the question of production and use, the examination of processes of embedment of hypertext and hypermedia within networks that encompass a multitude of human and non-human agents reveals the need to establish new frameworks through which the structuring link/node relationship can be understood as a basis for new communicational environments.

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Needling the System: Knitting and Global Justice Protest
Kirsty Robertson, Department of Art, Queen's University

This paper takes up the topic of “anti-globalization” protest and knitting, unraveling one section of the intricate web of global relations and antagonisms. While the act of knitting might, at first glance (or touch), seem to have little to do with the circulations of capital and bodies in the situation of globalization, in this paper I suggest that the work of a number of textile artists, activists and scholars offers an embodied critique of the vagaries of globalization that riffs off more traditional protest, incorporating and embedding both the technologies of virtual space and the very real materiality of the body. Focusing on the network of Revolutionary Knitting Circles, this paper examines how knitting, an activity traditionally thought of as domestic, feminine, and lacking use value, has been appropriated by the global justice movement as a sophisticated technological metaphor for networks of connection outside of and against the globalization of capital. Transforming the language of binary computer code into the stitches of knitting, Revolutionary Knitting Circles stretch metaphors of linkage through virtual and real projects, and through the careful (inter)weaving of collaborative work, connections throughout the world to other craft-workers and anti-sweatshop activists, and metaphors of both the global justice movement and the internet as “webs” of interwoven ideas.
Knitting has been taken up by a number of political/activist artists, working within the market-driven art world, such as Canadian Barb Hunt, who knits minutely detailed and accurate pink landmines, and New York artist Maria Porges, whose knitted and felted Molotov cocktails and bombs challenge both an art/craft hierarchy, but also the bounded and controlled space of the supposedly politically void art world. The tactility of knitted and felted work, I suggest, challenges a visual hegemony that all too easily renders political art as mere aesthetic gesture. Further, the interpolation of textiles with the body, the repetitive gestures of knitting, the materiality of the tissues of both the garment and the body challenge the generally dis-embodied, flattened and empty two-dimensional recording of protest. Far removed from the typical image of the violent and black-clad male anarchist protester, Revolutionary Knitters, I suggest, challenge and extend the means through which representations of the global justice movement are generally filtered - whether through the mainstream media, the internet or even word of mouth. What possibilities might there be, I ask, in the textured and haptic world of textiles for creating, recording and communicating global activism in ways that challenge the traditional two-dimensionality of protest art production?

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Revolutionary Spaces in Globalization: Beijing’s Dashanzi Arts District
Laura Tan, Communication, Culture and Technology, Georgetown University

In 2000, Chinese artists and art groups began resettlement of the Dashanzi factories in the northeast Beijing. Formerly electronic production warehouses, these factories were created during the 1950s for greater socialist aims. Reading the district as what Henri Lefebvre calls “social space” provides an approach that unifies ideology and physical site. This interpretation explains the reason that the Chinese government allows for the continual existence and growth of the region, a form of grassroots activity typically denounced.
Through an examination of the space in relation to Beijing and in relation to itself in its production process, the district reveals the multi-layers necessary and active in the sustenance of the arts district. The layout of Beijing socially informs its readers of the dialectic between a hierarchal society and a socialist governed one. How the current era of globalization affects this dialectic is evidenced through the district. Globalization has brought international attention to the contemporary art and to the factories themselves, all of which play distinct and major roles in the district’s survival. Only during this era of globalization have artists been able to appropriate the space of Beijing’s Dashanzi district, a process antithetical to Chinese concepts of centrally-governed city planning.

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Hybrid Entities of Resistance: Examining the Local Characteristics of the Toronto Reclaim the Streets Movement
Christopher Smith, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

The contested nature of urban (public?) space is prominently featured in the socio-political agendas of many contemporary urban social movements (USMs), including most notably Reclaim the Streets (RTS). Emerging in London, England during the early 1990s as a result of both militant anti-road protests and the increasing politicization of ‘rave’ culture, the RTS model has proliferated worldwide. In the process of adapting to specific local issues and politics, however, the different global manifestations of RTS have become hybrid entities, each responding to local-specific facets of the politicization of urban public space that have been brought about by the forces of globalization and capitalist redevelopment. Regardless of these specific agendas, however, the primary means of protest practiced by RTS groups throughout the world is ‘reclaiming’ public space- transforming a given ‘public’ site/space into “a place where people can gather together without cars, without shopping malls, [and] without permission from the state” (http://reclaimthestreetsnyc.tao.ca/info.html).
Throughout its shifting, amorphous, six-year existence, the Toronto RTS movement has represented a unique point of intersection between local artist, activist and academic communities, all coming together to address and respond to the politics of public space in the City of Toronto. Drawing from the student’s attempt to archive the history of the Toronto RTS movement as part of a Canada Research Chair project entitled Visible Cities (headed by Prof. Janine Marchessault), this multi-media presentation will feature highlights of interviews with some of the most prominent Toronto artists and activists involved in Reclaim the Streets, addressing the specifically local character of the movement as it has manifested in Toronto. Following a short, theoretical introduction to the history of the Reclaim the Streets movement worldwide, the project will critically incorporate representations of the RTS phenomenon by the mainstream media, promotional literature produced by the Toronto RTS community, along with a series of short interviews with prominent artists and activists involved in the Toronto RTS movement.
This project will itself be something of a ‘hybrid entity’ in that it will involve both the delivery of a brief, theoretical, academic paper, and a visual presentation of interviews with prominent local artists and activists organizing under the shifting, amorphous auspices of RTS which were generated out of the student’s attempt to archive the history of the Toronto Reclaim the Streets movement.

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Drawn Onward: Representing the Feminist Self in Autobiographical Comic Books
Shannon Gerard, Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, York University

The recent proliferation of comic books and graphic novels in the mainstream media has spawned an equally vibrant body of critical work about the format and its cultural meanings. However, as with any emerging field of study, many gaps exist in Comics Scholarship. My focus is on feminist theories of self-representation in small press and independently published autobiographical comic books.
There is a long tradition of dialogue between art historians and curators about female self-representation in visual art practices. Much critical attention has also been given to feminist theories of self-construction in text-based life writing. My work attempts to bring these two areas of inquiry together so that a critical vocabulary for talking about women’s autobiographical comic book work can develop.
For Hybrid Entities, I propose a brief slide presentation of my own autobiographical comic book work in the context of work by artists such as Fiona Smyth, Trina Robbins, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Julie Doucet. The slide talk and accompanying paper will specifically question the existence of an unwritten code governing the aesthetic and narrative choices made by female comic book artists to represent ourselves in a particularly "strategically honest" way.
Drawn Onward is cast in the theoretical framework of Leigh Gilmore's theories in Autobiographics and Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about cultural and economic capital in his work The Field of Cultural Production. The paper and talk also consider Trina Robbins’ historical look at comics, From Girls to Grrrlz.

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Painting the Myth
Trevor Haldenby, Habitat New Media Lab, Canadian Film Centre

Painting The Myth is an interactive installation piece exploring the subjective construction, and cultural consumption of the myth surrounding Canadian painter Tom Thomson. Valorised as a heroic national artist and citizen, Thomson‚s life and mysterious death are examined through a unique painting interface, in which the user illustrates [using light-on-canvas] one of Thomson‚s works. This painting process in turn immerses the user within an audio environment where relevant personae from Thomson‚s life share their [at times contrasted or conflicting] opinions of the man, the myth, and the mystery. Posing a number of challenging meta-narrative questions, Painting The Myth breaks down established myths as it educates, and attempts to situate the learning process within a framework of objectivity ˆ the user can paint in as much detail as he or she likes, directly corresponding to his or her engagement with the details of and conflicting opinions on Thomson‚s life and work. In the debate around authenticity in technologically oriented artworks, the installation provokes numerous questions on the topics of narrative voice, biographical usage, and contextual personal illustration. Questions of policy, power, and agenda also figure prominently into the work, as it challenges the public conception of Thomson as wilderness hero-figure, replacing this blanket designation with an opportunity for users to explore the artist‚s life from numerous perspectives, and to formulate their own conclusion as to his socio-cultural role, and personal identity.

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The Viral Knitting Project
Kirsty Robertson, Department of Art, Queen's University

Picking up on some of the issues raised in my paper, and using the relation between the embodied experience of the actual protester, and the virtual/viral spread of the issues of protest across a variety of networks, the “The Viral Knitting Project,” is an (as yet unfinished) collaborative work that combines the networking potential of the internet with the tactile and embodied act of knitting. Taking the binary code of the Code Red computer virus, and transforming it into the “code” of knitting (0=P; 1=K), this project knits the code of the virus into a series of colour-coded “scarves,” each in proportion to the number of days since September 11th that the United States has been on red, orange, yellow, or green terrorism alert. The idea is that on the one hand there is created an actual knitted garment – comforting, yet ultimately dangerous as it can be “read” as the code red virus – on the other that through a series of interventions in the virtual space of the internet, the knitting code can spread virally, allowing the project to unfold through and across a variety of networks. Though the goal of the “Viral Knitting Project” is to make a statement of protest, it is also to explore the juncture of new and old technologies, and to establish the efficacy of internet networks as spaces of potential for protest movements. In this performance, a video is broadcast onto the wall, showing a loop of unending knitting – it is comforting, yet at the same time insufficient – the knitting never actually goes anywhere, nothing is actually created. A slide projector projects the code of the virus on top of the video – contained within the walls of the image, untranslatable into functioning code without human action, it is harmless. In front, any number of knitters sit knitting the virus into scarf-like garments in a silent yet resonant environment – the sound of knitting needles, the soundtrack of the video, the whirr of the slide projector. Performable in any number of venues and sites, the “Viral Knitting Project” undermines the aestheticism of politics in the gallery, it refuses the stillness and two-dimensionality of the image, it offers the potential of a tactile critique.

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Developments in Music Technologies: Hybrid Activity in Popular Music
Jeremy Morris, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

February 24, 2004 will hopefully go down in history as “Grey Tuesday”. On this day, hundreds of websites simultaneously offered downloads of “illegal” music files from DJ Danger Mouse. The songs, known collectively as the Grey Album, were a compilation of innovative hip hop remixes featuring lyrics from contemporary rapper Jay-Z and music from the Beatles’ White Album. The hybrid remix was originally released in January. By February, record label EMI had become aware that the unauthorized files were being traded on-line. As owner of the Beatles' copyright, EMI promptly sent “cease and desist” letters to Danger Mouse and anyone offering the songs on their site(s). Grey Tuesday was organized as a form of protest against these letters; an act of defiance against what the participating sites deemed as overbearing and inappropriate music industry control.
Whether or not Danger Mouse’s hybrid remixes and the ensuing “cyber activism” created enough disruption to give Grey Tuesday a permanent place in history books remains to be seen. Yet the protest underscores important changes taking place in music production and distribution in light of new digital technologies. With sophisticated software programs such as ProTools, Acid and Reason, computer-based music production facilitates (perhaps encourages) the manipulation and hybridization of existing sounds and samples. Hybrid compositions – combinations or re-appropriations of old and new music – are now easier to create than ever. However, as the computer gains a central role in home and professional studios, musicians must become increasingly proficient at using computers while computers must become increasingly adept at being instruments.
This paper intends to critically explore some of these new technologies of music production and consumption. It will examine cases (e.g. the Grey Album) where hybrid activity, on the part of artists and/or listeners, has fueled a reconsideration of traditional notions of copyright, authenticity, and creativity. The paper will also address, however, potential limits and drawbacks that arise as an ever-increasing amount of music production and consumption becomes mediated by computer-based technologies.

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It’s All About The Band..ugh, Brand: Culture and Commodification in Fashion and Popular Music
Markian Saray, Department of Communications, Film and Popular Culture, Brock University

Where as culture is influenced by one’s surroundings and social setting, the field of cultural studies has only recently begun to pay attention to how culture is consumed: how our purchases result in our cultural condition. Shane Gunster (2004) notes that despite the increasing prevalence of commodification as a dominant factor in the production, promotion, and consumption of most forms of mass culture, many in the cultural studies field have failed to engage systematically either with culture as commodity or with critical theory.
This paper attempts to bridge this gap by analyzing how music, a form of culture turned into commodity, relates to the purchase of fashion items, a commodity representing culture. From perfume to pants, lipstick to lingerie, shirts to skirts, these purchases become how we define ourselves - from where we purchase them (shopping malls, boutiques, thrift stores), to how we purchase them (Internet, credit card, on sale) and why we purchase them (to be in style, to rebel, to conform). These criteria define our persona and how we convey it to others around us. Fashion is the element that allows us to consume our relationship to class, gender and race and thus express it its most latent terms. This expression is being altered in a hybrid culture/commodity form. There has been a vast shift in the signature/brand relationship in fashion, and in culture in general where cultural intermediaries have closed the gap resulting in the emergence of what I have termed as “signabrands” (e.g. JLO by Jennifer Lopez, Curious by Britney Spears).

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Echo: Before, Between and After
Lewis Kaye, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

Musical performances are fundamentally social events. Concerts provide both audiences and performers with an indelible shared experience, strengthening bonds of community and culture. Obviously, people attend performances to witness an event and as such attention is rightly given over to the performer. Yet audiences themselves also provide a rich sensory environment. The sounds audiences make – the clapping, singing, screaming, laughing, coughing, walking and talking, among others – clearly contribute a great deal of energy to the overall aural experience of a performance. Given this, if we listen carefully – with our expectations not limited by the traditional assumptions and dynamics of music performance – our attention reveals an ocean of sound, ebbing and flowing with an energy that is at once collective and the product of specific individual activity. If we let ourselves skip and glide over the surface of this ocean, the sound of myriad conversations will float in and out of our awareness. Random phonemes coalesce into words if we pause to let our attention unify them. Each crowd has its own specific character. Different performances, different audiences, different spaces and different contexts can't help but create a unique configuration of energy and emotion. This work takes advantage of one such singular event, one with a great deal of joyous energy and community spirit. The source recordings for this work document the sounds of a group of people gathered to hear a concert of the Echo Women's Choir, a Toronto-based community choir, on December 7, 2002. The Echo community is a rich and diverse one, with an open and inclusive approach towards music. For Echo members, sharing their love of music with each other, their friends and families, is the sole reason for participating. The crowd the choir draws is thus highly supportive and emotive, infusing the entire atmosphere of the concert with a genuinely positive feeling. This work explores the idea of the sociality of aural space, and in particular shared aural environment of a concert, and the mutual engagement of performer and audience. It seeks in performance the collective sonority created by all present, refusing to relegate the sounds of the audience to the background and to treat it as unwanted noise. Produced for the 2002 Aural Cultures Residency at Charles Street Video in Toronto, the track is featured on the CD companion to Aural Cultures, a book/sound project edited by Jim Drobnick and published by YYZ Books (2004). About the piece, Drobnick writes "What is usually considered background noise becomes an immersive ocean of sound as the murmurings, laughter, applause, announcements, and shuffling create an ambient composition with multiple affective registers." (p. 275) This submission proposes a listening session followed by a brief discussion and question and answer period. The technical requirements are quite simple, needing only a CD player and stereo (2-channel) audio system for playback.

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Myself and My Origins: Contemporary Nigerian Artists and the inward self. Reading into OGBANJE/ABIKU texts as THE NEW AFRICAN AESTHETIC OF CREATIVITY and SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
Ijose Chow, Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, York University

The West African ‘spirit-child’ myth, the Abiku (or Ogbanje) underpins the West African concept of creativity and is often drawn upon by, in particular, contemporary Nigerian artists, as a metaphor for creativity. I propose that the felt needs for the myth by these artists is indicative of a quest for a new aesthetic and for a spiritual autobiography. What results is a double rupture in the overlap of prevailing modes of representations and issues of self-identity. This double rupture emerges as that between individual and society, between the local (Nigerian) and the international (cosmopolitan) ‘being’, fueling an urgent re-invention of the creative and inward self that transcends the burden of inadequate modes of representation and pushes the represented ‘body’ towards ‘spirit’. Within the framework of an African ancestral past, its rituals and its myths, contemporary Nigerian writer and photographer, Ben Okri and Rotimi Fani-Kayode respectively, articulate a hunger and compassion for and in an uncertain present.
To make this argument, I will examine the postcolonial and the postmodern argument as it relates to the general scheme of forging a new ‘African’ aesthetics. My interest lies in the use of the Ogbanje/Abiku as metaphor and specifically in the first person narration/relation as a definitive gesture towards an aesthetic of “possibilities”. The use of the myth and its attendant concepts examines and explores a crisis of self-identity. What emerges, as ‘possibilities’--that is, from the myriad applications, interpretations and meanings enabled through contemporary treatment of Ogbanje/Abiku myth—are aesthetics of creativity and spiritual autobiography. Ogbanje/Abiku texts of first person narration in the works of Okri and Rotimi --specifically The Famished Road, and the photograph series, ecstatic antibodies, bodies of experience: nothing to lose, respectively--contain, within the context of reaching into an African ancestral past and mythic awareness as embodied in the Ogbanje/Abiku myth, a multivalence into which one may read a quest to reconcile the outward and the inward self as a process of forging an aesthetics of artistic honesty of spirit in relation to the art object.
I propose that ‘style’ and ‘spirit’ allow for a ‘re-insertion of the subject’ through existential and humanistic themes of Hunger and Suffering, coincidentally a key element in the Abiku/Ogbanje corpus as exemplified in the myth concept of ‘Road’ as a problematic. Locked within Ogbanje/Abiku mythical concept of ‘Road’, Hunger and Suffering as themes are registers of a creative and spiritual quest for style and spirit. The quest for the new African aesthetics becomes a new articulation that makes problematic readings of the texts as sufficiently postcolonial or postmodern. What Okri and Rotimi attempt is a transcendence of prevailing movements into an existential and humanistic view of a new African aesthetic and spiritual self --fetched from the harassed traditional histories, languages and local practices, as well as the hybridized postcolonial/postmodern urban spaces of the African.

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Considering Politics of Appropriation Concerning Transgender, Transsexual, and 2-Spirit Bodies.
Spy Welch, Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, York University

I am interested in looking at the objectification of transgender, transsexual, and 2-Spirit bodies within stages of drag and performative art. Through using the context of photography and creative spoken literature, I would like to present a notion of “queering” the concept of objectification within queered forms such as Trans + 2-Spirit bodies.
I am proposing to share a short academic paper, along with a slide presentation of photography art, that would be pertinent in addressing the object of appropriating the Trans body.
As a Metis Transman myself, the work I would be presenting at Intersections 2005 would merely be a microcosm of the past and current academic and artistic endeavors which I am investigating on an on-going basis. Some of the photo art I am interested in showing at the conference includes surveying the landscape of transition and drag. Additionally, in this presentation I will make important speculations on how Native scholarship aligns itself, if at all, within the confines of drag and transgender theories. Here is a template for the breakdown of my academic paper: A) The Intersections of Identity and Transformation; and B) Gazing upon Native and Trans bodies (this section will ask: How is it these bodies are becoming subject of objectification? Is this objectification profitable? Is this an object of erotica and / or fetishism? How does this figure into the focal point of art? Is this actually a subversive statement on Resistance?
Some other questions that I may quickly glance over in this paper as sub-themes, which may not be necessarily limited or subjected too, are:
1) Who appropriates the term “queer”?
2) To whom does “queer” apply?
3) How does “queer” intersect culturally and socially?
4) What are the complexities, boundaries, and implications of “queer” when it does not befall upon a cultural or social context?
I am including with this proposal a sample of the theory / photo art I have produced in 2003 called “Performing Drag” under the supervision of Ann Wilson, and I will likely apply this to my academic paper.

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Cybermuseology and intangible cultural heritage
Dominique Langlais, Department of Communication, Ottawa University

This presentation shall focus on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in cybermuseology (museums using the Web). I am specifically interested in examining some types of ICT used by the museum community that generates “reel virtual” experience through the Internet. The growing emerging field of cybermuseology uses Internet to preserve and decimate cultural knowledge and heritage, but also to create some forms of interactive experiences between the users and the content. While André Malraux (1965) developed the idea of a museum without walls some important questions remained unanswered. For example, can cybermuseology presents more than images of objects? Can the knowledge of localised cultural heritage be transferred without loosing the context it stems from? More specifically, can ICTs transfer tacit knowledge, human experience, and tangible cultural heritage, and if so, what can we learn from this new process of cultural codification?
By addressing these issues, this presentation shall conclude that whether tacit knowledge can be transmitted or not by ICTs, tangible cultural heritages is a manifestation of the intangible, defined by the UNESCO as: “forms of popular and traditional expression - such as languages, oral literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, customs and craftwork…” In 2004, intangible heritage has been made a priority by UNESCO, as a way to preserve and communicate the living knowledge societies create.
References
--Deloche, Bernard, Le musée virtuel, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2001
--Malraux, A., Le muse imaginaire, Paris, Gallimard, “Idées”, 1965
--UNESCO, http://portal.unesco.org/culture/admin/ev.php?URL_ID=21427&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201#def visited December 12, 2004.

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Television and the ‘Objet a’: Psychoanalysis and the ‘boob tube’
Gregory Flemming, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

In current research, television as a cultural and political object has slipped into the invisible. Simon Frith (2000) proposes that while a great deal of attention has been paid to both the production and consumption side of television, the object itself has been left largely untheorized. Similarly, Kevin Dowler suggests that theorists need to “think about the ways that the television as an object has begun to dematerialize, both as an entity in space, and as an object of thought” (2002, 44). I propose this disappearance was precipitated, as John Corner suggests, by television’s myriad content and resistance to ontological compartmentalization (1997, 252). Williams ([1973] 2003), however, did undertake such a description of television, formulating it as a social construction – a technology that took on the form and function imputed to it by industrial society. While largely lauded as some of the most insightful work done on the medium, it has, however played a smaller role in television studies than might be expected. His “mobile privatization” has been relegated to the sidelines of television research (Moores, 1993), and often his work is mentioned solely for its historical significance. Television has remained a black box whose effects are felt, but whose functioning and status as an object have remained intangible. I propose to open up television by combining an aesthetic and cultural description of it based in psychoanalysis with one rooted in political economy and the work of Williams, relating television as object to television as political and economic tool that bonds the disparate elements of Canada to each other and the United States through the Canadian subject.
Works Cited:
--Corner, John. “Television in Theory” in Media, Culture, and Society, vol. 19, pp. 247- 262. 1997.
--Dowler, Kevin. “Television and Objecthood” in Topia, Vol. 8, Fall 2002.
--Frith, Simon. “The Black Box: The Value of Television and the Future of Television Research” in Screen 41:1. Spring 2000. pp. 33-50.
--Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication. Vol. 8, 1993. P 365-379.
--Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York, Routledge. 2003.

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Identity and Representation in Canada’s broadcasting system: A critical analysis of the 1999 Ethnic Broadcasting Policy
Amanda Coles, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

Television is a site where social, political and cultural ideas, stories, and images are shared and circulated – in short, part of the public sphere, where both personal and broader social identities are (in)formed and articulated. If it is assumed that television is important as a site for personal, group and national identity formulation, then the question of how the regulation, policy and structure of the broadcasting system in Canada either serves or impedes these goals and what the implications are for ‘media citizenship’ for a multicultural Canadian society merits scrutiny. Policy informs content through regulation of market access, types of programming, scheduling practices and resource allocation. Policy is thus a site of power relations and affects subjectivity and identity for Canadians, most certainly those whose bodies are marked by the Ethnic broadcasting policy that operates as an interpellating device employed by the state in the management and containment of a multicultural society.
First introduced in 1985 and most recently revised in 1999, the CRTC’s Ethnic Broadcasting Policy is the primary policy tool through which management of Canada’s diverse multicultural population is constructed in the limited broadcasting spectrum. Using a critical anti-racist framework drawing on the work of scholars such as Himani Bannerji, Minelle Mahtani, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Frances Henry & Carol Tator, and Nancy Fraser, I will examine the implications for citizenship as constructed through the essentialization, containment and marginalization of those, “ethnic” identities within the broader context of how the construction of racialized and ethnicized Canadians serves to further the foundations of a nation building project founded on colonial white supremacy through discourses of neo-liberalism and colonial capitalism. Explorations of the power of diaspora, ‘mixed-race’ identities, and the need for nomination of whiteness will be taken up in disaggregating power relations and re-imagining the Canadian broadcasting policy framework as a critical element of multiple public spheres.

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Hybrid legacies of the Sublime Porte: Sexual politics and practices of identity in Turkey and Romania
Alina Sajed and Asli Toksabay, Political Science: International Relations, McMaster University

The paper addresses the employment of the same historical legacy, namely that of the Ottoman Empire, in two different directions of identity construction and practices (in the construction of Romanian and Turkish identities). In the former case, Ottoman legacy was used as a negative experience, whereby the sense of Romanian-ness was and is being constructed in opposition to a past wrought with struggles against successive attempts at invasion and conquest, among which the fight against the Ottomans is by far the most significant element of Romanian history. Such a legacy survives in the present in a transmuted version in cultural productions such as the literature or the media (movies, commercials, music, news pieces), whereby Turkish men are seen as perverse and lustful, eager to abduct ‘our beautiful women.’ On the other hand, while the Romanians used the Ottoman past as a negational reference point, Turkish attitude was much more ambiguous and sometimes fragmented in its adoption as a negative or a positive feature. What the Republican cadres chose to underplay and at times lament, the subsequent elite glorify with a dose of nostalgia. With the fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in 1989, there has been a wave of Eastern Europeans coming to look for alternative sources of income in Turkey. The encounters between Romanians and Turks have been primarily gendered ones, through stereotypes of Eastern European women involved in the sex industry. Such encounters have often been portrayed in the Turkish media by a discourse that exalts the sexual prowess of Turkish men, sought after by Eastern European women unsatisfied by their vodka-drunkard men. Therefore, it is fascinating to explore how a legacy that is usually relegated to a distant and unrecoverable past, that of the Ottoman Empire, continues, in an altered way, in a (post)modern encounter between two cultures in cultural productions such as the literature and the media.

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Fugitive l(i)ght
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

This film attempts to bring back into academic discourse and art history the still invisible Loïe Fuller, a woman artist from the turn of last century and the creator of Serpentine Dance (1892), whose enigmatic presence hovers over the areas of modern dance, cinema, theatre, art history, science, and women studies. fugitive l(i)ght is therefore a tribute to Loïe Fuller. It is an 8 minute hybrid experimental film (a work in progress), inspired by many unsuccessful attempts at locating the actual film footage capturing Fuller's dance performance. It is composed of elaborately reworked found footage, originally captured by Thomas Edison, of her imitated performances where glimmers of Fuller's presence slip into the film by means of artist's absence; both Fuller's and my momentary suspensions through my use of chance operation. The films are woven into intricately reworked sequences using several image compositing computer programs. Poetic interpretations of artists, who experienced her dance and were influenced by it, are used as an aesthetic guide: texts of Mallarmé, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and futurist manifesto on dance by Marinetti. fugitive l(i)ght focuses primarily on the morph-like quality of the Serpentine Dance and its play on the visibles and the invisibles, which extends to the larger context of Fuller's persona and legacy. This film emphasizes the rhythmic structures over and above representation, by drawing viewer's gaze into a maze of multiple folds of coloured patterns; always moving, changing, shifting while luring the gaze into where no-thing is but sheer energy of movement. The structure and content of the film reflects my thesis on Fuller, that her performances were a product and a direct response to her social-historical setting, i.e., the power relations of the gaze, instilled first through the visual spectacle of the vaudeville theatre of the 1800s and later in cinema, which she tried to subvert with her dance by shifting the “I-eye” positions of power, both the artist’s and the spector’s, through her morphing, multilayered light-body performances and also through her multi-vocal presence/unpresence in the history of art. This film project is the first interdisciplinary hybrid film project based on new connections derived from the invisible legacy of Fuller's work, which resonate both through the structure and the content of the film, and thus unveil Loïe Fuller as poetically visible in motion.

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c: one eyed jail: Sewing the Divide between Form and Function, Art and Craft, Precept and Concept through Feminization of Structural Film.
Kelly Egan Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

Joyce Wieland was a trail blazing filmmaker who, along side a handful of male filmmakers in the 1960s, originated a new type of avant garde film termed structural film. Wieland often used materials relegated to the domestic sphere and transcended the boundaries between art and craft by making quilt sculptures and using objects from the realm of “women’s things” in her filmmaking practice (e.g., the use of crocheting needles and fabric dye). As homage to Wieland, this project will call into question the binary oppositions concerning issues of art and craft, personal and public space, content and form, as well as exploring the very notion of film in time and space.
c: won eyed jail is a 35mm film projects consisting in two parts: a quilt constructed out of 35mm still negatives and 35mm found motion picture which will stand on its own as an art object, and a film print of the quilt which will be projected through a 35mm motion picture projector. Although 35mm still photography film and 35mm motion picture film are made from the same stock, there are huge differences in the size of the frame and the intended directionality of the filmstrip. Still images are usually taken along a horizontal axis; the pictures are longer in length than in height. When you load a still camera, the film appears to go from the left side to the right side. Motion picture film moves vertically, from top to bottom in the camera and from front to back on a projector. The gate for taking still pictures is twice as large as that for motion picture. Playing a print consisting of still picture negatives through a motion picture projector will have a dramatic effect on the perception of the image. The image will be divided, with one section followed immediately by its second half. No two images will be repeated in a sequence, as they normally are in motion picture shots. Because of basic optics requiring at least three motion picture frames of similar content to fabricate a conscious impression, the viewer will never obtain a cognitive grasp on the visual image. The fragmentation of the image will re-present the visual information in a more kinetic form: traces of the image. At the same time, the quilt exists as a very tangible object—a whole united through fragmented parts.
The multiplicity of authorship (the donation of still image negatives from a variety of sources), much like in traditional quiltmaking, stresses the ideas of community and collective influence, inherently challenging the prevailing pluralist concept of individual inventions as an occurrence in isolation. I am curious about what happens to the experience of the viewer with a text that so fully disrupts the continuity of perspective and emphasizes the fragmentation of the material. Can it invoke a haptic experience of the film? Or will it further distance the viewer from the content? If fragmentation and perceptual disruption are qualities of defining modernity, what does it mean when the pieces, the particles collide to form a single unit in space and time? Can the very fragmentary and disruptive nature of the film cause the viewer to experience the presence of present? Or does it inherently cause the annihilation of the possibility of the moment? What are the implications of constructing a quilt out of cold, inflexible material? What happens when the content that you cannot perceive is the only thing of comfort? These are a few of the questions I will be exploring with this film.

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Two Eleven - experimental video documentary
Jane Walker, Film and Video Production, York University

A short experimental video documentary which explores the connection between corporate control of art and the media, terrorist threats, public space and a looming Oil War… Is Freedom of Expression the first casualty?
On February 11th 2003, in the midst of a “High Terror Alert” a lone Canadian journeys by train to see an “Illegal Art” exhibit in Chicago. This video chronicles that experience. Two Eleven explores two connected aspects of the media: surveillance techniques that quash freedom instead of protecting it and media conglomerates that protect the wealthy corporations at the expense of individual expression.
Two Eleven documents the “Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age” exhibit, which was hosted in early 2003 by “In These Times”, an activist magazine in Chicago. The artists exhibited use copyrighted images, the unauthorized use of which, although they permeate our environment, often leads to lawsuits.
Formatted as a “road movie” to and from Chicago, the viewer is invited to think of the connections between transport and freedom of movement, between corporate control of public space and privacy.
Shot on digital video with narration by the curator of the Chicago “Illegal Art” exhibit, Jessica Clarke, Two Eleven is a challenge to image control by the media.
Two Eleven has been previously screened in September 2004 at the 3rd International RestCycling Art Festival at the Backfabrik Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

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The meaning of e-: Neologisms as cultural markers
Lucinda McDonald, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

"A community is known by the language it keeps, and its words chronicle the times. Every aspect of the life of a people is reflected in the words they use to talk about themselves and the world around them. As their world changes – through invention, discovery, revolution, evolution or personal transformation – so does their language. Like the growth rings of a tree, our vocabulary bears witness to our past" (Algeo). According to Algeo, language has a natural capacity to mark the historical and cultural changes of a community. Ideas, thoughts, new inventions, values and cultural conventions are recorded in our language through the new vocabulary that moves in and out of use. New words to do with technology abound in today’s world, particularly those that begin with the prefix e- such as e-mail, e-commerce, e-vite, e-publishing, and e-ticket (to name just a very few).
In this paper I consider what the prefix e- means, how productive it is, how we are using e-words and what these words signal about our attitudes towards computers and technology including the influence of the dot.com boom and bust on our language. This work on neology (the study of new words) is at the intersection between several disciplines including linguistics, English, communication studies and cultural studies. It represents a new “hybrid entity” with characteristics of each but belonging to none.
This paper highlights how new words or neologisms can be a rich resource, reflecting back to us both how our culture is changing and how we are reacting to this change. As Baugh and Cable (2002) point out “great developments or events leave their mark upon the language” (p. 300). In my view, it is time we paid attention to these linguistic markers and what they can tell us about ourselves.

References:
--Algeo, J. (Ed.). (1991). Fifty years among the new words: A dictionary of neologisms. 1941-1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
--Baugh, A. & Cable, T. (2002). A history of the English language, Fifth Edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.

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Sim Difference: The Sims and the Commodity of Liberal Diversity
A. Brady Curlew, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

My conference paper will reflect how representations of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity intersect with strategies of late capitalism in The Sims, arguably the most popular video game of all time. The Sims has been praised as socially progressive for its liberal views towards same-sex relationships, absence of racial stereotyping, and non-sexualized presentation of women in an industry that is historically chauvinistic, xenophobic, and hetero-normative. My focus concerns how The Sims is interpreted by, targeted toward, and marketed to same-sex desiring people, ethnic and racial minorities, and women. I will conclude, using the theory of Stuart Hall, Naomi Klein, Henry Jenkins and others, that this spike in social liberalism may not be the result of a socio-cultural change in ideology, but instead reflects a change in how traditionally marginalized people are marketed to in late capitalism.
Difference in the game is only ever on the surface – in skin colour, in dress, in names – no actual elements of cultural or community distinction exist in the game. Despite that a wide array of different kinds of people are featured in The Sims, everyone is standardized into one category of “normal.” While standardization on the basis of social equality is not what I’ll be arguing against, I am instead weary about the mould for this standard, which is detectably aligned with the traditional patriarchal, heterosexual, and Caucasian-centred suburban space. All difference in the game is thoroughly white-washed. This being the case, I will argue that The Sims amounts to an exploitation of diversity initiated by targeting untraditional markets to better tap into the consuming potential of millions of non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual people – what Stuart Hall sees as the commercial appropriation of difference.
This work is best tailored to the “paper presentation/discussion” format used in the conference. I see this topic gelling with the conference themes in the way it rethinks arrangements of cultural being in terms of media, culture and economics – making The Sims a hybrid entity, fueling both progressive liberal discourse and the relentless pursuit of profit at the expense to those it (mis)represents.

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Infrared Imaginations and Cloud Truth: Classifying Weather in the Satellite Age
Charlotte Scott, Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

“Nature turns out to be shaped differently by our different imaginations”
- J. Berland

My paper presentation will explore how cultural understandings of the natural world are shaped by new technologies. Satellite surveillance and the Internet mediate the weather both visually and epistemologically. Weather in modernity is a hybrid of nature and science; animal senses and folk sayings validated and confirmed only by rational knowledge. In the tradition of the Enlightenment, the atmosphere is a new frontier whose secrets are revealed by the penetrating eye of science. The clouds are subject to the gaze of infrared sensors above in space, the mysteries of the wind are revealed in mathematical formulae, and Nature is safely delivered to the consumer as a commodity rather than a natural phenomenon. Weather reports, disaster-porn, and exhaustive Internet databases meticulously organize and classify weather data. Science partners with industry in the hopes of achieving a pre-emptive control over this natural liability, in order to maintain a productive global flow of goods and services. Yet the public fascination with the weather, in its mundane and disastrous forms alike, harkens back to an era of instincts and animistic understandings of the natural environment. It is the relationship between these perceptions that I propose to explore. Through a live analysis of Internet weather sites (specifically the Environment Canada website) and infrared satellite images as portals into the cultural universe of meteorology, and borrowing from texts in eco-cultural and feminist cultural theory, I will illustrate how our understanding of the weather is mediated through scientific discourse, and the ways in which popular media narratives about natural disasters and climate change reflect the modern perspective, as well as a more traditional, sensual understanding of the Earth’s atmosphere.

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The Politics of Animal Representation: Thinking Outside of Metaphor
Vincent Guihan, Cultural Mediations, Carleton University

The question of the politics of animal representation is significantly undetheorized. Carol Adam’s Sexual Politics of Meat suggests that representations of animals function either metaphorically or literally. As well, Margaret Atwood has suggested in Survival that Canadian literature represents animals empathetically as victims. However, the re-examination of the animal as a category of ontological Being in contemporary philosophy, coupled with the animal rights movement, have pushed the animal as a question of theory out of its academic margin, signaling, perhaps, a change in the production and reception of the representations of animals in literature. In fact, several contemporary Canadian novels deploy representations of animals that combine both clear anthropomorphisms (speech, reasoning, even agency) with accurate ethological representations of animals (open and closed instincts). These representations call for theorizations more complicated than a paradigmatic metaphorical/literal theory of animal representations or an understanding of animals as only victims.
In reply, my presentation argues, first, that these obviously artificial and ontologically contradictory representations of animals function as ‘artificial myths’ in Barthes’ sense, deconstructing traditional representations of animals as mute suffering bodies or humans in animal drag. Instead, these representations function poetically as synecdoche; these animals represent themselves as particular victims, as victims in general, and also agents responding to a particular regime of power. Drawing on the work of Levina, Derrida, Heidegger and Habermas, I argue that these representations blur the nature/culture boundary and resist the instrumentalized ontological processes of subjection, objectification and abjection — the ‘Selfing’ and the ‘Othering(s)’ — of a rootless modernity. That is to say, the animal functions as a sign that calls the human subject to be present in a rooted, ethical relationship with its others, human or not.

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The Endoscopic Gaze: Objectivity and Objectification Go Inside the Body (and Out Again)
Robyn Fadden, Media Studies, Concordia University

Endoscopy is a medical technique wherein a small camera attached to the end of a probe is inserted into the body for exploratory or surgical purposes. The camera’s images are viewed on a television-like monitor. In some cases the patient is able to view the exploration of their own body on this screen or might see a recording after surgery. Recently, via television, documentary film and visual art, these images have made their way onto more familiar screens and a wider audience has been able to see them.
My presentation will outline the scientific and cultural history of endoscopic technology and situate endoscopic images within a broader cultural context where science, medicine, health, technology, film and the biological body intersect. Though endoscopy began as a medical technique, it borrowed its premise from the medium of film. Both technologies seek to capture and explore worlds from new perspectives, using the camera as a new, cyborg-like eye.
I will address how real-life experience, medical documentation, and fictional use of endoscopic images (or imagery) add to and change our current understanding of our bodies, but as they intertwine with understandings of, for example, static medical drawings, cadavers, x-rays, and the innumerable images of the outsides of our bodies, a kind of reconciliation takes place: what once belonged to the realm of medical discourse becomes of social and cultural consequence. The biological body is presented as another series of surfaces subject to change, critique, and issues of identity and ontology.

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Pass Me My Cape: Superheroes on/as the Posthuman Threshold
Sabine LeBel, Film and Video Department, York University

In the last few years there has been an explosion of superhero movies from Hollywood, including Spider-Man, X-men, Catwoman, and The Hulk. Within the scifi film genre, superhero movies can be seen as the latest articulation of the anxieties, played out most recently through the figure of the cyborg, about what it means to be human. Central to the identity of every superhero is a dual nature where, beneath the mundane human self, the superhero persona constantly lurks, and vice versa. Like the cyborg, the superhero can be seen as a hybrid entity, existing in a posthuman realm.
Because superheroes are never able to show both sides of their persona, the human and the superhero, at the same time, each side must “pass” in the other’s realm. The moments of change between realms or of transformation between personas are central to the superhero story. Part of the superhero mode is to save the world but they can rarely effectively control their own bodies. This is especially true of the Hulk but can also be seen in the X-men through the character of Cyclops who must wear glasses to help keep his optic blasts under control. These accidental moments of rupture and deliberate moments of transition mark fascinating nodes from which to read superhero bodies in order to see how these performances mark the posthuman landscape. Discourses of masculinity, femininity, identity, and science gone awry, mark the superhero body as conflicted and existing in a threshold universe. The representations of superheroes come together as multiple bodies across texts, converging as composites of those previous versions, as drawn by different artists, embodied by action figures, video games, cartoons, and now, again, as live action film heroes.

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Call for Participation

We invite all interested graduate students to join us for our 4th annual Intersections event, expanded this year into a weekend Creative Conference. As scholars doing interdisciplinary work in a joint programme, we are especially interested in encountering and generating significant intersections of art, activism and academia. How can we remix resistance? What can mongrel media make possible? How does contemporary culture rework us? Which beings, theories, technologies, cultures, languages, representations and values compound into interesting hybrid entities and identities?

HYBRID ENTITIES is a call for works that take up what is revealed when entities collide and the creative or transformative possibilities in interesting combinations and connections. After last year’s successful conference around themes of lag, error, breaks and gaps, our focus now turns to links, networks, compositions and new creations. We are interested in submissions that explore these intersections where names have not yet been given, where identities are still being formed and where new problems and possibilities for bridging the gaps among scholarly disciplines, and between scholars, artists and activists can be found.

Open to all graduate students, this interdisciplinary conference welcomes submissions that take up these themes either through a paper presentation, an artistic expression, or an activist agenda. Details on subtopics and submission procedures follow below.

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SUBTOPICS AND THEMES
Invited submissions include papers, artwork and activist presentations that relate to the following broad themes:
Media and Culture
Topics could include (but are not limited to) subjectivity, popular and visual culture, media studies, cultural consumption and production, media democracy, representations of sexualities/race/ethnicity, gender studies, portrayals of social class, depictions of ability/disability, semiotics and linguistics, cultures of cities, space and place.
Technology in Practice
Submissions in this category might address (but are not limited to) questions regarding technology's emergent role in theoretical and practical debates surrounding art, authenticity, and aesthetics, negotiations of accessibility and identity, race and gender, explorations in the concepts of the cyborg, the post-human, and technoculture.
Politics and Policy
Potential areas of focus could include (but are not limited to) strategies of resistance, questions of structure, power and agency, deliberations about the communication and culture and the public sphere, sovereignty, accessibility, cultural policy, citizenship, globalization, copyright and intellectual property, privacy and surveillance, media ownership in Canada, communication policy.

SUBMISSION FORMAT/DEADLINES
As an expanded event, this year HYBRID ENTITIES will include the following formats for disseminating and discussing ideas.
+ Paper presentations
- 15 min. presentation of an academic paper with time for discussion to follow
+ Creative work with artist’s talk
- Artwork/media for exhibition, accompanied by artist talk during conference
+ Poster session (with possible roundtable discussion)
- Presentation of materials in a poster and/or table display with discussant.
If enough interest, these displays may be followed by a roundtable discussion.

Although these formats are tailored to accommodate academic papers, artwork and activist contributions respectively, all participants are encouraged to apply for whatever format is most interesting or appropriate for your submission.

All interested participants are asked to submit a textual abstract or artist’s statement explaining the proposed presentation in light of the conference themes, and indicate which of the above three formats the presentation would take.

Abstract or statement should be no more than 250 words (approx. 1 typewritten page, double spaced) and submitted via email as an attachment in .TXT, .RTF, or Microsoft Word format.
Name and contact information should not appear on this page. Please include a separate page with the following information:

1. Title of presentation as it appears on the abstract or statement
2. Name
3. Affiliation (program and university)
4. Level and year of study (ie. Master's, 2nd year)
5. Phone number
6. E-mail address
7. Mailing address
8. A/V requirements (computer/projector, film projector, VCR, stereo, turntables, etc.)
9. Other requirements (table, easel, hooks, display materials). If you have exceptional requirements for your
work, please contact us to discuss feasibility.

Artists are also asked to submit a small sample of their work for adjudication, by either email or post.
If sending creative works by email, please submit up to 10 jpegs sized to display onscreen or a multimedia clip with cumulative attachment size of 5mb or less. You may also direct us to an URL. Please number the pieces and put viewing instructions, comments and titles in your email if applicable.

If submitting creative works by post, please mail the proposal well before the deadline with a self-addressed, stamped envelope for return to: Intersections, c/o Graduate Communication and Culture, 3068 TEL Building, York University, 4700 Keele St. Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3. You may send a CD, DVD, cued video or other multimedia, the duration of which does not exceed 10 minutes. Alternatively, you may send up to 10 slides or printouts of work, illustrations or diagrams. Please include a slide or media list with title, size, media, and date, and viewing instructions for your work if applicable. Please do not send original work.

Deadline: MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 2005.
Please e-mail submissions to: intersec@ryerson.ca
For inquires and info e-mail: tanner1@yorku.ca
CFP available online: http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa/conference.html
Presented by the Communication and Culture Graduate Students Association:
http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa
For more information about the Joint Programme in Communication and Culture:
http://www.yorku.ca/comcult/

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Information for Out of Town Participants Accommodations

Accomodations
Transportation
Maps

Accomodations

Below is an alphabetical list of some budget hostels and hotels in the downtown area.
All are within walking distance or a short subway ride to the Ryerson campus. If you are looking for accommodations on a tight budget, you can also contact us at intersec@ryerson.ca about the possibility of arranging billeting.

The Bay Street Hotel 650 Bay St., (416) 971-8383 www.baystreethotel.com	Canadiana Backpackers 42 Widmer St., toll free 1 (877) 215-1225 or (416) 598-9090 http://www.canadianalodging.com	College Hostel 280 Augusta Avenue, (416) 929-4777 www.collegehostel.com
Dundas Square Hotel, 223 Church St., (416)703-3939 http://www.dundashotel.com/	Global Village Backpackers 460 King St. W (416) 703-8540 http://www.globalbakpackers.com

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Transportation

From Pearson International Airport:
Via TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) Bus #192 Airport Rocket takes you directly to Kipling Station on the Bloor-Danforth Subway line. This is a 20 min. bus ride (according to TTC).
Transfer to the subway and head east (this is the end of the line so the trains only go east from here).
Get off at the Bloor-Yonge station.
Transfer to the Yonge line heading south (Next stop Wellesley).
Get off at Dundas station. You are a 5 min. walk to the Ryerson campus and the Rogers Communication Centre.
Cost is $2.25 one way. Total time is about 1.5 hour.
http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/ttc/service_to_airport.htm#192

Via GO Transit and TTC
Get on the GO Transit bus heading to Yorkdale Mall. The bus ride will take 30-35 min.
At Yorkdale Mall transfer to the subway. Get on a train heading south (next stop Lawrence West).
Get off at Dundas Station. The subway ride will take about 25-30 min. You are a 5 min. walk to the Ryerson campus and the Rogers Communication Centre.
http://www.gotransit.com/public/aboutgo/touristinfo.htm
Cost is $3.65 one way for the Go bus plus $2.25 one way for the subway. Total time is about 1 hour.

Via Taxi
There are numerous taxis outside of all terminals at Pearson. A taxi ride to Ryerson will cost around $40-45.
Total time is about 45 min. (if it's not rush hour).

From Union Station (via train):
Walk through the underground maze at Union station following the TTC signs to the subway.
Get on a train heading towards Finch station (north).
Get off at Dundas station. You are a 5 min. walk to the Ryerson campus and the Rogers Communication Centre. Cost is $2.25 one way. Total time is 5 min.

From Greyhound Downtown Station (via bus):
The Greyhound coach station is located at 610 Bay Street.
From the station get on Dundas Street and head east one block to Yonge Street.
Walk north on Yonge Street to Gould Street (one block). Walk east down Gould Street and cross Church Street. The Rogers Communication Centre is on your left. Total time is about 10 min.

By car:
Ryerson is bounded by four major city streets: Gerrard (north), Dundas (south), Jarvis (east), and Yonge (west).
Main traffic routes are as follows:
Highway 401 east or west to Yonge Street, south on Yonge, turn left (east) at Gould (no turns are permitted at Yonge and Dundas).
Cross Church Street and the Rogers Communication Centre is on your left.

Don Valley Parkway south to Bloor Street, turn right (west) at Bloor, turn left (south) at Church, turn left (east) at Gould Street. The Rogers Communication Centre is on your left.

Gardiner Expressway east or west to Yonge Street, continue north, turn right on Gould Street. Cross Church Street and the Rogers Communication Centre is on your left.

Parking -
http://www.ryerson.ca/map/directions.html (scroll down to parking).
Note: Toronto-area calls made locally require ten-digit dialing (ie., the area code must be included when dialing).

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Maps:

Ryerson campus
http://www.ryerson.ca/map/
Downtown Toronto
http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/torontomaps/visitormap.htm
TTC subway map
http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/ttc/pdf/subway_rt.pdf
Links to other Toronto maps and information:
http://www.toronto.com/feature/241/?cslink=cs_generic_4_2
http://www.mapquest.com

For inquires and info e-mail: tanner1@yorku.ca or intersec@ryerson.ca.

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Contact Us

Conference Chair: Lauren Cruikshank
intersec@ryerson.ca

For more information about the Joint Programme in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities please see: http://www.yorku.ca/comcult/

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