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M.E. Luka will be at UC ��«����Ƶ, Monday March 11th (2-5pm) and Tuesday March 12th (time tbc) to present on her doctoral project (Archiving Artspots) and lead a Korsakow workshop. Please bring your laptop and join us at the Brakhage Center (ATLAS 311). You can download Korsakow .

Archiving ArtSpots: seeking creative citizenship
What is the relationship between art and media production and dissemination? This is the large umbrella under which much of my professional work and scholarly research takes place. Currently, my focus is on production practices and creativity in cultural media production, including the meaning and potential of creative citizenship, and the often precarious work of artists and creative producers in daily life and professional engagements. More specifically, my doctoral research is an in-depth, highly reflexive study of the long-running television and internet program, CBC ArtSpots (1997-2008). Ten years of thoughtful creative activity resulted in multi-layered curatorial discussions, a proliferation of practices, reams of visual and audio footage, and terabytes of backups and storage: what was the generative relationship between art and digital media in Canada at the cusp of the 21st century? I seek pathways through archival materials, communications methodologies, potentially totalizing narratives, and theoretical frameworks about the work of art and artists in relation to broadcast and digital media. By digging into the video art and broadcasting roots of ArtSpots, I intend to cast light on the helpfulness of mobilizing old and new methodological and creative processes side-by-side with theoretical structures and strictures.

My current interest in historicizing and rethinking the ArtSpots project is intended to situate it in the larger context of cultural media production, and cultural engagement generally, both at the time, and as it continues to impact today. The joining of cultural studies and the sociology of art with a political economy analysis offers a starting point, enabling the examination of systems and patterns concerning the everyday social and productive relations of individual and collective creators involved in cultural production. However, much of the existing theoretical work about the arts and broadcasting is informed by empirical work outside Canada, including Lynn Spigel’s work in the United States (2008) and Georgina Born’s ethnographic work in the U.K. (2004). By taking a look at how and why artists engage with the Canadian broadcasting and digital media system, a deeper understanding of the inventive and precarious nature of an artist or media professional’s creative labour in the broadcast environment in Canada can be realized. The need for such attention is evident, considering decreasing levels of government and private funding of visual arts and non-profit media. From this examination, a complex understanding of what is meant by creative labour and creative citizen engagement within cultural media production may be generated; including how cultural space is fashioned for such production. An element of my current research investigates ArtSpots as such a cultural space (Luka, pending): a fluidly evolving digital archival and/or (perhaps) virtual space.

I am using the strategy of mobilizing media production as a way to interrogate and reflect on the ArtSpots space – potentially engaging a deliberate (and deliberative) embodiment of the theoretical, historically-based “remediation” endeavour that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) might suggest may be inevitable as technology develops, and which draws from Marshall McLuhan’s legacy of deliberate engagement with materiality in/and media. This may bring me closer to media archeology as a theoretical framework through the methodological forays I undertake. As I’ve noted in an  for No More Potlucks 25 – Archive#:

In addition, I am interested in how Lynne Huffer (2010) characterizes the work of Foucault in relation to archives. In particular, the suggestion that experiences are “archivally thick” critical contributions to archives strikes me as useful in thinking through power and social relations, very much the concern of Foucault. Such archival practices “puts us into the question[s]” asked in terms of affect as well as the subject relationship (Huffer, 334-5).

Methodologically, my approach includes engagement in material practices myself: the research-creation project I am conducting for my doctoral dissertation research probes ArtSpots through a specific set of mixed-methods. This includes organizing and recording in-depth interviews and discussion groups, editing them together with some of the ArtSpots’ archived video productions (embedded with high production values) and combining these into a short series of non-linear documentary structures through  software, along with images based on freeze-frames grabbed from the almost-moribund (or partially archived?) ArtSpots website, scanned pictures of production notes, etc. Additionally, my methods program includes a deliberative mash-up of scatterings of post-it notes, workflows incorporating Evernote(s) and website-based field notes, hard-copy bibliographies and handcrafted reflections, and mappings of my house of theory, as well as the themes and questions that arise through tilling the verdant soil of discussion groups and in-depth interviews, including seeking feedback on how I am processing this unusual experience. Taken together, these seductively productive incursions hurtle me into provocative interrogations of vernacular and cultural citizenship (see Joke Hermes and Toby Miller as well as William Uricchio and, in Canada, Caroline Andrew et al), bringing these together with the creative commons, cultural industries and digital archival practices, interrupting and tracing the concept of creative citizenship that I seek to move toward.

Works Cited:

Andrew, Caroline, Monica Gattinger, M. Sharon Jeannotte, and Will Straw, Eds. (2005). Accounting for Culture: Thinking Through Cultural Citizenship. Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Born, Georgina. (2004). Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Secker & Warburg.
Hermes, Joke. (2005). Re-reading Popular Culture. Malden, Oxford & Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
Huffer, Lynne and Elizabeth Wilson. (2010). Mad for Foucault: A Conversation. Theory, Culture & Society 27, 324-338. http://www.sagepublications.com. DOI: 10.1177/0263276410383712. Retrieved 24 November 2012.
Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka. Eds. (2011). Introduction. Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1-6.
Luka, Mary Elizabeth. (pending). Mapping CBC ArtSpots. Diverse Spaces: Examining identity, heritage and community within Canadian public culture. Ed. Susan Ashley. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Miller, Toby. (2007). Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Spigel, Lynn.  (2008). TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Uricchio, William. (2004). Beyond the Great Divide: Collaborative Networks and the Challenge to the Dominant Conceptions of Creative Industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1: 79-90. Sage Publications. Retrieved 23 February 2011.

Mary Elizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar and doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Joint Program in Communication at Concordia University, where she’s probing the meaning and potential of “creative citizenship,” including the work of artists and creative producers in daily life. Luka is also an award-winning documentary producer and director for television and the internet, and—because she likes to start things—has helped to develop programs, projects and a great deal of talent related to her fields of interests, particularly in the Atlantic Region. As a consultant in the cultural non-profit sector, she recently assisted Women in Film and Television – Atlantic and the Canada Dance Festival develop their strategic and business plans. M.E. is actively involved as a volunteer for professional and community organizations related to the arts, media, and culture, including as founding Vice-Chair of Arts Nova Scotia, the brand-new independent, provincial funding body for the arts in that province, and as a member of the Creative Nova Scotia Leadership Council, an advisory board to the government of Nova Scotia regarding the creative and cultural industries. The videos appearing in this article are drawn from the non-linear documentary work-in-progress grounding her doctoral research.