Detouring the Commute (The Art and Practice of Everyday Travel) Taien Ng
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Detouring the Commute (the art and practice of everyday travel) Taien Ng-Chan A Thesis In The Humanities Program Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Fine Arts) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada April 2016 © Taien Ng-Chan, 2016 Abstract My thesis explores the processes of gaining deep knowledge about place through everyday travel. I focus on how different modes of mobility perform different kinds of spaces, views, and mental maps of the city, how the repetition of the daily routine enacts a personal archive of place, and how the functionalistic commute can be “detoured” into a meaningful practice. My creative research stems in part from my autoethnographic media practices of navigating the city, and frames the gathering of knowledge as an artistic experience that is integral to my methods of investigation. The commute is a unique and everyday liminal space, one that is ripe for artistic encounters and stories to materialize the city in transformative ways. By explicitly advocating an interventionist practice through mapping and locative art, I hope to contribute to the development of a more engaged commute as a hybrid space of aesthetic pleasure and surprise, and a heightened awareness of the many strata that make up a place. This project investigates three different and specific kinds of commutes. The first involves a walk between two very different neighbourhoods that involves crossing the controversial border that is the L’Acadie Fence. I use cultural landscape methods of “reading” the built environment with an eye on the material, the social and the historical, as well as a photographic practice that documents and archives my daily journeys around the two neighbourhoods. The second commute relates the experience of city transit as a unique space of performance, both in the everyday ritual sense and as a space of social theatre. The ubiquity of mobile media in transit spaces is also addressed as having the potential to reconnect to one’s surroundings, rather than disconnecting from the commuting routine. Finally, the third commute describes a drive from one city to another in rush hour traffic, combined with a look at Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope as a method of cinematic analysis, and a way of discerning narratives that build up around the non-places of the auto-commute. This study will then conclude by presenting a framework for the detour as a practice of creative mapping through everyday travel. iii Acknowledgements Very special thanks for many years of unwavering support to my co-advisors: Sébastien Caquard, for the writing guidance, the movie-watching research, the fantastic activities for the Art and Cartography Commission with the International Cartographic Association, and for his unquenchable enthusiasm and good humour; Marielle Nitoslawska for her sharp critical eye, warm conversations, and for always bringing me back to my art practice and to the work. Many thanks as well to professors Cynthia Hammond and Katie Russell, my minor field supervisors who completed my amazing thesis committee; Kim Sawchuk and Mark Shepard, my excellent external examiners; Bina Freiwald (whose tenure as Program Director has bookended my doctoral studies and indeed, was there at the very beginning of all my graduate studies); Erin Manning for her support as Program Director particularly during the student strikes. Thank you to Sharon Fitch for wonderful departmental support, and to Hexagram-Concordia for the Internationalization Award and Student Research Grant, both of which have been invaluable in my media work. Much gratitude to my HUMAns, those on the conference and salon organizing committees with me, and especially those who were out on the streets in 2012, and who carry on in the struggle! And to Natalie Doonan, Florencia Marchetti, Felicity Taylor for extra support during thesis writing and defending. I couldn’t wish for better colleagues. A much shorter version of Chapter One: The Walking Commute was published as “L’Acadie Fence: A Series of Views” in Objects in Context: Theorizing Material Culture, edited by Stephanie Anderson and Cierra Webster, 2013. As well, a shorter version of Chapter Two: The Transit Commute was published as “Performing City Transit” in Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Technology in Hybrid Spaces, edited by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mimi Sheller, New York: Routledge, 2015. To the editors of these two publications, and to the peer reviewers involved who gave extremely helpful comments, my deepest thanks. Thank you to everyone at the artist-run centre Agence TOPO, particularly Michel iv Lefébvre, Marc Fournel, Éric Paillé, and Vincent Archambault, and to all my collaborators for Detours: Donna Akrey, Gord Allen, Lance Blomgren, Adrian Gorea, Emilie O’Brien, and Samuel Thulin; Christina Sealey, who did the beats and the sound mix for Superhighway Suspense Movie. Gratitude and love to Donna Akrey and Sarah E. Truman, my HPU comrades. HPU! HPU! HPU! This is for my mother Amy Suk Han Chan. And as always, for Joe Ollmann and Samuel Ollmann-Chan, my always. v Table of Contents List of Media Works viii List of Figures ix Introduction: “Metro, boulot, dodo” 1 Methodologies of mapping and mapmaking 6 Maps and their legends: a key to reading this work 11 Surveying the landscape (a review of the literature) 12 Contribution 23 Interchapter One: L’Acadie Fence (the documentary detour) 26 Chapter One: The Walking Commute 30 Approach 33 The route of the commute: evidence from an everyday walk 37 Detouring around the fence: an examination of a border 49 Other boundaries 57 On the way home 60 Interchapter Two: City Transit (the performative detour) 63 Chapter Two: The Transit Commute 69 Approach 71 City transit as a liminal space 74 City transit as a space of performance 78 City transit as space for communitas 83 City transit and equipped travel time 86 City transit, locative art and hybrid space 88 Rhythms of the familiar 92 vi Interchapter Three: Superhighway Suspense Movie (the cinematic detour) 96 Chapter Three: The Auto-Commute 100 Approach: chronotopic analysis 103 Chronotope of the car 106 Traffic jams and superhighways 109 Chronotope of suburbia 114 The driver 120 The future 125 Conclusion: The Poetics of the Detour 128 Art and mapping as creative urban research 132 “Autocartography”: a detouring toolkit 134 Psychogeography (lessons from the walking commute) 136 Mobile media and art (taking from the transit commute) 138 Cinematic cartography (story-maps from the auto-commute) 142 Prompts and participatory events 135 Possibilities 147 Reference List 149 Mediagraphy 161 vii List of Media Works All works listed here are by Taien Ng-Chan as part of this thesis project and can be viewed at http://soyfishmedia.com/detouringthecommute/ 1. L’Acadie Fence Digital photo-collage. Original dimensions: 22” x 1800” An early version was first exhibited digitally at Contested Site: Archives and the City, FoFA Gallery, Montreal, 2012. 2. City Transit Multi-media website featuring 19 videopoems and narrative fragments made for watching while riding city transit. Original media formats include digital cell phone video, digital camera video, Super 8 and Super 16mm film. Produced as part of a collaborative website project, Detours: Poetics of the City, in residency at the artist-run centre Agence TOPO, 2012. http://agencetopo.qc.ca/detours/ 3. Superhighway Suspense Movie Digital video. Length: 6 minutes 38 seconds. Music and soundmix by Christina Sealey. An early version of this video was first exhibited at Stories of the City, curated by the In/Terminus Research Collective at the University of Windsor, in November 2015. viii List of Figures All photos and artwork (unless otherwise specified) by Taien Ng-Chan. 1. Both sides of L’Acadie Fence – excerpt 26 2. 80 Av. du Parc bus and PX80 graffiti 38 3. Open Street Map screenshot of Parc-Extension 39 4. Parc-X alley food 40 5. Details from L’Acadie Fence photo-collage, looking into TMR 41, 42 6. Details from L’Acadie Fence photo-collage, looking into Parc-X 43 7. Open Street Map screenshot of TMR 45 8. Parc-X street and TMR lawns 47 9. PX was here 48 10. The L’Acadie Fence hedge 50 11. L’Acadie Fence gate at Jarry St. 51 12. A hole in the L’Acadie Fence 52 13. L’Acadie Fence gate signs, both sides, at St-Roch St. 53 14. Both sides of the fence 54 15. Footprints on the dirt path by the L’Acadie Fence 55 16. A place for a lock on the fence 56 17. Playing in the alley 61 18. City Transit digital map interface 63 19. Detours main digital interface with layered maps 66 20. Still from Superhighway Suspense Movie 96 ix Introduction “Metro, boulot, dodo” For many people, the parts of the city that they experience most are the ones they move through on the way to work or to school. In his “Theory of the Dérive” ([1956] 1996), Guy Debord points to Chombart de Lauwe’s famous map of all the trajectories made by a Parisian student over the course of one year, to illustrate the narrowness to which one’s life can sometimes be reduced. There are times when a person can become caught in the nine-to-five structures of modern society, and our daily itineraries may form similarly narrow triangles between home, work, and places of leisure and consumption. Debord expressed “indignation at the fact that there are people who live like that” (22) and although I am inclined to agree, I know also that to wander the streets in a dérive or as a flâneur is a luxury that some cannot afford. Sometimes, the daily commute is the only time that I am able to be actually out in the city, moving through it.