New Ideas of North: Makrolab's Mission to Nunavut :: Michelle Kasprzak

In his groundbreaking radio documentary, The Idea of North, eminent Canadian musician Glenn Gould revealed that “... the North has remained for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.” (1) His confession has resonance with the sort of exoticization of distant territories we might all share at some level. A remote place that we have never actually experienced can easily take on the mantle of myth. The longer we imagine it and refrain from actually visiting it, the more we become enamoured of our own vision of what it is, and lose sight of what it really might be.

Gould’s tactic of maintaining an illusion about a place by thinking about it, but not visiting it, is probably the only way to keep such a myth intact in today’s hyper-explored globe. Today there are no maps with “Here Be Dragons” marking unknown lands. The search for the Northwest Passage is long over. Magellan circumnavigated the globe long ago, in the 1500s. A cynic might ask: in a time when everything has been explored, and distance is collapsed by information technology, what have we left to discover?

There is, of course, much more to discover, since a given pool of knowledge about a place may be wide, but not necessarily deep; or deep, but not necessarily analyzed and shared adequately. In addition, some of the earth’s most forbidding surfaces are not easily “plugged in” to the grid of information technologies that permit the sort of armchair tourism today’s internet surfers can indulge in. The challenges of today’s exploration projects, then, are to collect meaningful data in-situ, analyze and share it with the rest of the world, and enable a legacy of sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration that is integrated into the local community.

These new challenges are precisely the ones that are at the core of the Makrolab project, managed by Projekt Atol and led by Slovene artist Marko Peljhan. The Makrolab team explores territories deeply, gathering and interpreting complex data about a place. Makrolab, which premiered at Documenta X in 1997, is a flexible framework that contains several research strata and has gone through numerous iterations. It takes many physical forms, but mostly manifests as high-tech laboratory outposts that are rapidly deployable and have zero environmental impact. I was fortunate enough to take part in TCM Progress – Sourcing the Inputs/Mapping the Outputs, the Makrolab installation on Suomenlinna Island in Finland. We workshopped ideas, mapped paths over the island, monitored conditions, and ate communal meals, all while the radar tower spun quietly in the background and the new RDU (Rapid Deployment Unit) was tested.

2007 – 2008 is the International Polar Year, forming the penultimate stage in Makrolab’s project trajectory. Makrolab’s last mission takes it to the two polar regions, with installations in Antarctica and Nunavut. In the tradition established by previous Makrolab projects, artists, scientists, engineers, and others will gather to collaboratively produce work that will analyze patterns of migration, weather, climate, and communications. However, this iteration of Makrolab during the International Polar Year adds yet another layer. This mission involves a conceptual and practical linkage of both polar regions, manifesting as a truly global project in scope. In this transnational spirit, Makrolab will be managed by I-TASC, the Interpolar Transnational Ars Science Constellation.

This is not the crude type of exploration of yore, when visitors did not seek to dialogue with or understand their host land and its people. The preparations that the Makrolab team undertakes begin long in advance, seeking understanding of the local environment and culture well before entering the territory. To prepare for the upcoming mission in the International Polar Year, and the subsequent operations under Inuit leadership from 2008 onward, Makrolab’s team produced POLAR_TANGENT, a streaming media, local presentation and workshop event that took place in Igloolik, Nunavut in April 2006. As Stephen Kovats, Program Curator at V2_ and one of the project participants, explains: “One of the project’s primary goals is to establish new arts practices in the zone connecting technology, society, and nature, and to do this at places where technology is challenged by earth’s inherent geo-physical structure.” (2) So though Makrolab has a progressive “leave no trace” policy environmentally, Makrolab will certainly leave many positive “traces” in a cultural and social sense with this Nunavut installation during the International Polar Year and beyond.

These cultural traces might be one of the most telling things about the project. Makrolab is, in many ways, a tactical media device that is ultra-mobile. It is able to transport and support small crews as they investigate the physical properties, cultural realities, and technological topologies of a given space. These missions are seldom long, because the project’s nomadic nature demands that it moves on to the next place to catalyze new activity there. As long as the cultural traces are left behind, however, the legacy of the project can continue and the integrity of the project is preserved.

Much of this groundwork has been laid with the POLAR_TANGENT event which featured presentations and discussions by many residents of Igloolik, including elders like Pauloisie Qulitalik and Isuma Productions president, hunter and fimmaker Zacharias Kunuk, Mary Kunuk of the women’s Arnait Video Productions collective, actor and musician Susan Avingaq, sound artist and producer Jayson Kunuk, and producer at Isuma Productions Katarina Soukup, among many others. When Makrolab Mark VII touches down for its “permanent” visit in 2007, the relationships between local practitioners and the Makrolab team will be well developed, and so the discussion about outcomes and long-term impacts of Makrolab’s research will already be at a high level.

Travelling from place to place, and establishing connections between pockets of data across long distances, Makrolab fashions a global dialogue about place that is based on data it gathered itself. It seeds developers of the project in the places that it temporarily inhabits, who carry on the work it begins. One prominent example is the Makrolab installation on the island of Campalto in the Venice Lagoon during the Venice Biennial of 2003. Makrolab’s activities during its time on Campalto was said to have triggered a “minor revolution in the outlook on the actual ecological situation of the northern Venice lagoon”(3). Makrolab’s legacies also must, of necessity, evolve over time, which further accentuates the importance of local actors who will continue the conversations that started in Makrolab’s context. For though geographical realities remain mostly static (as Donald Trump famously said, “God isn’t making any more real estate” (4)) the patterns of social development, meteorological change, and infrastructure upgrades continue to feed the analysis of the progress of geographic territories we call home.

If new methods of exploration are to ignite local change and stimulate transnational exchange, then exploration has truly evolved. As Makrolab charts new territory in research strands that are rooted in geographic reality but that also fly out radically from that point, we might wonder wistfully what tales Gould might have shared if he were invited to take part in Makrolab’s Nunavut mission, since it will surely take the idea of north to whole new levels of creative analysis.

Notes

1. Glenn Gould, The Idea of North, Radio Documentary, CBC, 1967.
2. Personal communication
3. Mobitel report
4. Unknown. Attributed to Trump, but possibly Yogi Berra? Ivana Trump? Henry Kissinger?

Biography

Michelle Kasprzak is a curator, writer, and artist. Since winning the InterAccess Emerging Electronic Artist award in her early career, Michelle has proceeded to present her work across North America and Europe. As a writer, Michelle has been published in magazines such as Mute, Spacing, Broken Pencil, and Public, and recently contributed an essay to the book Hothaus Papers: Perspectives and Paradigms in Media Arts. Her recent curatorial projects include an online exhibition for Gallery TPW/Virtual Museums of Canada, and In-Site Montreal, an exhibition of site-specific artworks on wireless internet portal pages. She is currently based in Edinburgh, UK, and is the Programmes Director of New Media Scotland.

http://michelle.kasprzak.ca

POLAR_TANGENT video link (interview with Zach Kunuk)