In an empty landscape a storm is announced by uprising sand, moving objects, silent people and a traffic jam on a narrow road.
In een leeg landschap wordt een storm aangekondigd door het oprispende zand, bewegende dingen, stille mensen en een file op een smalle weg.
Curlew is an interactive, multimedia poem about one man's encounter with the forces of nature. The narrative centers on Catsinas, a fisherman living alone in a makeshift shack on Curlew, one of several barrier islands in the Gulf Coast known as the Chandeleurs. Based on a true account, the story chronicles the man's futile attempt to save Curlew's shoreline to a storm's destruction of his adopted home.
The work entails the use of a Kinect Game System that allows for the audience to interact with the poem and participate in the narrative.
STRUTS is an algorithmic narrative collage created from a collection of fragments of facts and fictions pertaining to a place and its people, history, geography and storm events. Narrative resonates in the spaces between the texts horizontally scrolling across the screen, the flickering updating of monthly tide gauge averages, the occasional appearance of live weather weather warnings pulled in by RSS feed and the animated set of photographs of the ends of the struts that support the seawall that protectsa portion of foreshore from the rising tides of the Northumberland Strait. The photographs were taken on May 23, 2011 the second day of a five-week stint as Open Studio Artist in Residence at Struts Gallery and Faucet Media Lab, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, May 22 – June 26, 2011. The Saxby Gale of 1869 is the storm we compare all possible storms to. The tide gauge data represents the monthly tide gauge averages for Shediac Bay from the month I was born to the month I moved from Canada to England. The gauge that measured these averages was destroyed in the same storm surge that damaged the struts in the photographs, onl the night of 21 December 2010. The Tantramar Marsh text is excerpted from Writing Coastlines: The Operation of Estuaries, Islands and Beaches as Liminal Spaces in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop, a paper written in residence at Struts and presented at "It Must Be Nova Scotia: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop" which took place at University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 10-12, 2011.
"These struts support the seawall that protects the foreshore in front of Linda Rae Dornan’s cottage from the Northumberland strait. The seawall was severely damaged 21 December 2010 during the third nor'easter in as many weeks. It was a full moon, and a lunar eclipse. Winds gusted to 100 kilometres an hour. The tide gauge at Charlottetown showed 3.494 metres above chart datum at 21:40. The tide gauge at Shediac was destroyed by the surge. Many STRUTS in Linda’s seawall were torn out or twisted. The holes were filled with stones. A rug was laid, covered with rip-rap and new soil, and seeded with grass. Boulders on the beach support the seawall now, thousands of dollars worth. The wall itself and the struts that support it are no longer visible."
STRUTS. STRUCTURAL MEMBERS, AS IN TRUSSES, PRIMARILY INTENDED TO RESIST LONGITUDINAL COMPRESSION. EMBANKMENTS MEANT TO PREVENT EROSION OF SHORELINES. BRACE OR SUPPORT BY MEANS OF STRUTS OR SPURS. SPURS. OBLIQUE REINFORCING PROPS OR STAYS OF TIMBER OR MASONRY. ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT. ON IMPULSE. SPURS TO ACTION. STRUTS. WALKS WITH HEAD ERECT AND CHEST THROWN OUT, AS IF EXPECTING TO IMPRESS OBSERVERS. WITH PROUD BEARING. PARADES, FLOURISHES. STRUTS AND SWAGGERS. STRUTS GALLERY. SUPPORTS BY MEANS OF STRUTS. STRUCTURAL MEMBERS SPUR STRUTS TO ART ACTION. WALKS WITH HEAD ERECT ALONG LONGITUDINAL EMBANKMENTS. SEAWALLS BRACED BY SPURS. STAYS. PREVENT EROSION. OF MOMENTS. OBLIQUELY.
STRUTS is composed in HTML, CSS and javascript. It is best viewed full screen. It requires an internet connection to run as one page element contains an RSS feed called by the Google API.