Dave Semeniuk
Dave Semeniuk spends hours locked up in his office, thinking about the role the oceans play in controlling global climate, and unique ways of studying it. He'd also like to shamelessly plug his art practice: davidsemeniuk.com
March 4, 2013 – 8:48 pm
There’s an interesting and short – it ends Friday – exhibition in the lobby of the Lasserre building (map). Passing Encounters: Towards a Visual Archive of Vancouver Public Culture was put together by AHVA lecturer Alice Campbell and Prof. Charlotte Townshend-Gault. The exhibition critiques the presentation and representation of a dominant visual culture in Vancouver. I’d say more, but I think the curatorial statement says plenty. From the Facebook event page:
This exhibition offers a visual archive of Art History 376 and 377 students’ passing encounters with the multiple forms of Aboriginal representation that circulate in Vancouver’s public culture. Many of these are forms of Northwest Coast art and design. Others are forms of non-Northwest Coast Aboriginal art while others still are Non-Native produced imagery that trade on widely recognized icons and stereotypes. The ubiquity of these often ephemeral forms in Vancouver ensures that they are genuinely hegemonic: highly visible, yet seldom noticed.
This archive emerges from two class projects in which the students of Art History 376 and 377 (Arts of the Northwest Coast Peoples: The North and The South) in 2012/2013 photographed the Aboriginal and Aboriginal-inspired imagery that they encountered in their everyday lives. They used whatever cameras they had on hand, ranging from cell phone cameras to DSLRs. In both classes, students carefully noted what information about the objects and images is made available to passers-by and what is obscured. Students asked questions about the objects, including how they and the objects came to occupy the same space. They considered their own shifting relations to the objects, and how these are structured by the colonial past and its enduring effects in the present.
The individual photographs, and the archive as a whole, are material traces of the students’ everyday travels, spaces, histories and habits. They offer a situated perspective, determined by the spaces the students travel through, and the objects and images they encounter there. Alone and together, the photographs provoke reflections on the role these objects and images play in our everyday lives. They point to the complexity of Aboriginal life, presence and representation in this multicultural, cosmopolitan city.
The exhibition is experimental with respect to both curatorship and education. It’s an attempt to share the collective knowledge generated in our classrooms with a wider community. Just as these objects have come into visibility for the 376/377 students, we hope our audience will increasingly notice these objects and images in their everyday lives. In other words, the exhibition is not a passive representation of Northwest Coast art, but rather an active incitement to look, to notice, to reflect and to inquire.
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January 3, 2013 – 1:15 pm
From Business Vancouver:
The federal panel reviewing the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal will be in Vancouver later this month to hear final oral arguments for and against the $6 billion project.
The proposal is in the final stage of hearings with the Joint Review Panel of the National Energy Board and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.
Enbridge wants to build a twin 1,170-kilometre pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat, with diluted bitumen flowing from Alberta to Kitimat, and condensate (used to dilute the oil) in the other direction.
The panel will be in Victoria January 4 to 11 and Vancouver January 14 to 18, and January 30 to February 1 at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre.
The meetings are for the general public, but speakers had to register in October 2011. Roughly 700 people are registered to speak at meetings in Victoria, Vancouver and Kelowna.
Members of the general public who will not be addressing the panel but who want to attend must go to a special public viewing area, where the proceedings are broadcast live. Public viewing venues are at the following locations and times:
- January 14 to 18, the Westin Bayshore, 1601 Bayshore Drive, Vancouver; and
- January 30 to February 1, Vancouver Marriot Pinnacle Downtown and Renaissance
Vancouver Harbourside Hotel, 1128 West Hastings Street.
The meetings are held at varying times. Check here for start times.
Once the panel has heard from the general public, it will resume the questioning phase of the final hearings in Prince Rupert. The questioning phase continues until mid-May. Final arguments take place from mid-May to the end of June 2013.
The panel will release its recommendations December 31, 2013.
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December 5, 2012 – 8:33 pm
The Vancouver Aquarium is hosting Drs. Louis Fortier and David Barber on December 10, 6:15-8:15pm.
The Vancouver Aquarium invites you to join us for a unique opportunity to hear directly from the experts at a free public event. The Arctic that our grandchildren describe will be dramatically different from that of today. The causes and consequences of these changes reach across our entire planet. Two of Canada’s leading authorities on the changing Arctic environment will look ahead to 2060 and discuss what we can expect in the face of continued Arctic change. This is a rare opportunity to hear Doctors Louis Fortier and David Barber discuss their views on a subject of global importance, and to ask your questions directly of the experts.
RSVP here (link).
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November 19, 2012 – 9:58 am
Mine Kafon | Callum Cooper from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.
When we were young we learned to make our own toys. One of my favourites was a small rolling object that was wind-powered. We used to race against the other kids on the fields around our neighbourhood. There was always a strong wind waving towards the mountains. While we were racing against each other, our toys rolled too fast and too far. Mostly they landed in areas where we couldn’t go rescue them because of landmines. I still remember those toys I’d made that we lost and watching them just beyond where we could go.
(source)
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October 26, 2012 – 12:43 pm
UBC’s geography dept. is hosting Loïc Wacquant from UC-Berkley at the Liu Institute of Global Issues.
Time: Thursday, 1 November, 4:00 – 6:00 pm
Abstract:
Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social space and symbolic power, I build a bridge between my books Urban Outcastsand Punishing the Poor to bring into a single model the emergence of the “precariat” and shifts in public policies aimed at managing problem populations and territories in the dualizing city. I track the rise of a new regime of “advanced marginality” characterized by the fragmentation of wage labor, the recoiling of social protection, and territorial stigmatization. I show how states have responded to the objective and subjective social insecurity this regime has spawned through “punitive containment,” by deploying the police, courts, and carceral institutions in and around neighborhoods of relegation. I propose that international variations in the intensity, concentration, and segmentation of advanced marginality are matched by differences in the vigor and modalities of penalization, in keeping with the architecture of the bureaucratic field and the texture of citizenship evolved by each country.
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January 5, 2012 – 7:27 pm
This year’s winner: the 2012 Republican candidates for the President of the United States (article)
Some choice quotes:
Rick Santorum: “There is no such thing as global warming…it’s just an excuse for more government control of your life and I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.” (source)
Mitt Romney: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.” (source)
Ron Paul: “I think war and financial crises and big governments marching into our homes and elimination of habeas corpus — those are immediate threats. We’re about to lose our whole country and whole republic! If we can be declared an enemy combatant and put away without a trial, then that’s going to affect a lot of us a lot sooner than the temperature going up.” (source)
Newt Gingrich: ““I’m an amateur paleontologist…I spend a lot of time looking at the Earth’s temperature for a very long time. I’m a lot harder to convince than just looking at a computer model.” (source)
Rick Perry: “I do think global warming has been politicised … We are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing our climate to change. Yes, our climate has changed. It has been changing ever since the Earth was formed. But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have, in some cases, been found to be manipulating data.” (source)
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