Excerpts from chapter 3
TRIBUTARIES // Toronto
Electric Hauntings and Premonitions
“Our language is poorly suited to describe the complexity of technological interactions. The interconnectedness of many of those processes, the fact that they are so completely interrelated, defies our normal push-me-pull-you cause-and-consequence metaphors. How does one speak to something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?”
-Ursula Franklin,
The Real World of Technology
The Sky Unearths
Storms have a way of bringing up all kinds of things, from the hair on our heads when in the crosshairs of lightning, to the uprooting of trees, to the sediment washed away, unearthing forgotten objects and structures, like the WWI-era railroad in Cape May, New Jersey, that resurfaced in the wake of a coastal storm in May 2022. Forgotten architectures of infrastructure are not only resurrected into prominence by being resurfaced and made visible to the naked eye but also when submerged further below. Torontonians experienced this in 2005 when a powerful downfall drove Garrison Creek, buried and channelled through a pneumatic tube sewer system in the early 1900s, to flood Christie Pits, Trinity Bellwoods Park, and the train underpass of King and Atlantic Street.
The hurricane grade storm had also impacted the campus of York University. Anders Sandberg, Professor of Geography at York University, looks closely at the cause of the estimated 45 million dollar damage that ravaged Finch Avenue, which included broken water and gas mains, service holes, blocked and overflowed sewers, flooded 4,200 basements, and caused months of traffic disruptions. In light of the extreme weather events due to climate change, Sandberg questions whether this level of destruction could have been avoided. Sandberg looks at the role city planning had in these calamitous consequences, narrowing in on the alterations of the watershed and how, if at all, York University bore any responsibility for the damage on Finch Avenue.
Before the development of the York University campus, approximately half of the watershed in that area drained to the Don River, and the other half ran into the Humber River Watershed (Sandberg, 2017). The ensuing sewage system redirected all of the water to the Humber watershed, making room for campus construction, channelling the water into Stong Pond, a stormwater pond, designed to retain water to prevent flooding; from there it flows to Hoover and Black Creek, the Humber River, then Lake Ontario. The pond, often at its full capacity, is not large enough to hold such large amounts of water, nor is the York University Storm Sewer built in 1963. Sandberg made the case that expanding this pond was not an answer to the overflow of rainwater, and that a more holistic approach was needed to work with nature, rather than to radically reshape it, in order to avoid such severe results in the future. If there were more trees, he argues, the water would run into the ground, allowing soil absorption, rather than just redirection, which caused the severe downstream consequences of flooding throughout Finch Avenue in 2005. Despite concerted efforts from Sandberg, colleagues, and students, the pond was expanded nevertheless. The pollution of Stong Pond proliferated throughout the re-channelled water systems, and the very downstream consequences Anders warns of had become visually and infra-structurally evident, as they often do, once a major incident occurs.
But what is happening in the time being, when our alterations of natural landscapes aren’t impacting us as overtly as we see with a torrential flood? A subtle shift in the ecosystem occurred when the yellow spotted salamander made a home within the human-made pond, sharing an adaptive habitat with groundhogs, Canada geese, squirrels, mink, and muskrat. The manmade pond supports these species and native species of deciduous and coniferous trees and shrubs. While this tiny creature offers hope within a dwindling habitat, the campus grounds oscillate between hospitable and unstable. The grasses and other native flora, for instance, are mowed and eliminated, inhibiting further expansion of biodiversity. Though migratory creatures, such as the Canada goose can leave and return with ease, this is not the case for the more habitat dependent creatures, such as the yellow spotted salamander, who may be displaced once again with further expansion of the pond.
There is another factor that threatens vulnerable species in storm ponds; they are teeming with species who do not naturally populate cooler, Ontarian environments. All over the province, retaining water pools and sewer systems are densely populated with goldfish that were released as disowned pets by individuals who may not have been aware of the huge ramifications of their actions. The goldfish feed on insects that inhabit the ponds, competing with the native species of reptiles and amphibians, some of which are endangered, like the yellow-spotted salamander. The feeding habits of carp and koi uproot plants and muddy waters, ultimately destroying habitats. Due to climate change, the water temperatures support the proliferation of goldfish. The warming of the water lowers oxygen levels, which is catastrophic for many fish species, unlike the hearty goldfish. As humans reshape and re-channel bodies of water that feed into creeks and rivers, they make their way to the Great Lakes as unnatural tributaries, bringing the robust and perseverant goldfish with them.
As the famed forester and author Peter Wohlleben tells us, nature is like the mechanism of an enormous clock, in which interconnectedness and interdependence function in a delicate balance. The propensity to underestimate how difficult it is to return nature to its original working order once it has been meddled with is prevalent and wide-ranging across fields of study and industry. Media theorist and historian John Durham Peters argues that humans and their craft have altered all earth and sea based systems, and even systems in the sky, he adds, so much that “nature” as it is defined as something unmolested by humans, only exists where humans have designated and cordoned off as “natural”. He continues that, “The human steering of nature is not always smooth sailing, and stormy weather is blowing on the ship from several directions.” We see this here, at York University, and in a larger context that branches out from the locality of our physical interventions.
With the expansive effects of the Keele Campus of York University in mind, and my interest in marking buried rivers and waterways through publicly accessible poetic gestures, I created a site-specific projection and augmented reality installation entitled Tributaries in October 2022. The multimedia work involved a projection onto fog atop of the reflective pool outside of Vari Hall, as well as an augmented reality installation representing native and invasive species in order to mark and draw attention to the overbuilt watershed veins that coursed beneath the City of Toronto (particularly the watershed of the York University campus area) buried as a result of urban development.
The projection component of Tributaries consists of 3D-animated species that emerge and recede into the whirling ether. Here, we see native species of birds and fish, such as the Canada Goose, Blue Jay, ruby throated hummingbird, minnow, bass, and the Chinook Salmon, as well as invasive species, including the goldfish, muted swan, and koi in an ethereal flurry, as though existing in a shape shifting fog, sharing matter in a unified spirit. The species intermingle through movements of swimming and flying, materializing and dematerializing in the fog. In addition to the progression in the animation where the creatures appear and disappear, the fog itself plays a formal role in the visibility of the content. A gust of wind creates a fade, a shift in direction brings the creatures closer to the viewer, or further away; the elements themselves were editing the projected content, compositionally and in pacing. This made the animated sequence unique in every cycle of the projected loop in an unpredictable, emergent collaboration between myself and the environment.
The salmon once swam up current in the GTA to spawn and feed populations of larger mammals, then giving precious nitrogen to the roots of the forest trees. In the absence of the salmon and other species, the earth itself has changed in its elemental makeup.
In Tributaries, the goldfish, grass carp, the muted swan, at times produce an overwhelming presence within the clouds of fog, but are just as beautiful and as graceful as the Ontarian species in their electric apparition. The 3D animation projected onto the fog also reflects on the water that is at times smooth as glass, and with a wind that swept up the fog, altering the image as the elemental editor, so too did the water’s surface, rippling and diffracting the reflection and affecting the visibility of the concrete below. The ethereality I intended to imbue in the work was swept up to a level I could not have imagined or predicted.
While creating the animation, I imagined the projection would feel contemplative and evoke a sense of animism that would mesmerize and enchant. Nature had a greater hand in shaping the emotional peaks and valleys than I had accounted for, as it always seems to, and the experience of the projection was lively, wild, felt, seen, and heard in concert with the environmental stimuli, like the rustling leaves in the trees surrounding the reflecting pool, the whoosh of the sudden gusts of wind, the obscuring of visibility when the fog was allowed to gather, hiding the surrounding area and those who moved through it, an enveloping, eerie whiteness.
The swans appear to have many heads and tower over the pool, high into the fog. Emerging out from the array of white wings and long necks, swims a giant goldfish, high into the air, joined by two ruby-throated hummingbirds. As the swans flap their powerful wings, the long black necks of Canada geese unfurl snakily into view as an orange glow creates a silhouette within the fog. A bluejay sweeps in from the fog towards the viewers, growing in size and obscuring the array of long-necked waterfowl. In the darkness, a school of Chinook salmon, long absent from the area, swim into the air, followed by giant orange and white koi and goldfish.
As the animals appear and disappear in the whirling fog, it is like a phantasmagoric electric storm. Their movements at times appear to agitate their foggy surroundings, at other times the fog sweeps them away. In this apparition and disappearance, I think of the particles in flux within the quantum field, the frog’s electric future face, the touch of electricity to reanimate deceased specimen. Like lightening in a cloud, the electric image produces fleeting luminous contours and line in the amorphous gaseous forms that traverse across the water’s surface.
To witness this as the artist was intense on an emotional level; at the beginning of the 12-hour-long event, I was wracked with anxiety - the alterations the climate brought forth were so outside of what I had imagined that it felt like an unwieldy error, an oversight that would ruin the work. But as time passed, I relinquished the illusionary sense of control I had imposed on the work, realizing that it was formally in line with the central concept of the work, namely, that humans have no control over the liveliness of nature, despite all of the engineering, landscaping, channelling, and effort we invest in doing so. No matter how we push or pull, the world will spill in and inhabit the spaces we thought we had cleared; all of our solutions to what humans perceive as inconveniences, such as the wildlife that inhabits spaces we have designated for ourselves, have a way of unfurling in unpredicted, adaptive natural ways. While this wildness and unimagined climatic edit may be perceived as a consequence, I grew to welcome it, to marvel and appreciate each change in the wind’s direction, each temporary clouding that hid us in the fog, and grateful for each time my creatures came back, no longer as a projection, but as a sighting. This liveliness felt akin to improvisation, and the flatness of a rendered video became a responsive performer. As the projection and elements married upon and within the fog and the leaves above, they added another layer to the performative facets of projection Gene Youngblood reflected upon during the infancy of video art: “In real-time multiple-projection, cinema becomes a performing art: the phenomenon of image-projection itself becomes the "subject" of the performance and in a very real sense the medium is the message.”
The passersby, some unaware of the event, others having made York a destination for the city-wide event of Nuit Blanche, would at times see nothing other than the reflecting pool with a small gathering of people mulling about, which is not an uncommon occurrence along a campus thoroughfare, to suddenly be confronted with the towering swans, which appeared to have four heads on their long, graceful necks, and as they flapped their powerful white wings in a kind of symmetrical fluttering, the vocal sounds of surprise and wonder filled the air. Then, a goldfish would swim out from the swan’s huddle and into the sky, as Canadian Geese emerged from the darkness with their long black necks. In the surrounding trees, goldfish swam across and through the leaves of the treetops, while others treaded across the fog close to the surface of the water, creating the illusion that they were half submerged, looking upwards as their tails shimmied their plump bodies along.
In the augmented reality component, viewers saw the superimposition of 3D animated fish swimming inches above the concrete. The augmented reality animations were viewable on mobile devices provided to the public onsite (and on a free app available on the App Store) on which viewers were instructed to aim the device’s camera towards illuminated graphic symbols positioned along the circumference of the reflective pool near Vari Hall. The machine vision of the phones or tablets track the graphic to superimpose and anchor the animated content in space, illuminated in the darkness and reflected in the pool of water.
Once activated, it is as though we are looking down into an invisible underground river where fish swim in darkened channels of the pavement, sidewalks, and thoroughfares. Forming a ghostly current, ethereal and silent, they haunt the campus as they slowly swim towards and about the ankles of the viewers. The fish koi, salmon, and goldfish, move as fluidly as the currents they swim in.
Tributaries draws attention to the historical landscape of Toronto as a site that supported a thriving ecosystem where numerous streams, creeks, and rivers fed into the vast body of Lake Ontario. These tributaries unified within the Great Lake, synergistically touching numerous cities, provinces and states, providing drinking water for 9 million people and countless non-humans. Tributaries metaphorically demarcates the overbuilt veins that coursed beneath the City of Toronto, buried as a result of urban development.
In Tributaries, past and present, native and invasive species appear as though in a void, wherein photons blink in and out of view, shift chimerically becoming and unbecoming. Electricity flashes their likeness on amorphous fields, and virtual and physical realms are enmeshed momentarily, mixing water and air figuratively and literally, letting a goldfish swim across the sky. While creating the animation, I imagined the projection would feel contemplative and evoke a sense of animism that would mesmerize and enchant. Nature had a greater hand in shaping the emotional peaks and valleys than I had accounted for, as it always seems to, and the experience of the projection was lively, wild, felt, seen, and heard in concert with the environmental stimuli, like the rustling leaves in the trees surrounding the reflecting pool, the whoosh of the sudden gusts of wind, the obscuring of visibility when the fog was allowed to gather, hiding the surrounding area and those who moved through it, an enveloping, eerie whiteness.
The swans appear to have many heads and tower over the pool, high into the fog. Emerging out from the array of white wings and long necks, swims a giant goldfish, high into the air, joined by two ruby-throated hummingbirds. As the swans flap their powerful wings, the long black necks of Canada geese unfurl snakily into view as an orange glow creates a silhouette within the fog. A bluejay sweeps in from the fog towards the viewers, growing in size and obscuring the array of long-necked waterfowl. In the darkness, a school of Chinook salmon, long absent from the area, swim into the air, followed by giant orange and white koi and goldfish. As the animals appear and disappear in the whirling fog, it is like a phantasmagoric electric storm. Their movements at times appear to agitate their foggy surroundings, at other times the fog sweeps them away.
To view Tributaries from the App Store, click here and download the app onto your mobile device.
Once the app is loaded, aim your device's camera at the symbol below.
