Lightning Talk
Mary Elizabeth Luka
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar | HASTAC Scholar | PhD candidate (ABD)
Joint Program in Communication, Concordia University
Biography
Mary Elizabeth Luka’s scholarly research and teaching interests focus on production practices and creativity in cultural media production and more generally the creative and cultural industries, and the intriguing dynamics—and personal/professional networks— generated at the intersection of the arts, broadcasting and digital production.
Abstract
What was the generative relationship between art and digital media in Canada at the cusp of the 21st century? It is not easy to find a quiet place to rethink creative practices and spaces, and find pathways through archival materials, communications methodologies, potentially totalizing narratives and theoretical frameworks about the work of art and artists in relation to broadcast and digital media. That is what I have set out to do: seek the eye of the storm in order to look back, look around and look out, if indeed I am in a storm at all. By digging into the video art and public broadcasting roots of CBC ArtSpots – an innovative, decade-long digital and television program in Canada – through visual, textual, aural and not always digital constructions, I intend to cast light (or at least, cast productive aspersions) on the helpfulness of mobilizing old and new methodological and creative processes side-by-side with theoretical structures and strictures. This is a deliberative mash-up of scatterings of post-it notes, workflows incorporating Evernote(s) and field notes, hard-copy bibliographies and handcrafted reflections, mappings of my house of theory, and the themes and questions that arise through tilling the verdant soil of discussion groups and in-depth interviews. These seemingly chaotic and seductively productive incursions hurtle me into provocative interrogations of vernacular and cultural citizenship, the creative commons and the cultural industries, interrupting and tracing a concept of creative citizenship that may be brilliant and/or deeply flawed but all in all seems helpful. Must progress always be forward moving? Of course not, but storm-filled momentum – yes, how tempting it is to attempt to get in front of it, and how necessary, instead, to seek the calm offered at the core.