Full Panel
Panelists
Professors Shelley Hornstein (York University)
Louis Kaplan, (University of Toronto)
& Melissa Shiff (University of Toronto)
Panel Chair and Organizer: Professor Janine Marchessault (York University)
Biographies
Shelley Hornstein is Professor of Architectural History & Visual Culture at York University. Her work looks at the intersection of memory and place in architectural and urban sites.
Melissa Shiff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and the director of the Mapping Ararat project for which she was awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. Website: www.melissashiff.com
Louis Kaplan is Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media, University of Toronto, and Chair, Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga. He holds cross-appointments in the Department of Art, the Cinema Studies Institute, the Knowledge Media Design Institute, and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Janine Marchessault is Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Professor in the Department of Film at York University.
Panel Description
What if? This panel discusses the possibilities for homeland constructions with invented architectural objects in mobile space reflecting on an augmented reality (AR) project that delivers new (hi)stories for new screens on the site of a failed Jewish homeland on Grand Island, New York. What if, through the analytical lens of inventiveness, subversion and irony, a heritage tour using a mobile phone application could visit and build on the ruins of a rejected proposal to construct a homeland? At the heart of this discussion, the panelists will explore the architecturally driven AR project Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project by Melissa Shiff, Louis Kaplan, and Craig Freeman. This collaborative digital art and humanities work in progress reanimates Mordecai Noah’s 1825 plan to transform Grand Island (located in the Niagara River near Buffalo on the border between the United States and Canada) into Ararat, a “city of refuge for the Jews.” The panel will focus on how Mapping Ararat utilizes augmented reality in order to promote learning and to spark the imagination.
Shelley Hornstein will consider how we imagine identity flows by paying special attention to the evolving conversation between architecture as a fixed physical place and digital interventions in urban space that move in and out of place. Mapping Ararat deploys situated technologies (augmented reality and simulated geo-spatial mapping specifically) to image and imagine a failed homeland project. As a result, it raises important questions that complicate and problematize considerations of material culture, imagined homelands and cartography, and ultimately, the notion of the fixity of identity and place. In the absence of a richly documented history, Jewish culture and heritage yearn for such places as Ararat where deep archival vaults of tangible heritage – architecture in particular – might provide evidence of lost individual and collective Jewish nationhood.
Melissa Shiff who serves as the lead artist for the Mapping Ararat project and Principal Investigator offers an overview of the research-creation aspects of the project. She will review the major components of the on-site Ararat augmented reality walking tour that consists of a series of electronic monuments, buildings, and landmarks (including a virtual synagogue, gravestones, and even a port of entry). The augmented reality walking tour constitutes a new creative practice that engages local, ethnic, academic, and technological communities. Shiff will outline how this specific use of geo-location software (Layar) enables a new mode of Virtual Jewish Tourism. This allows not only for knowledge mobilization but also a powerful affective experience that includes a range of poignant and humorous responses. Shiff also will review how Mapping Ararat involves the creation of vernacular artifacts common to all modern nation-states (whether money, flags, postcards, or newspapers) to provide simulations of statehood.
As chief researcher and theorist on Mapping Ararat, Louis Kaplan will address directly how this augmented reality project crafts an “historical fiction” through the use of visual media in order to imagine new horizons and possibilities for thinking about community, history, and (digital) diaspora. In particular, Mapping Ararat poses an alternative universe that incorporates augmented reality to plot what would have occurred if Noah’s plan had been instituted and if history had gone a different way. In light of Ararat’s electronic monuments, the mobile camera offers not a transparent window but a spectral refraction to reanimate paths not taken but still haunting the scene. Thus, Kaplan’s presentation reviews how Mapping Ararat conjures the Jewish phantoms that haunt the contemporary landscape of Grand Island.