Media Cosmologies: A conversation with Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Callum Beckford

Agnes Etherington Art Centre - Atrium

Since the mid-1990s when world wide web first swung into public view, the net art works of Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) have explored and articulated the radical possibilities of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) within the emergent, evolving landscape of digital culture. Among Turtle Island ¹ú²ú´«Ã½ ’s earliest adopters of the web as an artistic medium and most cogent theorists of its significance as a space of cultural self-determination and survivance, L’Hirondelle has created and co-created a body of artworks and texts that are crucial not only to understanding the full histories of media art and the internet, but also to imagining their futures –– Isi-pîkiskwêwin-Ayapihkêsîsak (Speaking the Language of Spiders, with Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, 1996),Dene/Cree ElderSpeak: Tales of the Heart and Spirit (with Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, 1998),  treatycard (2004), Horizon Zero 17: TELL (2004), and ·Éê±è¾±²Ôâ²õ´Ç·É¾±²Ô²¹ (2005), among others.

This public program celebrates the ongoing restoration of one of these projects, vancouversonglines.ca (2008). Alongside talks by artists Cheryl L’Hirdondelle and Callum Beckford, vancouversonglines.ca will be presented in a legacy environment on computer terminals in Agnes’ atrium, giving the public access to this work for the first time in years.

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