~Broken Pencil Magazine~

PUBLIC 40: Screens
Edited by: Susan Lord, Dorit Naaman, and Jennifer VanderBurgh

PUBLIC 40: Screens features twenty artists, curators and researchers who investigate and respond to new spaces of viewing and changing patterns of consumption —from Quebec to Palestine, from streets to galleries— with a variety of aesthetic, technological and distribution tactics. From Kelly Mark’s The Kiss to Elaine Ho and Sean Smith’s project responding to the Beijing Olympics, from Bruno Lessard’s essay about Robert Lepage’s Le Moulin à images to Holly Lewis’s "Wars of Air and Electricity," Screens is dedicated to the ways screens are used, viewed, imagined, placed, and made worldwide.  The contributions together consider how the internet and communication networks enable screens to become sites of a multiplicity of localities, cultures and citizenship practices. While the increased presence of screens in a variety of art forms and public places complicates and enriches patterns of consumption, Jan Allen’s curation on the aesthetics of surveillance, with works by Arnold Koroshegyi, David Kemp, Germaine Koh illuminates how cameras and screens are also used for surveillance of nearly every aspect of civilian life. Collectively, the articles and artists’ projects in this issue suggest that screen technology embodies a tension between the mobility/immobility of citizens, with a special dossier on how mobile screens make old and new forms of citizenship possible.

Contents include:

• Bruno Lessard, "Site-Specific Screening and the Projection of Archives: Robert Lepage’s Le Moulin à images"
• Holly Lewis, "The Wars of Air and Electricity"
• Erika Balsom, "Screening Rooms: The Movie Theatre in/and the Gallery"
• Michael Darroch and Kim Nelson, "Windsoria: Border/Screen/Environment"
• Janine Marchessault, "Of Bicycles and Films: The Case of CineCycle"
• Jan Allen curates "Data Dances: The Aesthetics of Surveillance. Works by Arnold Koroshegyi, David Kemp, Germaine Koh"
• Mirjiam Struppek reports on Media Architectures
• Elaine Ho and Sean Smith present their artist project "17 Days in Beijing: Screen of Consciousness on the Micropolitical"
• Raul Balanquet presents the multi-screen installation "Merida T'Ho_MX"
• Mobile Cinema dossier edited Tamara Falicov and including a 1963 essay about Cuban mobile cinema, and essays about contemporary hand-held Korean films and mobile cinema in the British Empire.

PUBLIC 41: Gardens
Edited by Erin Despard and Monika Kin Gagnon

In Greater Perfections (2000), John Dixon Hunt identifies some thirty-two gardens including rose gardens, vegetable gardens, landscape gardens, cloister gardens, bog gardens, therapeutic gardens, container gardens, and corpse gardens. Contributors to PUBLIC 41: Gardens add even more types. In the 24 contributions to this issue, there are the "botanicuratorial" museum gardens discussed by J. Keri Cronin; the school gardens analyzed by Kai Wood Mah; and the special form of allotment garden such as the Alex Wilson Community Garden, animated by Richard Brault. Gina Badger critiques the ‘seed bomb’ by guerilla gardeners; Jill Didur comments on Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers; and there are two new texts from French garden designer Gilles Clément, whose gardens have been influential (and controversial) in the worlds of ecological garden design, landscape theory, and garden studies.

Gardens by artists include:

• Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell’s Dymaxion Sleep, created for the 2009 International Garden Festival at Grand-Métis, Québec;
• Broken City Lab’s ‘removable gardens’ in Windsor, Ontario;
• Oliver Kellhammer’s Concrete Island (2006), a found garden of flourishing weeds and indigenous flora in Vancouver;
• Mike MacDonald’s A Butterfly Garden (2004);
• The Wayward Plants Registry;
• Aviva Rahmani’s Trigger Point Garden, which is artwork, and ecological restoration.

Many contributions ask what the implications of bringing formerly excluded elements, or the garden’s ‘other’ within the scope of its study? Wilderness, the uncontrollable, weeds, and even the unattractive—what do these philosophical and aesthetic species bring to the garden’s ecology?