As is reflected in the full name of the exhibition, Public Syntax: SAW Video at Critical Distance, this project was understood and navigated as an act of organizational coexistence. Throughout a joyful process, the conversations that took place between SAW Video and Critical Distance staff were consistently focused on establishing shared fields of interest occurring between the respective mandates, programs and trajectories of our two centres. As both host and guest, each group brought to the table their expertise, positions, materials, and questions that were not only heard and utilized, but generatively pulled in the direction of one another along the way, effectively extending each of our operational reaches.² Through a collaborative spirit, exhibition-making here became a folding-together of two interests and capacities – curatorial practice and the media arts – with a few key areas of mutual exploration being established and set in motion through the processes of making a show together. These resonances became the beginning of a conversation that extended beyond the closing date of the exhibition in a continued exchange of ideas, approaches, projects and programs.³ Before turning to the presented artworks and artists in Public Syntax, I will give an outline of these common folds of thinking and practice, which have now become a material binding through the generous production of this catalogue.

From the outset, the most evident resonance between CDCC and SAW Video was our shared interest in situating art in public space. As a tenant of Artscape Youngplace, CDCC has access to two unique contexts for programming in addition to their exhibition venue: an exterior billboard on Shaw Street, and the interior hallways and stairwells of the building, which is a former public school. Similarly, in 2018, SAW Video launched a multi-year program to build capacity for the production and presentation of large-scale video projections at public sites around Ottawa.⁴ Through these shared organizational capacities, curiosities and trajectories towards publicness, we developed an exhibition framework for Public Syntax that would inhabit a range of different public and semi-public sites available at Artscape Youngplace, and specifically would approach these locations as opportunities to reflect on and experiment with the installation of time-based artworks in non-standard, transitional environments.

The result was a series of video, sound and sculptural works woven throughout the building’s interior and exterior spaces, which a transitory audience, comprised of the various and diverse tenants and visitors at Artscape Youngplace, encountered throughout the duration of the show. Rather than intervene upon or work against these preexisting audience flows, the tactics of installation attempted to position the included works as good neighbours⁵ to them – as elements that could be seamlessly tethered to the already active environment of the sites. This led to a sequencing of works through the spaces moving from the outside to the inside that was conceptualized as the gradual formation of syntax. In other words, we understood the exhibition as occupying and moving through three separate zones, each with distinct viewer speeds and modes of reading, and thus requiring different forms of imagistic and sonic address: 1) on the exterior billboard a single word, without syntax, is encountered and may be read instantly, 2) in the interior halls and stairwells, images and words begin to group together as clusters through the basic ordering logics of lists, databases, and algorithms, and may be read as an ambience, and 3) in-gallery, a place of viewing is constructed that is entirely dependent upon the commitments of linear sentences, speech and choreography, which should be read through a slower, longer-term form of encounter. Through this, the exhibition sought to modulate its forms of address in a way that would not only meet the different scales of attention⁶ being performed by a viewer in motion⁷, but understand these inevitable, minor acts of skimming or passing-by as valued and workable units of interpretation, situating artworks that could still produce effects in these surface-level forms of viewership.

A second organizational resonance was built through an earnest engagement with the mandate of CDCC to focus on collaborative practices. This focus was explored most directly through an experimental curatorial mode of “collective editing” that was taken up with certain artists and groups in the production and presentation of specific works, in particular by those situated in gallery⁸. This practice involved operating the malleability of digital video editing as a material and process through which to mediate between different artists and their works – a conversational mode through which collectivities would progressively form and build together towards the development of a shared, linear edit. In this discursive approach, artists generously negotiated as a group to discuss, modify, and produce agreement about when their images or sounds would occur in relation to one another within a sequence. The breath of a duration, the weight of an image, the movement of a sound’s grammars – these were some of the qualities through which certain artists in the show would come to situate and nest their work within the temporalities of the other, establishing through this a common video-based syntax from which to speak together.

Thirdly, a fruitful exchange around questions of access occurred throughout Public Syntax, much in thanks to the generous work and expertise of Emily Cook, CDCC’s Education and Accessibility Coordinator, whose input around issues of accessibility influenced our curatorial conversations from the very beginning of the project. At the early stages, we arrived at a point of critique with how strategies for making exhibitions accessible were often applied as after-the-fact additions to an already finished show or artwork, and we began to think about how this project could provide a unique opportunity to not only address and involve accessibility strategies differently, but do so in an experimental, considered and integrated way. While unable to apply this approach fully across all works, we chose to focus our thinking most intently on a single work that was being produced collaboratively by the Video in the Public Sphere Working Group – a consortium of artists, critics, and curators in Ottawa that was holding seminars in relation to public presentation programming at SAW Video’s Knot Project Space⁹. Through screenings and readings, the Working Group was at the time examining durational, lens-based capture as a form of documentation that could preserve the irreducible complexity of a site and the unknowability of place through performing an excess of description¹⁰. Beyond reflecting on these tactics in discussion, the group also began generating a collection of long takes and field recordings that put these claims to the test – material that would later be given shape through a process of collective editing, as has been described above.

In discussing with CDCC the dynamics of this work that were taking place in Ottawa, we identified and pursued an affinity occurring between these claims of descriptive lens-based capture and the processes of descriptive audio and captioning that make a moving image work accessible to a deaf or blind audience. As the video work was being collectively produced by the Working Group, Cook and I engaged with Descriptive Audio / Video Describer Wanda Fitzgerald, and spoke with her about the concepts being pursued by the group, before she wrote captions and recorded audio descriptions for the images and sounds of the collective edit. Given that the nature of the shots by the artists was durational and protracted, Fitzgerald’s descriptive processes were encouraged and able to unfold in great detail and abundance, describing and making visible otherwise overlooked perceptions of the images and sounds:

A field of ice fills the screen. Daytime. There is a jagged semicircular ridge of ice. Centre, top third of the screen. The left side of the ridge is lit by golden sunlight. It gives the impression of the crest of a wave. Wavy lines of frozen water mottle the image. The colours are bright white and stark. [external space, building cold oscillation, cars passing, quiet rumble, distant whisper, hollow swirling, shifting, chilly resonance, tiny crunching, muffled footsteps]. The image changes.

These descriptions were ultimately treated and understood not as additions to the work but as integral inflections of the images themselves that added to the complexity of their reception. This integrated positioning of this content is reflected in the unconventional inclusion of the descriptive audio recording also as a subtitle in the work, suggesting that the voice-over was a diegetic sound, or part of the world of the image, as if Fitzgerald herself was narrating from behind the camera. This process not only made the eventual video work accessible to a range of viewers, but also developed, expanded upon, and enriched the concepts of a descriptive irreducibility, with the captions continuously uncovering perceptual layers that were not apparent or available on first glance. The video that was produced, Thicker Realities, was an act of assemblage¹¹ that sought to show how accessibility strategies could be approached as deeply creative processes. It is both an examination and proof of how, when given adequate time and consideration from the outset, accessibility can produce a generative and insightful parallel lens that runs alongside the image, producing a vibrant and vital stereoscopy through which to encounter, represent and construct a world.

Lastly, there was a considered effort for Public Syntax to respond and rise up to CDCC’s mandate of “advancing curatorial inquiry”. Through the supportive environment at CDCC, as a guest curator I was encouraged to experiment with and pursue alternative curatorial protocols for presenting time-based artworks in a group show context, which opened trajectories for future research that I will briefly present here as a closing, before turning attention to the individual works. As mentioned, Public Syntax behaved as an exhibition with a linear sequence: as a trajectory to be traveled through in one direction, and back again. While the drifting in and out by visitors of this sequencing was certainly inevitable and frequent throughout the show, conceiving of and approaching the exhibition in this way opened up a conceptual space through which to consider the relations between the included works beyond their spatial proximities to one another, and instead navigate their coexistences through temporal, sonic, and musical registers. Throughout the production of the exhibition, I returned to and discussed consistently questions such as: How can one work echo, bleed into, or nest itself within the next through time? How can the overlapping perceptual territories of works in a group exhibition operate as a polyphony rather than a cacophony, and share space rather than being isolated in headphones or separate rooms? How can the placing of individual works collectively sustain and build a rhythm or syntax together as they are sequentially navigated? While the tactics that emerged from these questions were only minorly explored in this case, the process of collaborative exhibition-making taken up through Public Syntax pointed towards how the curation of time-based works can operate through a similarly time-based curatorial practice. This would be an approach to exhibition-making that meets and converses with time-based artworks on their own temporal terms, behaviors and modes of organization, inhabiting and extending these towards new curatorial protocols that are also rooted in a negotiation of time. Such a time-based curatorial practice would necessarily move away from the habits of juxtaposing artworks in space, to instead be guided by qualities and senses of momentum, rhythm, and syntax as relational tools for creating coexistence and agreement between works, if effect producing and sustaining artist cultures that figure themselves as causal, sequential acts of assemblage. These sites would not narrate failure or generate a mutual destabilization of meaning¹², but rather participate in the active production of it through the enunciation of a collective, directional utterance, built on temporal commitments and propelled by the syntax of a common edit. Such an approach would speak, and project, an exhibition as a sentence¹³.

– Neven Lochhead

¹The title of this essay is an excerpt of a caption which appears in an included work in the exhibition, Thicker Realities, produced by the Video in the Public Sphere Working Group. Captions for the work were written by Descriptive Audio / Video Describer, Wanda Fitzgerald.

²“Perhaps the question of scale exceeds the presupposition of smallness, because it is a matter of experimenting with the capacities of the organization each time. No one knows what an institution can do just as nobody knows what a body can do. Only the practice of exhibition making gives the organization a sense of what it is capable of inventing – of its range, of its reach, its core, its expertise, its strength, its focus, its sense of what is possible, feasible, imaginable, inevitable.” (Kuduo Eshun, “Orphan Black,” presented at Public Assets: small-scale arts organizations and the production of value, Central Saint Martins, London, 2015).

³CDCC and SAW Video continued their organizational exchange following the exhibition when CDCC Director Shani K Parsons did a research residency in SAW Video’s Knot Project Space in December 2019. The residency was used to develop strategies for an exhibition curated by Parsons that echoed elements of Public Syntax as it unfolded in the transitional spaces of a building in Toronto.

⁴Funded by Ontario Trillium Foundation, this capacity building project culminated in an extended public art exhibition, Imagining Publics, which featured new commissions by five Ottawa artists installed at four outdoor locations throughout the city from August-November 2019.

⁵I am referencing here an included work in the exhibition, Henry Andersen’s Stanzas or the Law of the Good Neighbour, a language-based sound work installed in the stairwell. More details about this work can be found in the following section of the catalogue. While not referenced directly by Andersen, the concept of the Law of the Good Neighbour stems from Aby Warburg’s non-alphabetical, thematically-driven organizational principle that was the foundation of his library.

⁶“Publicity and Art know no scale. From a grandiose projection on a building façade to a passing gesture on an escalator*, art and publicity is not contingent on mass visibility, nor does it refute such forms of popular attention. Art and publicity proceed by moments, struggling with, around and against the economization of attention, no matter how subtle, fleeting or extravagant these moments of attentiveness may be. *In admiration of Jiří Kovanda’s 1977 public action on an escalator in central Prague, where he turned around to gaze fixedly at the person behind him.” (Patricia Reed, “Ten Theses on Publicity and Art,” from I am in Public Space. Edited by Alissa Firth-Eagland, 2011.)

⁷In October 2019, artist, educator and researcher Dave Colangelo delivered a public lecture at SAW Video’s Knot Project Space and held a related seminar with a group of Ottawa artists. The seminar gave attention to the “space around the screen” in public projection and introduced ideas about presenting works to a transitional viewership.

⁸This process is seen reflected most directly in the gallery works: Thicker Realities by the Video in the Public Sphere Working Group and Between Pieces of Our Pasts, a two-channel work by Ivanie Aubin-Malo and naakita feldman-kiss, both produced through this exhibition.

⁹Knot Project Space is a venue at SAW Video that opened in January 2018 as part of the centre’s major expansion into a new location. It is a purpose-built gallery meant for the presentation of media arts.  www.knotsawvideo.com

¹⁰The group watched Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park, followed by a seminar with Professor Malini Guha that discussed the film alongside the text “The Reality-Based Community” by Erika Balsom, which references the film heavily. About Everson and others, Balsom writes: “These films retreat from any posture of domination to instead provide thick description of the irreducible complexity of the world, its vital excessiveness and ambiguity.” (e-flux, 2017). The ideas Balsom presents about an observational mode in ethnographic documentary were transposed to considerations of documenting site and place throughout the conversation.

¹¹I am referring to ‘assemblage’ here in the technical sense of video editing as an act of assembling images and sounds, but also in the sense of a group assembly or a social act of collective thinking. In an interview with Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, Isabelle Stengers speaks about the importance of “collective assemblages of enunciation” saying: “An assemblage is political to the extent that those who participate in it both experiment with and experience its fabrication, fine-tune it and feel its effects.” (“History through the Middle: Between Macro and Meso Politics,” from INFLeXions No. 3 – Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Edited by Nasirin Himada, Erin Manning and Leslie Plumb, www.inflexions.org, 2011).

¹²These ideas are influenced by the artistic practice, texts and critiques of artist and writer Amanda Beech, who delivered a closing lecture to the exhibition titled Constructing Time, at Critical Distance on April 1, 2019. Discussing the objectives of her constructivist practice, Beech said in her lecture: “I didn’t want to say no to and give up on the future. I didn’t want to make art that narrated its own failure to think a future. […] I wanted to find out how commitments in the present are made in the production of ideas, images and artworks, and how they can extend and infer commitments in time to the future.” (Toronto, 2019).

¹³“A sentence means that there is a future.” (Gertrude Stein, Arthur a Grammar, 1928).