{"id":3820,"date":"2020-09-14T15:43:19","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T21:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/snapartists.com\/snapline\/wasting-away-together\/"},"modified":"2022-06-13T17:56:06","modified_gmt":"2022-06-13T23:56:06","slug":"wasting-away-together","status":"publish","type":"snapline","link":"https:\/\/snapartists.com\/snapline\/wasting-away-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Wasting Away Together"},"content":{"rendered":"
Written by Megan Gnanasihamany<\/strong><\/p>\n Early this spring, when the closure of the border between the United States and Canada had just been announced, a friend video-called from Oregon. I threw out a pile of paper (notes, receipts, half-finished grocery lists) that was taking up space on my desk, and answered. The signal fluttered in and out, a side effect of the University of Oregon\u2019s free wifi network; as the video lurched frame to frame, Dana Buzzee and I abandoned our summer plans.<\/p>\n Since meeting in Calgary in 2016, Dana and I have written collaboratively, curated each other\u2019s work, and provided critique from afar, maintaining the sense of long term, creative vulnerability that characterizes friendship between artists. We visit in person once a year during my annual return trip to Edmonton, and invariably our conversation follows the same, undiscussed route: we catch up\u2013\u201dwhat are you working on\u201d becomes \u201cremember when…\u201d \u2013 and the track ends where it always does: on collaboration. For all the poetic potential within notions of collective effort and a loss of ego, creating beyond the scope of what one could do alone, there is a specific intimacy to the work of collaboration: the physicality of sharing tools, space, and intention side-by-side in the process of making together. In the spring, when Dana called, we spoke about collaboration and landed on a challenge: how to reproduce the physicality of working together, that side-by-side feeling, across nearly 5000 km of insurmountable distance.<\/p>\n Vice Versa<\/em> is an ongoing project designed in response; it is one attempt to translate the specificity of place, time, and effort that printing together in person encapsulates without denying the implications of space between us. Collaboration over long distance is only possible through multilinked pathways of technology and labour. The physical web of cable that allows us to coordinate through the internet is echoed in an interconnected network of workers whose work in fabrication, transport, and sanitation enable our collaborations to continue. We have a responsibility to the network, and Vice Versa is an endeavor to meet it. I was already working from home when isolating became a public health necessity. A week later, Dana was teaching their undergraduate students through Zoom and grading at a folding t.v. tray table. In discussing our ad-hoc apartment studios, we looped back In New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future<\/em>, James Bridle examines the impact of waste, heat, and carbon emissions from large-scale data storage sites. Physical infrastructure that upholds the cables, towers, and data centres which grant us access to high speed video and file sharing produce \u201cabout the same carbon footprint as the airline industry,\u201d expanding the number of people affected by our project to include anyone who works on the upkeep and damage control that our internet reliance necessitates.1<\/sup> It was with this sense of gravity that we determined the \u201crules\u201d for our collaboration: nothing bought, nothing wasted, and nothing sourced from the infinite, digital database that forms our immediate environment when sharing space is not possible.<\/p>\n
\nover the logistics of printed work and long distance collaboration. Without the anonymity of a collective garbage bin in the corner of a shared studio, the potential volume of each of our individual waste outputs during the course of the project grew threatening. Printmaking has byproducts; offcuts, misprints, and test proofs join paper towels, saturated rags, and hollowed out plastic tubs in the incidental waste of working. Working digitally would appear to address the issue of excess material waste, but even digital consumption has an environmental cost.<\/p>\n