This exhibition is curated by Liz Mac Dougall, of the Halifax-based Incomplete Dislocations Collective along with curatorial committee members Doug Porter and Andreas Guibert. Through this digital media collective a one-time project was run where a group of Nova Scotian artists from a variety of more established disciplines, including photography, painting and sculpture were invited to make new media work or expand their existing digital practice. They were given training and technical support to take their work a step further into the realm of digital and interactive art.

In finding artists for the re:location exhibition I purposefully sought those who did not have a simple comfort with the significance of location in their lives. I was looking for those who do not take location for granted, are perhaps more familiar with dislocation. I have asked these artists to consider through personal explorations involving new media technology, the place of the body, the person, and culture, in the fusion of space and time via instantaneous digital transmission. At the heart of this inquiry is the question of identity. How is one being defined as individual considering the conditions of social relations in a world facing globalization and cultural assimilation? How does one’s location or sense of location express culture, identity and reveal technology’s methods?

Dislocation is a property of almost any new media art work. It is a lens through which to view new media itself. To work with new media is to experience various levels of dislocation. For example, a letter drawn with a pencil belongs to its author. It is a product of the body. A letter made with a typewriter is generic and difficult to trace to its author or be owned by its author. The same letter produced by a computer can be infinitely duplicated in digital form with no link to its origin.

We who work with digital technologies experience this phenomenon to a greater degree than described here - dislocation is integral to our practice. To live in a technologically mediated culture is to live dislocation as a quality of daily life. But the dislocations we experience are on many levels, cultural, racial, geographical etc. While the art does convey story, these works are not about seamless story telling, they are about the methods we use to piece our complex reality together.

Liz Mac Dougall
re:location curator
coordinator of the Incomplete Dislocations Collective