Where is our freakishly successful envelope-pushing cultural infrastructure that stretches underneath it all like an undulating electric field pulsing with glory?
Well, je me souviens. 1994/1995. CISR > Centre for Excellence. CDN gov short term initiative. CISR > Centre for Image Sound Research was set up in Vancouver taping computerish artists connected to SFU and BCIT. We the webweaver collective (Derek Dowden lead for ANIMA) , put together the first cultural website in BC on the Wimsey server. Yes, children, - N.B. - that in those early years of the net — facebook did not exist, neither did twitter, and there was NO ads allowed! It was to be an educated cultural innovative space. Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!
Unbelievable I know. What we put together —ANIMA, Arts Network for Integrated Media. Very ambitious, syncretic site. One of the first cultural website on the W3. The position and engagement faltered for lack of support other than the initial years. It did evolve into Digital Earth (Schiphorst + Hockenhull) which ran for another 1.5 years, before it too died for lack of support. I tried in those initial years to get the NFB to go truly national and public via the web...a sort of pre Facebook facebook — but to no avail. When you have political and social engineering bureaucrats who have little understanding of the confluence of technology and culture — making decisions about what to finance — you end up in a society boxed in the past marketed as the future. Canadians won't invest a nickel to make a buck and an American will invest a dollar to make a nickel. The lack of support for ambitious technological cultural production and evolution in Canada (if it is not already connected to a university) is incredibly short sighted but not really surprising as the rule for cultural management in this country is don't rock the boat, secure my salary and wait for that pension. But hope springs again?
Hell yes! Let me know how writers/book publishers can be included in this conversation or future ones. This is fantastic work, Kate.
Thanks Sean!
Well, je me souviens. 1994/1995. CISR > Centre for Excellence. CDN gov short term initiative. CISR > Centre for Image Sound Research was set up in Vancouver taping computerish artists connected to SFU and BCIT. We the webweaver collective (Derek Dowden lead for ANIMA) , put together the first cultural website in BC on the Wimsey server. Yes, children, - N.B. - that in those early years of the net — facebook did not exist, neither did twitter, and there was NO ads allowed! It was to be an educated cultural innovative space. Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!
Unbelievable I know. What we put together —ANIMA, Arts Network for Integrated Media. Very ambitious, syncretic site. One of the first cultural website on the W3. The position and engagement faltered for lack of support other than the initial years. It did evolve into Digital Earth (Schiphorst + Hockenhull) which ran for another 1.5 years, before it too died for lack of support. I tried in those initial years to get the NFB to go truly national and public via the web...a sort of pre Facebook facebook — but to no avail. When you have political and social engineering bureaucrats who have little understanding of the confluence of technology and culture — making decisions about what to finance — you end up in a society boxed in the past marketed as the future. Canadians won't invest a nickel to make a buck and an American will invest a dollar to make a nickel. The lack of support for ambitious technological cultural production and evolution in Canada (if it is not already connected to a university) is incredibly short sighted but not really surprising as the rule for cultural management in this country is don't rock the boat, secure my salary and wait for that pension. But hope springs again?
See my proposal: VAST: A Public AI Social Media Commons for Canada – Open to the World https://ohfilm.art/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/1-VAST-Main-Summary-May-4.pdf
"a society boxed in the past marketed as the future" - so good! So OG Oliver! I am so going to dive into this...