Media Cosmologies: A conversation with Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Callum Beckford

Since the mid-1990s when world wide web first swung into public view, the net art works of Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) have explored and articulated the radical possibilities of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) within the emergent, evolving landscape of digital culture. Among Turtle Island’s earliest adopters of the web as an artistic medium and most cogent theorists of its significance as a space of cultural self-determination and survivance, L’Hirondelle has created and co-created a body of artworks and texts that are crucial not only to understanding the full histories of media art and the internet, but also to imagining their futures –– Isi-pîkiskwêwin-Ayapihkêsîsak (Speaking the Language of Spiders, with Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, 1996),Dene/Cree ElderSpeak: Tales of the Heart and Spirit (with Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, 1998),  treatycard (2004), Horizon Zero 17: TELL (2004), and wêpinâsowina (2005), among others.

This public program celebrates the ongoing restoration of one of these projects, vancouversonglines.ca (2008). Alongside talks by artists Cheryl L’Hirdondelle and Callum Beckford, vancouversonglines.ca will be presented in a legacy environment on computer terminals in Agnes’ atrium, giving the public access to this work for the first time in years.

For more information, visit the Agnes Etherington Art Centre website.