Starting in early 2023, I was part of a team at Vancouver’s Centre for Digital Media working on a site-specific poetry project. Vancouver’s then Poet Laureate, the amazing Fiona Tinwei Lam, had inaugurated a project to collect and curate some of the most impressive, contemporary verse about specific places in Vancouver.
But why limit those poems to be read only on paper, or on a website page? To the imaginative, the opportunity to enhance the Vancouver City Poems Project with a dedicated augmented reality experience was just too good. Using mobile platforms, lovers of literature could actually be encouraged to journey in person to the places the poems are actually about, “collect” those poems once they arrived site, and proceed to engage with the words, themes, and imagery in the poems while physically out in the urban environment that inspired them in the first place.
The app I helped design as a part of that CDM team—the Locative Audio App—was sometimes joked about as a Pokémon Go for poems. This breezy comparison is actually not far off the mark.
Through a moderately convoluted set of circumstances, the production of the app was being undertaken by a unit within the University of British Columbia’s Critical Indigenous Studies Department. This perhaps counterintuitive collab—between an ancient and celebrated form of literature on the one hand, and one of the world’s leading academic institutes promoting decolonization and Indigenous empowerment—made for brilliant forms of cooperation on one hand, and some thorny challenges on the other.
For sure, I didn’t anticipate what would be foremost among those thorny challenges. No one else on the team did, either.
But for reasons having everything to do with the history of the land on which the modern City of Vancouver was erected, and the relationship with the land the peoples who preceded white settlers traditionally enjoyed, our mobile app about navigating to places in Vancouver couldn’t feature any kind of map.
So—how do you make it possible for people to locate one of a constellation of discrete sites in a sprawling, modern city without showing them streets, buildings, boundaries, and cardinal directions? That was our task.
I wrote about both the historical, cultural, and ideological underpinnings of all this, and our efforts to design with those underpinnings in mind, in an article that was recently published in The British Columbia Quarterly, or B.C. Studies.
It was an honour to be part of that issue, and you can read my article, “Apping a City Through Verse,” here.
(My article title is a riff on a 2022 Fiona Lam article in The Tyee, “Can You Map A City Through Verse?”, which can be found here.)
As primarily an author of graphic nonfiction, it was a rare and flattering treat to have my work published in an academic journal; something I would likely never have experienced outside my pursuit of a Masters of Digital Media at CDM. I remain grateful to the faculty members, staff, and my fellow grad students for the experience of a lifetime in Vancouver from 2022-2024.
