Geo-locative smart phone app, iOs and Android, 2015
Video:
Free iTunes Download: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/invisible-histories/id921390469?mt=8
Free Android Download: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.igfich.invisiblehistories
Geo-locative Smart Phone App
“Invisible Histories” began when I came across the astonishing fact that 270,000 radioactive mice are buried near Niagara Falls NY as a result of research for atomic weaponry. Like the Underground Railroad, these mice operate as a secret and hidden history of the area, now manifested through this project. The first version was a video installation, installed at floor height and rear projected, so a nearly life size green glowing mouse runs along the gallery floor. This work exists as a type of monument, or anti-monument that engages in the missing spectacle in the Niagara Falls landscape—a landscape of otherwise extravagant sites. New media becomes an avenue for marking, memorializing and re-activating history. As activist art, it nods to critical animal studies, and questions the ways in which we engage, abuse and memorialize the animal other. It invites the viewer to visualize other historical outcomes, and hopefully by extension, to imagine other presents, and other futures.
As an interactive phone app, Invisible Histories gives the user feedback about the proximity and direction of the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS), a nuclear waste facility that houses the remains of 270,000 radioactive mice, and is a mere 23 kilometers from Brock University, where I teach. When the viewer launches the app it starts a video of a 3D animated green glowing mouse that runs across the screen. Using the phone’s GPS and compass functions, the direction of the mouse indicates the compass direction of the storage site; the mouse runs across the screen with increasing frequency as one nears the storage site.
Exhibitions: Phone App
2018 Digital Animalities. John B. Aird Gallery, Toronto, ON October 29 – November 23
2015 Satellite. MIWSFPA Gallery, St. Catharines ON, October 19 to November 28
Exhibitions: Video Installation
2013 Toronto Underground Film Festival (TUFF) , Sept 6-16
2013 In the Soil, St. Catharines, April 26-28
2012 Whispers and Rages, a Can-Am Exhibition, 164 Allen Street, Buffalo NY, Oct 5 (First Friday Event)
Reviews
Steve Nadon. “Let the mice guide you: “Invisible Histories” Brock Press, January 14, 2014 http://www.brockpress.com/2015/01/let-mice-guide-invisible-histories/
Holly Mohr. “Brock visual arts prof creates app to uncover historic nuclear testing” Brock News, December 19, 2014 http://brocku.ca/brock-news/?p=31340&wpmp_switcher=desktop
Keri Cronin. “Animal Histories in Contemporary Media” 2013
http://www.ourhenhouse.org/2013/05/animal-histories-in-contemporary-media-art/