Trading Routes, Grease Trails, Oil Futures: Video "Atlases" as an Artistic Form of Countermapping

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Arts-Based Research and Social Justice

Abstract

This paper explores research findings from an on-going federally funded research/creation project entitled Trading Routes: Grease Trails, Oil Futures, demonstrating how acts of sharing and creating knowledge in and through artistic research has implications for social and political change. Drawing from Pyne & Taylor’s (2012) concept of “atlases,” articulated as a radical form of counter-mapping, this paper considers how two different video modalities, as modes of artistic inquiry, address complex issues while deepening understanding of these issues in palpable, compelling and evocative ways (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Inclusive to multiple perspectives, lived experience, and critical thought, viewers are afforded an opportunity to empathize with the experience of others and to participate in events of public discourse, provoking dialectical activity.

Author

• Ruth S. Beer, Emily Carr University of Art + Design