Computer Culture Emerged in Canada Through Convergence of Unique History and Governmental Policies

June 20, 2022

Transformative instant in art and science explored from Canadian viewpoint in new e book

By Jeanne Hedden Gallagher

“There is a normal tale about how pcs produced that is centralized all-around Silicon Valley this development myth of the laptop or computer as a uniquely American cultural and social phenomenon,” stated Michael Century, a professor in the Office of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “That tale is not wrong, but it truly is not the total story.”

In his new e-book, Northern Sparks: Innovation, Technological know-how Policy, and the Arts in Canada from Expo 67 to the Net Age, Professor Century aspects insights and observations gained as a producer and creator of new media artwork and as a electronic coverage adviser to the Canadian government. He delivers a exclusive viewpoint to the emergence of the electronic age established in a exclusively Canadian narrative, just one that revolves all over the social, technological, and political historical past of Canada in the late ’60s via the early ’90s.

“I had this privileged situation to seem deeply into the interconnections concerning the arts and technologies,” Prof. Century said. “I began to see that the computer would come to be a typical instrument to make interdisciplinary perform in the arts attainable in unprecedented ways.”

He places the commencing of his narrative of Canadian digital culture at Expo 67, the transformative world’s reasonable in Montreal when “the nation was dealing with a palpable political reinvention alongside its centennial celebration, and artists ended up using on the slippery problem of defining what it might imply to speak of a distinctly Canadian society.”

The imaginative sparks from this first impetus set the stage for what he calls a uniquely Canadian “technological ethos,” whereby rising systems were collaboratively shaped and co-invented by experimental artists. Prof. Century even further argues that the improvements produced by artists resonated with the political consciousness of the period and ended up nurtured by governing administration insurance policies responding to a time of countrywide modernization.

In Northern Sparks, Prof. Century employs case scientific tests in animation, virtual truth, and software program purposes, amid other folks, to illustrate how art, know-how, and plan intersected in Canada in a way that is distinct to this unique period and this unique state.

He finishes his examination in the early 1990s, when the World Broad Internet produced the web ubiquitous and Canadian cultural politics shifted to modify to new globalizing pressures.

“This e book presents you an in-depth expertise of a single of those people innovative times in record when the artist, the technologist, the scholar, and the policymaker all arrived alongside one another all-around a spirit of innovation that coincided with a time period of nationwide reinvention,” Prof. Century explained. “The Canadian story serves as an instructive item lesson now and for the upcoming, across the variety of its wide scope and manifold techniques for mobilizing the arts, coverage, and innovation.”

Northern Sparks, the initially reserve from Prof. Century, will be posted by MIT Press in June 2022.