Felix Kalmenson

A Line is Not a Line
Art Gallery of Ontario
Toronto, Canada
September 3, 2015

A Line is Not a Line examines the practice of landscape visualization as a technology of colonialism. Using Google Streetview and Earth as a contemporary analog to colonial landscape painting as a technology of power, A Line is Not a Line unpacks how we visualize and understand borders and bordering in global economies and ecologies marked by migration, extraction, and exploitation. The work unpacks how this technology, like colonial landscape painting before it, reduces landscapes through a process of cultural and bodily erasure, flattening a multiplicity of subjectivities under the totalizing subjectivity of the colonial gaze. The work consists of two elements integrated into an immersive multi-screen video installation work. The first element is a video essay that unpacks the concepts explored in the work in an interplay of embodied and disembodied textual overlays. The second component of the work consists of 8 screens arranged in two berm-like arrangements, establishing a passageway between them. These screens display videos composed of Google Streetview scenes from Border cities in Canada, USA, and Mexico visualizing the border from either side of the boundary line, establishing the border itself within the passage of the viewer.