Tag Archives: virtual

On a Thursday night in October 2021, like many other weeknights, I sat down at my small desk, opened my laptop, and logged onto the blank canvas where most modern-day, creative endeavors originate: Google Docs. The blinking cursor beckoned me to press my fingers to my keyboard, but I resisted since I was waiting for the start of 805-4821, a play within Google Docs conceived by the Winnipeg-based theatre company We Quit Theatre. While the piece saw a live, in-person performance history prior to the pandemic, this iteration at the Toronto-based Buddies in Bad Times’s Queer, Far, Wherever You Are series was a part of the show’s run adapted for an online space. As if the lights were dimming in the theatre, the cursor began producing words that filled the Google Doc. The show had begun. 

By Madeline Bogoch

Last year at Platform Centre in Winnipeg, during a slyly theatrical lecture-performance by emerging media artist Colby Richardson, the tall and affable filmmaker quoted fellow Winnipeg artist Mike Maryniuk: “I work with the latest technology to hit the local thrift stores.” This sentiment is an ethos that echoes through Richardson’s interdisciplinary practice, which habitually resurrects media detritus by placing it into bold new arrangements, in order to revel in the afterlife of obsolete equipment. As significant a role as these technologies have played in Richardson’s practice, I took his framing of Maryniuk’s quote to imply that his was not an aesthetics of nostalgia, but rather of access and experimentation.