Urban Fox Project
Interdisciplinary Studies Masters Program / York University Toronto
Statement of Interest
Judith Doyle
February 12, 2002
My thesis will begin with an exploration of interactivity models and methods; this research will be applied in my examination of the human-driven factors (including habitat change, public policy and representational discourses) effecting the urbanization of wildlife (specifically, the red fox in the GTA). Alexander Wilson, among other writers, has analyzed how wildlife documentaries have shaped our interpretations of nature. Through the microcosm of a Toronto urban fox colony, I will examine how intersecting systems of representation impact on city life, and potential cultural responses using digital media.
Interactive digital media have a history that can be traced from experimental teleculture, digital proto-internetworks and gaming subcultures from the mid-seventies, through the emergence in the 1980’s of hypertext stacks, and the 90’s web-specific artworks and CD Roms (including ‘interactive documentaries’ repurposed from documentary films, books and television). Recently, digital game design, "edutainment", and DVD adaptations of feature films are promoted as ‘growth industries’ in a fanfare of corporate/government ‘partnership’ and subsidy.
My program of study will include an historical and cultural analysis of interactive digital media and methodologies, including a review of new media technologies and models of interactive documentary and game design. Areas for consideration might include interface design, non-linear "storytelling", database navigation structures and site mapping. I’m interested in issues of agency, including analysis of paradigms for constructing the ‘user’, ‘purchaser’ or ‘player’ within the programming design. Relevant courses appear to be offered in the Communication and Culture program.
I will focus on representations of ‘nature’ in digital media, and on artists’ and activists’ projects. How have traditional documentary media including film and video been included and organized? What are some of the contexts for interactive documentary (the Internet, natural history museums, schools, ‘family viewing’)? Given the climate of hype and hyperactivity (to coin David McIntosh’s phrase) what examples exist of interactive documentary as activist media, as artwork and as an alternative to traditional nature documentary?
I will produce a written scholarly thesis, to be integrated into a non-linear DVD form where ideas of mapping, migration, a sedimentation of overlapping laws, policies, and regulations, and a grid of public, private and semi-private property ownership are adapted into a kind of navigable digital topography. The two seemingly disparate areas of research — urban foxes, digital media — intersect at the level of digital design for the DVD. Urban foxes are boundary creatures with emergent behaviors that traverse existing legal and cultural systems of animal categorization (stray, feral, domestic, livestock, wild) and bring assumptions underlying these distinctions into relief.
a) policy and representational systems
I plan to research public policy effecting animals in the Greater Toronto Area. For example, I might undertake a comparative analysis of policy on rabies containment with regulations effecting sarcoptic mange treatment, with an eye to what these policies reveal about ideas of the ‘natural course’ of disease epidemics. This policy research will be informed by readings on science, environmentalism and the history of imaging technologies, including such authors as Michael Taussig, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sean Cubitt and others. Field research might include interviews with biologists at the Ministry of Natural Resources, policy-makers, animal activists and people dwelling in the proximity of urban wildlife. The profusion of urban fox web sites on the Internet, ubiquitous and shifting nature TV programming, and urban ecology pedagogy are examples of pertinent representational systems for analysis.
b) DVD & fox project background
The DVD will include footage from my extensive archive of digital video of urban foxes on one small street in the Beaches area of Toronto, tracing peak population density in 1999-2000, through the decline in 2001 due to trapping and sarcoptic mange. I have drawn on this footage for two previous projects : the video ‘Animal Movies : Fox Past’ (2000) and the CD Rom ‘fox : future’ (2001)*. Screenings for these projects include the Brooklyn Film Festival, Hot Docs, Pleasure Dome’s ‘Blueprint for Moving Images in the 21st Century, the Canadian Documentary Retrospective at the American Museum in Washington, the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival and Cinemateque Ontario ‘Animal Movies’ and ‘fox : future’ were informed by the chapter ‘Looking at the Non-Human’ in the book ‘The Culture of Nature’ by Alexander Wilson. This chapter explores how animal movies and TV have impacted on ideas of nature.
Developing my thesis alongside the DVD will allow me to study interactive documentary production, and on a broader level, to explore the potential of interactive documentary as a means of fostering debate on public policy.
c) Exploration of structures and methodologies for interactive documentary production might include • research of digital syntactical and search tools, site mapping and design
• development of project components including text, sound and image loops, sequencers
• research on scripting languages, and scripting in Flash 5 & Java
Judith Doyle : some relevant background
I’ve been granted a full sabbatical for 2002-2003 from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where I’ve taught part-time since 1986. My courses there include ‘Film, Video and Social Change’, (post-colonial theory, Third Cinema); Publications : Print & Digital (project-driven environments for development and critique of print publications and web sites); and Integrated Media Fundamentals (Curriculum Leader, mandatory Foundation overview of film, video, audio, performance and digital art and ideas).
I have very strong editorial skills (12 years experience total on the Editorial Boards of Impulse and Fuse magazines, and editorial work on various books and student publications). I’ve taught computer applications and scripting languages including HTML, new media (Flash 5), graphics (Photoshop, Quark Xpress) non-linear video editing (Avid Xpress, Final Cut Pro) and sound design (Sound Edit 16, Logic).
My art practice includes film, video and new media works. Briefly, my short film ‘the last split second’ (1998) won the ‘Chameleon’ award for Best Documentary at the Brooklyn Film Festival, screening at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. It is pre-selected for a TVO pilot hosted by the Ontario Arts Council. I’ve directed two hour-long 16mm documentaries that screened internationally, and my feature ‘Wasaga’ still plays the late-night slots on Bravo. My critical writing includes ‘Life & Life Support Systems : zines, nets and outlets by artists’ (Fuse cover, Vol 19 # 5’96). With David McIntosh, I co-edited the "Rewiring bodies, art and technology" issue of Fuse (Vol. 20 #5 ’97). The body of writing about my work includes a text in progress by York professor Janine Marchessault on my CD Rom ‘fox : future’, commissioned for ‘Blueprint for Moving Images in the 21st Century’, by Pleasure Dome.
Note on my honours degree (B.A. Creative Writing Programme, 1978, York University)
The grade average of my final two years at York was 6.2, just slightly below the 6.4 (B+) mandated for the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. Therefore, I am enclosing my academic ranking dossier to demonstrate equivalency (I've recently been ranked as Associate Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design where I teach). In the intervening years since I graduated from York at the age of twenty, I've accumulated significant relevant experience including fifteen years of college-level teaching, lectures and panel participation at universities across the country, and an extensive professional practice.
While at York, I was very active in publishing, editing the poetry anthology 'Shark Tank' with Irving Layton, working on student publications and reading events, helping to set up the Landsdowne Artists' Collective adjunct to Calumet College, and participating in events outside the school. These extracurricular activities had a negative impact on my grades but a positive one for the school (I was one of the first two students to graduate from the fledgling Creative Writing programme).
Referees (Judith Doyle)
David McIntosh, Assistant Professor, Ontario College of Art and Design
Vera Frenkel, Professor Emeritus, Visual Arts, York University
Brenda Longfellow, Graduate Programme Director, Film and Video, York University (letter sent under separate cover to Interdisciplinary Studies Office)
Fields of study : Film and Video, Environmental Studies, Science and Technology
My thesis project will begin with an exploration of interactivity models and methods; this research will be applied in my examination of the human-driven factors (including habitat change, public policy and representational discourses) effecting the urbanization of wildlife.
Dr. Steven Bailey, Assistant Professor, Science & Society, Humanities Division
Dr. Janine Marchessault, Associate Professor, Film Studies; Director, Graduate Program in Film & Video
Dr. Joan Steigerwald, Assistant Professor in Humanities, Arts, and Faculty of Environmental Studies