One of the best things I have done lately is to come to the Banff Centre to this MAIV residency. What’s great about it is that it forced me out of my dailey routine and away from work in particular. I drove here and it took me two days. The first day, I drove Mike Banwell’s son Zak with me to stay with Mike at Stump Lake- 30 minutes south of Kamloops on the old Highway 5A. That was a great start to the trip. The second day I left fairly early and didn’t rush, and I arrived at the Banff Centre around 5pm.

Since then, other than a few days of introductions and presentations by the 29 residents in our group- I have had complete freedom to work, with a beautiful studio- two tables and a lovely view of the mountains, a great dining room to eat in and a big room in Lloyd Hall Residence.

Stairway Gallery, JPL Building, Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta

Part of my project here was to work on a MAIV wiki for the residency. That’s off to a good start, but the greally great thing is that I have the time- away from the distractions of work to focus on my research project. I feel I have been circling around a number of ideas and I haven’t been willing to commit to any one of them. I know they relate to locative media, geotagging, GPS and mapping, but I haven’t been able to figure out what would be an original project to research and pursue for the next year.