About Disorienting People
Photograph from the expired Canadian passport Tegan L. Smith used for this project.
My web art about the intertwined histories of Earth-measuring, empire-building, and normality stems from childhood woodland memories and a lifetime of autistic enthusiasm for maps. Follow Essay and Travelogue topics by menus, buttons, categories, tags, and charts, or zoom into a rotating globe connecting map coordinates to Travelogues. Click upside-down Disorienting to return Home.
While I take full responsibility for the size and contents of Disorienting, I am indebted to the people mentioned throughout the website. In addition to usual creative projects supports, dyslexia-autism means I require assistance with organizing, editing, and knowing when to stop. Scroll down to summarized Artist Biography, Project History, and Acknowledgements.
Map/globe plotting began in 2017, with travel plans to places connected to Earth measuring: the UK Greenwich Prime Meridian, Toronto’s Australian antipode, and the French 19th C Paris Meridian survey that established the metre as a fraction of Earth’s circumference for the Metric System.
Travelogues relate to specific coordinates of latitude and longitude. Posts crystallized from experiencing places in the moment and photographing measuring tools. Navigation and Migration posts focus on boundaries and travel. Standard Dimensions are about measuring and categorizing humans.
Essays fall into the same 2 categories. They integrate past photos with those from the three trips made for this project. Posts show different ways of navigating what passes for normal. Contradictions emerged from witnessing the destructive effects of my travels and wasting energy on internet art.
Artist Biography
My multidisciplinary art has been exhibited across Canada and in international group shows. Past day jobs in economic research and book publishing inform my practice. I have a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, my hometown, and an MFA from York University in Toronto, Ontario, where I live now. Disorienting is part of The Coordinates of Home mapping project about connections to specific places and relocating by choice or coercion. Related sculptures deal with measurement systems used to enclose, compare, and rank. Although I have always acknowledged neurodivergence as an influence, recent work confronts dyslexia and autism in processes, media, and subject matter while critiquing normalcy and othering. Art portfolio website: https://art.tegansmith.ca/
Disorienting History – An Accidental Website
Disorienting contains accumulated observations on how land is valued, hierarchies of worth, who is put on a pedestal, and who is de-humanized. My art practice over the past twenty years has focused on neurodivergence, standardization, and navigation. I documented places related to geodesic history through personal field notes, photos, maps, and ephemera. Initially suggestive of scientific detachment in classification or superficiality in wunderkammer-style pursuits, this work constitutes an autistic-dyslexic reclamation of those tropes. It re-frames collection arrangements as re-orientation.
I didn’t intend to build a website, let alone a large one. I was examining measurement’s role in displacement from land to reconsider navigation beyond categories and boundaries of self, identity, and territory. I planned an interactive installation with Greenwich coordinates and my collections. During COVID postponements, I switched to planning a photo blog, using invisible latitude and longitude lines to question boundaries inflicted on diverse lifeforms. Technologies are changing as dramatically as physical environments through their interactions.
As I grappled with dimensions rooted in variable human bodies and Earth’s circumference, more abstract binary and quantum measurements intruded. Disorienting combines the contents of a large book with a flexible blog format. Surrounded by dead internet discussions, the process seemed like resurrecting both kinds of publishing. They face obsolescence against speedy social media, distrust of information, and monopolies gobbling resources. I photographed terrestrial locations and wrote texts using spell and grammar checks. ChatGPT prompts increasingly popped up. Resisting conformity and accumulations of fortunes becomes more urgent as we reorient to artificial intelligence.
This website was completed with stellar efforts from developer Torrey Falconer and Eduardo Padilla editing my dyslexic texts. Philip Dyke persisted as travel companion, chauffeur, and constructive critic, always helping first and talking later. Disorienting has become what journalist John McPhee describes as a never-ending project that keeps one old/alive. (Tabula Rasa Vol. 1. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, p. 6.)
Acknowledgements
Throughout the process, Geographer Eduardo Padilla contributed to my still basic grasp of geodesy and is a consistent interlocutor. Gaye Jackson helped with grant submissions. Web Developer Mel Racho set up spread sheets to organize posts and recommended separating “Neurodivergent Notes” from “Visit Descriptions” and “Place Histories”. Essays followed when curator Belinda Kwan suggested a stream of consciousness introduction. My usual punctiliousness kicked in. As texts got long, I divided up essays. Images, charts, journal snippets, and subtitles acted as editing tools. When essays became as data heavy as the travelogues, I switched from Word outlines to spread sheets. Themes emerged as titles and patterns morphed into graphs.
- Eduardo Padilla – Researcher and Editor
- Torrey Falconer – Web Developer
- Gaye Jackson – Grant preparer
- Belinda Kwan – Curator and Design Consultant
- Philip Dyke – Driver and assistant
Interlocutors
This project wouldn’t have happened without friends, family, art colleagues, and Toronto neighbourhood community.
- Family – Heather Frank, Andrea Macdonald, Kristi Frank, Jeff Irving, Bernie Hendrickson, Audrey Jean Hendrickson, Marguerite Smith, Brian Smith, Dorothy Barks, Robert Barks
- Friends and Colleagues – Norman Zlotkin, Genevieve Leslie, David Moulton, Joanne Lyons, Janet Nicol, Krys Verrall, Bill Burns, Catherine Vamvakas Lay, John Baljkas, Elaine Whitaker, Lois Schklar, Elaine Stewart, Teresa Acenceo, Gita Hashemi, Micheal Bumby and Davenportage participants
- Neighbours – Isabelle Cochelin, Emily Cochelin Roest, Bert Roest, Chiara Fagnola Chareun, Gwen Schauerte, Gloria Watling, Kerry McArthur
- Membership at InterAccess and Trinity Square Video, and events at Tangled Art Gallery, Toronto
- Other casual conversations that contributed to new insights, sometimes unrecognized at the time
Institutional Acknowledgements
This website was conceived and researched at four international artist residencies in places chosen for their proximity to Earth-measuring history and home. The influence of different place and suggestions from artists is evident in website posts. I would also like to acknowledge the support from local and national arts funds that keep residencies operational.
- Luminous Bodies, Artscape Gibraltar Point, Toronto, Canada, 2013
- Interdisciplinary Residency, Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, Scotland, 2018
- Can Serrat International Art Residency, El Bruc, Spain, 2019
- Artist in Residence, Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, Western Australia, 2022
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
