Mamook Lapeep (Let’s Chat) is an interactive AI media installation featuring five collaborating artists (Indigenous & Anglo / Chinese / Argentinian settlers) offering to make trade with the public. The trading activity will posit the fundamental question of exchange in the trade language of Chinook Jargon: Khata Maika Ticky? (What do you want?) and, Khata Maika Iskum? (What do you have to offer?).
The work of the five artists, Jai Sun Kang Djwa, Karin Lee, Russell Wallace, Pablo Duboue and Nicola Harwood, will be approaching issues such as Indigenous language renewal, half and half identity, settler relationship to land, conflict among immigrant groups, our relationship to the truth of Canadian history and our responsibility to reconciliation. Through artist trade exchanges with the audience participants, we will express both our gifts and our needs in relation to this hybrid community called, “Canada.”
Questions at the core of the project include, how do we define honourable trade in light of the dishonourable history of colonization? What exchanges can we offer one another that can fall outside the imperative of free market capitalism? How can we get beneath the surface to acknowledge our true needs as a community? How can we, like the creation of Chinook jargon, communicate across our differences and come to some new understanding of both each other’s gifts and needs? If we choose to trade together, what future responsibility do we have to one another?
Emerging from the metaphor of the trade language of Chinook Jargon (Wawa - a trade language widely used on the Pacific Coast and Interior of B.C. during first contact), Mamook Lapeep will offer audience participants an opportunity to enter into a trade exchange with the artist of their choice. Trade value will be established through a system of evaluation determined through the programmed AI. Once a trade offered from the audience/participant is determined as desirable, a creative exchange will take place, the audience/participant will submit their trade and then receive access to the artists’ work. In this way, the project will enable participants to contribute their own gifts to the data bank– creating a composite community avatar that will grow in complexity as viewers contribute. This future community avatar that will then be reviewed, programmed and available for the next iteration of the project.
For any enquires about Mamook Lapeep, please contact Nicola Harwood.
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