The snow is too deep to move quickly or smoothly through tangled trees, and so sitting in stillness is essential. Cold winds rush through the trees above, causing their tops to sway noticeably beneath fast-moving clouds. Doors, tables, and bedframes salvaged from old farmland scrap piles carry the molecular memories of past lives lived in prior places. The traces of past events are not only found in the abandoned objects, but also in in the root systems of trees and in the streams of the brook diverted by a beaver dam.
What happened here before my settler ancestors arrived? Where are the imprints of first communities? And what of the marks still being left by the non-human beings that live here today? The rabbits, the foxes, the deer, the moose, the beavers, the coyotes, and the family of black bears that has a den down near where the fiddleheads grow in spring.
Meanwhile, every physical body radiates EM waves according to its temperature. These EM waves are circulating around and through us, all the time, like invisible entangled landscapes. Radio waves carrying voices, images, and data, circulate freely and are not bound by property lines or the borders of nation-states. EM waves, and perhaps even emotions and memories, can either penetrate through, become absorbed by, or reflect off, of the materials they encounter. Here we find relationship between matter and energy as radio waves carry the traces of long dead stars connecting the present to the past through waves of various frequencies.
Amanda Dawn Christie is an interdisciplinary new media artist who makes film, installation, performance, and transmission artworks. She is a disabled white woman of settler descent currently living in Mi’kmaki territory. She completed her MFA at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, and formerly worked as an Assistant Professor in Studio Art: Intermedia (Video, Performance, and Electronic Arts) at Concordia University in Montreal. Since 1997, Christie has been involved with artist run culture, in both staff and volunteer positions. She frequently curates, publishes, speaks, teaches workshops, and serves on peer assessment committees across Canada. Her artwork explores the relationship between the human body and analogue technology in a digital age, and has been presented on five continents.
Her interdisciplinary practice extends to audiences outside of contemporary art circles, and has been profiled by electronic engineering, shortwave, and hacking communities. Critical analysis of Christie’s work has been published in various books, catalogues, and journals. Her films are distributed by the CFMDC, V-Tape, and Lightcone and her works can also be found in various private and public art collections.
Christie’s work has been presented by various galleries, museums, festivals, and broadcasters around the world, including the Canadian Film Institute, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Millenium Film Workshop in New York, Cannes, Radio Web MACBA of the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, and the BBC, among many others. She also works with scientific research facilities, such as HAARP—one of the planet’s only Ionospheric Research Instruments.