Wake Up Winnipeg

Regular Programming Presentation No. 3

Sandee Moore, Wake Up Winnipeg, October 15-29 2010.

Description: Wake Up Winnipeg is a durational performance, during which the artist provides a wake up call service to interested Winnipeg citizens. Video Pool will advertise this free service to members and to the Winnipeg public. The practical, service-oriented purpose of the wake up call is removed – the calls are made when the artist wakes up, not when the participant would like to be awoken. This will hopefully facilitate more room for potential development of relationships. The wake up call will be of a social and political nature and by delivering local news to people and offering the opportunity for interaction, discussion and debate, the artist wishes to stimulate greater awareness and engagement among Winnipeggers in the issues of civic governance.

Press Release:

http://www.wakeupwinnipeg.org/

Wake Up Winnipeg
A Participatory Telephone Performance by Sandee Moore
October 15 – October 29
Presented by Video Pool Media Arts Centre

Video Pool Media Arts Centre presents a participatory telephone performance by local artist Sandee Moore. Taking the form of a telephone wake up call, Moore invites subscribers to her service to consider local politics on the dawn of Winnipeg’s civic election. Participants will enjoy the personal interaction of a wake up call, in which the human element has been replaced by a fully-automated experience in contemporary use.

Wake up calls are a personal activity associated with hotels wherein a stranger wakes a guest via telephone. This service was traditionally carried out by a hotel employee in person, but has now generally been automated, taking the personal activity out of the experience, making it both less and more odd at the same time.

Moore invites subscribers to her free wake up call service to experience this mediated intimacy and to engage with its imaginative potential – what fantasies are awakened when a voice enters your bedroom? Complicating the traditional service nature of this relationship, Moore asserts her person-hood by delivering her wake up calls peppered with rousing tidbits of local political news. Also challenging the expected, Moore delivers her service when she awakes each day, rather than setting a schedule

The purpose of Wake Up Winnipeg is, therefore, to awaken the somnambulist population to dreams of a better city through stimulating deeper knowledge about local politics.

Artist Biography:

Sandee Moore proposes to animate social relationships through personal exchange via artwork in media such as performance, video, installation, and interactive electronic sculpture. Since graduating from the MFA program at the University of Regina in 2003, Moore has screened and exhibited across Canada at venues including The Edmonton Art Gallery (now The Art Gallery of Alberta), Images Film and Video Festival, The Blackwood Gallery, The Dalhousie Art Gallery, and The Mendel Art Gallery. Her practice has also taken her to Japan, where she was the 2004 Mukojima/Rice+ artist-in-residence. In 2006, she was commissioned to create a video for The Winnipeg Art Gallery. Since retiring from her position as Director of Video Pool Media Arts Centre in 2009, Moore has presented a video game-based artwork at The Gendai Gallery (Toronto) and curated a video program for Border Crossings magazine. She has been invited by Art Souterrain to perform at Montréal’s Nuit Blanche in March and will present an interactive sculpture, Imaginary Gift, at Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in June.

Video Pool thanks: the Canada Council for the Arts, The Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Art’s Council for their generous operational funding. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $11.8 million in media arts throughout Canada.