The Census Project is a question-based dialogue with Canada’s national census, and with statistics, more broadly. The work asks questions of state logic, of the false western assumption of linear time, of spatial control, and of who and what is accounted for in the scientific processes used to measure a state body, namely in the place referred to as “Canada.” What does a method of reasoning like the scientific method allow us to measure? What does it cost to make oneself legible to the state? Who is included in the portrait of this place called “Canada”? How are identity, relations to place, culture, body, self and conceptions of home constituted and rendered by statistical logics?

This multi-media installation explores how state subjecthood and narratives of time and space are constituted through the apparatus of the national census. Drawing from visual traditions of data visualization and the history of statistical practice as a strategy of colonial expansion and governance, the work sheds light on and offers a critique into how colonial statistical logics operate in Canadian politics. The Census Project is an invitation to reckon with notions of autonomy and privacy in the current information state and to imagine other ways of telling stories about ourselves and this place called “Canada” that celebrate the subjective, undocumentable, hidden and erased forms of life and practice that are held in the memory of this land.

Fun fact! I'm going to be showing this work at the Hatch gallery this week and will be giving a talk about surveillance and the information state next Thursday, January 25th at 6:30pm at the gallery if anyone is interested in coming!

Hello everyone!
My name is Anneke and I'm in my 6th year of the BFA Program, majoring in visual arts and pursuing a double minor in economics and informatics. I'm looking forward to learning from people in this class!

I've put together a few samples of my past artworks if you are interested in getting to know some of my research and creative practice. The video we watched in class last week about futures prompted a lot of thinking for me as well about the importance of being critical of whose future we are being served, and the role of art & imagination in imagining futures where we can all flourish.

The Census Project (2023)

This gif work uses the corporate-bureaucratic interface of Microsoft Excel to examine the bias-infused processes of becoming that data undergo in our present information economy. Often framed as unquestionable truths while hiding behind veneers of objectivity, data, in reality, are multifaceted, flawed, approximated captures of time and space that expose the interests and vantage points of their collectors’ ability to understand and measure but a small glimpse of the world.

Situated Snapshots (2022)

another part of the project ^

Untitled (Inflection Points) (2022)

This week I read an article about a "well-being economy" being explored in Nanaimo, BC. It's a pretty short read, but it got me thinking about what we were speaking about last week. The "Futures" video we watched seemed to be putting forward a story of the future that was technologically deterministic (ie, implying that technology was going to shape society, and we as humans are just at its whims). What I find hopeful and inspiring from this article, is the way that community input and long-term thinking seems to have been centred in the two case studies (Nanaimo, BC and Wales) that the article explores. The future is being positioned here as something that we collaboratively build through relationships and considerations of obligations we have to those humans and more-than-humans who will come after us

I've attached the article below in case you're interested in taking a look!

Graphs for the Labourers (2020)

reunion of strangers (2022)

Proxy, Proximal, Approximate (2021)

Proxy, Proximal, Approximate negotiates virtuality and reality as they relate to the artist’s body and its encounters with physical representations of its own data. The abstracted portraiture of the data visualizations frame the avatar of the artist’ information body; data from the artist’s geographical movements, financial transactions, emails and health measurements during the pandemic become manifest in rudimentary data visualization objects which materialize as almost play-like objects in real space. Removed from contextual axes, the data’s connections to scale and representation are abandoned; the possibility of their new affordances, meanings and ownership become open to renegotiation.