Northern Sparks: Innovation, Technology Policy, and the Arts in Canada from Expo 67 to the Internet Age By Michael Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press  

BY DAWNA SCHULD

Technology and Culture 64.4 (2023): 1317-18.

Northern Sparks introduces an "alternative technological ethos" that developed in Canada over the last three decades of the twentieth century, when the mutually constitutive relationship of technology to culture was overtly acknowledged and purposely experimental. This distinctly Canadian alternative occupied productive borders between art and industry, emphasized embodied interaction with technology, and exemplified an improvisatory approach to social structures. The book is a challenge to technologically deterministic accounts of creative progress that characterize current debates about social media and artificial intelligence. Instead, like the narrator in a science fiction alternate history plot, author Michael Century guides readers through a series of historical case studies that show how technology and culture might have codeveloped if publicly mandated but human-scaled intermedial models had prevailed.

A number of Canada's geopolitical particularities are foundational to its history as an important borderline case: its physical vastness, which necessitates an innovative communications policy; its cultural diversity, playing out against Quebecois claims to cultural and political sovereignty; its historical ties to Great Britain and France; and its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. As Century describes it, Canada's borderline status prompted creative challenges that were also advantages-it was not a major player in technological development but was adjacent to power and had access to cutting-edge industrial and educational resources. Indeed, it can be argued that Canada's marginal positioning afforded leading theorists like Marshall McLuhan the necessary critical perspective to recognize artistic insight as an essential component in ethical technological development. Following McLuhan's lead, this is less a history of technology and culture as it is one of technology as culture.

The book describes a society of innovators-artists, electrical engineers, and bureaucrats-who influenced the trajectory of computer animation, human-computer interaction, sound engineering and generative music, cultural networking, and virtual reality. The history of an alternative art and technology ethos in the United States involved the sometimes paradoxical role of industry players like IBM and Bell Labs. But in Canada, where until 1979 communications policy and cultural programs were administered in the same department, public servants were innovators and artists were public servants. The impact of these policies is more than theoretical, and Century brings valuable insight through his personal experience in the bureaucratic trenches as a consultant to the Ministry of Communications and Culture ( and later the Ministry of Heritage) and as the founding director of the Banff Centre's media arts division.

Northern Sparks is a critical overview, and much of its contents warrant further scholarship in media arts history, especially regarding Canada's efforts to name and claim a distinct cultural identity, a fraught history only sketched out here. Century's emphasis is on the salient effects of an alternative ethos, and the book is organized according to the sensory, technical, and social mechanisms of interaction. Within this framework, he produces a history of intersections-of ideas and people-as elaborated via case studies. An account of the filmmaker Norman McLaren is particularly unexpected and instructive, though I'm not fully convinced by the claim that his experiments with the National Film Board were "proto-computational;' which lends a (perhaps unintended) inevitability to technological progress that belies the more open-ended possibilities of McLaren's "bricoleur" approach.

McLaren is also something of an outlier in a history that is marked by the 1967 Montreal Expo-a techno-utopian high point-at one end and, at the other, the 1992 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the effective endpoint of Canada's erstwhile borderline status. But that is not to say that the borderline ethos is no longer relevant. One of the most intriguing narratives in the book involves the Telidon network launched in 1978, a "national video text system" that failed to attract the users it purported to serve. Century contrasts this top-down approach to artist-led networks like Bill Bartlett's Collaboratory or the Western Front Society, founded in Vancouver in 1973, which-unlike the white elephant Telidon-provided a dynamic hub for experimental programming across artistic disciplines worldwide. This history of alternatives suggests that there are alternative presents to be explored as well.

DAWNA SCHULD Dawna Schuld is associate professor of modern and contemporary art history at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Minimal Conditions: Light, Space, and Subjectivity (University of California Press, 2018).