Beyond Anti-Conquest: Unearthing the Botanical Archive with Locative Media

This article introduces the Alpine Garden MisGuide / Le Jardin alpin autrement, a locative media project that endeavours to bring the complex cultural and historical insights of the paper archive on botanical exploration into dialogue with the embodied experience of visiting the living archive of contemporary botanic gardens. Recently created mobile guides to botanic gardens tend to fall back on the discourse of “anti-conquest”—where the colonial subject claims innocence even as s/he subordinates the other to their gaze—to frame their collections for the public. Taking a decolonial approach, this essay explores how the affordances of the MisGuide’s locative platform presents opportunities to challenge innocent or nostalgic presentations of botanic gardens’ collections and engage garden visitors in a more complex account of the influence of colonialism in the history of gardens and the environment.Cet article présente le Alpine Garden MisGuide / Le Jardin alpin autrement, un projet médiatique locatif qui s’efforce de faire dialoguer les connaissances culturelles et historiques complexes des archives papier sur l’exploration botanique avec l’expérience incarnée de la visite des archives vivantes des jardins botaniques contemporains. Les guides mobiles récemment créés sur les jardins botaniques tendent à se rabattre sur le discours de « l’anti-conquête » — où le sujet colonial revendique l’innocence alors même qu’il subordonne l’autre à son regard — afin d’encadrer leurs collections pour le public. Adoptant une approche décoloniale, cet essai explore comment les possibilités de la plate-forme locative du MisGuide offrent des occasions de contester des présentations innocentes ou nostalgiques des collections de jardins botaniques et d’engager les visiteurs des jardins dans un compte rendu plus complexe de l’influence du colonialisme dans l’histoire des jardins et de l’environnement

Between Landscape and the Screen: Locative Media,Transitive Reading, and Environmental Storytelling

International audienceIn what ways can the everyday citizen encourage sustainability and promote biodiversity in spaces that are as fragmented, industrial, and toxic as the city? This paper investigates how GPS-enabled platforms afford user experiences of what we call "embodied knowing"-learning through encounter, awareness through physicality-in urban wilds, which represent informal greenspaces on the edges of urban development. The locative mobile application that we have produced, Global Urban Wilds, complicates notions of time, space, and preservation in ruderal landscapes that survive in city spaces, demonstrating that they come into tension with layers of biodiversity, technological development, and settler culture in urban contexts such as Montréal, Canada. As such, we show how the app's mediation of these layers through a method of transitive reading promotes a user's critical negotiation and awareness of urban ecosystems in relation to today's "smart" city

Between Landscape and the Screen: Locative Media,Transitive Reading, and Environmental Storytelling

International audienceIn what ways can the everyday citizen encourage sustainability and promote biodiversity in spaces that are as fragmented, industrial, and toxic as the city? This paper investigates how GPS-enabled platforms afford user experiences of what we call "embodied knowing"-learning through encounter, awareness through physicality-in urban wilds, which represent informal greenspaces on the edges of urban development. The locative mobile application that we have produced, Global Urban Wilds, complicates notions of time, space, and preservation in ruderal landscapes that survive in city spaces, demonstrating that they come into tension with layers of biodiversity, technological development, and settler culture in urban contexts such as Montréal, Canada. As such, we show how the app's mediation of these layers through a method of transitive reading promotes a user's critical negotiation and awareness of urban ecosystems in relation to today's "smart" city