Displacement and Drift (2020 – 2026) is a machinima (mixed reality video) and virtual installation project that reframed and reassembled materials from Blood In My Wires, Dust in My Breath, a live performance project commissioned by the Black Bag Media Society for performance at Factory Theatre in Toronto.

Displaced and Drifting Installation

The Displaced and Drifting installation is an interpretation and expansion of the Blood In My Wires, Dust In My Breath material for the interactive 3D world Second Life. Its layers of personal and ancestral memory plays with the altered sense of time, place and identity are fostered inside a virtual mixed realities world. 

Slideshow (9 images): Scenes from the Entry and Landing sections of the installation.

Scenes from the Forest Origins section of the installation.

The sonic exploration of Displaced and Drifting is woven around the fragmented narrative told from the perspective of a surviving essence after an undefined end-of-human-world scenario. Floating in and out of layered video and audio textures, the narrative voice latches onto a scene that reflects life in an idyllic off grid primitive Polish village, defined by the making of linen cloth from flax. The story progresses to the uprooting of the narrator’s mother’s family to a cattle car that ultimately brings them to a World War II concentration camp; and finally through scattered personal memories and reflections to an unknown future semi-existence that might partly reside inside cyberspace.

Displaced and Drifting features imagery filmed and/or photographed by Kirk Schwartz, Dan Kaunisviita, Liz Solo and Lyssa Pearson. Its soundworld includes layered sine tones, and segments of virtual compositions performed by the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse and the late composer Pauline Oliveros.

Funding for the Displacement and Drift project was provided by the Canada Council For the Arts / le Conseil des arts du Canada, and the British Columbia Arts Council.