The artist Kay Burns, once an artist-in-residence at our research partner Waag Society, has developed a GPS tour with the use of 7scenes, called Diaspora. The tour can be walked in Saint John, Canada.
The art of walking
Kay Burns is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, and has co-founded the Ministry of Walking artist collective. The tour she has created fits perfectly into her view that walking is a good way to become familiar with and aware of your surroundings. As she herself puts it: "Very often, we tend to look for the quickest way to get somewhere, as was opposed to finding the slow methods of getting around, and exploring the place differently." Diaspora was developed to offer an alternative viewpoint of the Port City. It is not a tourist attraction, but a fictionalized experience, meant to allude to historical places and events through the experience of fictional people.
The tour then shows, according to Burns, "The underbelly of a place, as opposed to the things that you're always aware of on the surface."
About the tour
Viewers are led to particular locations where their presence triggers audio clips that play through 7Scenes. The recurring narrator is Moira Quinn, a fictional present-day Irish woman who comes to Saint John to do research on her family, who immigrated to the city to escape the potato famine. She has a stack of historical letters from her family to work from, and snippets of the letters are spoken by generations of Quinn women.
Diaspora is part of the exhibition SIGNALS of the third space gallery.
Visit the website of Kay Burns for more information about her and the tour.