Kathleen Irwin
Arrivals and Departures: The Bus Project/Community Interactivity

Organized as a transdisciplinary initiative at the University of Regina, The Bus Project was a community-based, public art event undertaken by theatre and inter-media artists, computer scientists and the Immigrant Women of Saskatchewan.  The aims of this research were to investigate subjectivity and narrative strategies, non-conventional spectatorship and how technology can seamlessly support such work.  

Investigating displacement and home, The Bus Project, linked low and high tech through the metaphor of the public bus system to explore the dissemination of individuals and their (cultural) “baggage”. The project situated computer game kiosks in the bus stations in Saskatoon and Regina. Using psychogeographical, “random drift” strategies, stories told by immigrant women were transformed into an interactive game that explored notions of choice and chance, resilience and transformation. “Upholstered” bus seats, representing what is taken and what is left behind, were installed in the bus itself.

         In community-based work, “buy in” from all participants is central; where  communities intersect and chafe is frequently the focal point of the event and provides the “value added” moment that can never be entirely planned nor repeated.  Conventional methods of assessment do not always take into account the possibility that researchers’ stated intentions do not express the multiple, sometimes unconscious, levels on which such projects operate. If intentionality is used as the yardstick for attributing merit then it must also be understood that in such events, there is an “excess of meaning” well beyond intention or imagination. 

         This paper discusses the notion of “value added” in public art/performance and problematizes the idea of blurred authorship in transdisciplinary research.