Dana is an architectural designer, curator, and researcher who is interested in how public memory and power shape the built world. Her research works to develop critical methodologies towards the interpretation, disclosure, and use of heritage sites, particularly in North and West Africa, stemming from experiences in the field. She directs *countermap (IG @countermap.land), a non-profit arts organisation in “Canada,” that examines relationships between heritage and power by building digital and IRL applications for critical cartography, as well as through community collaborations, research, and commissions. Dana has taught design and research courses at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design and OCADU’s Faculty of Design. She serves as a guest critic and lecturer at these institutions and elsewhere. Dana is a co-founder at SHEEEPschool (www.sheeep.school), a space for experimental knowledge exchanges in spatial practice. Dana is currently pursuing her PhD in Architecture at Taubman College for Architecture and Urban Planning, The University of Michigan Ann-Arbor where she is a member of The Africa Alliance. She splits her time between T’karonto, Cairo, and Michigama.

Dana, we’ve spoken many times about technologies and their role in making the landscape measurable. Based on your long-term research in cartography, history, and counter-mapping, could you tell us more about why you chose to engage in this theme? Additionally, if you could introduce the "Countermap" project in this context, it would help us gain a better understanding of the project.

Architectural training makes colonial spatial logics quotidian; from the urban plan, to the zoning parcel. Our eyes are trained to ‘see’ in a manner that obscures the realities and histories of land. The more I encountered these hyperreal technologies of surveying and land commodification, the more I questioned their development and sought out other ways of seeing. Working in landscapes such as deserts made the artificiality of land parcelization abundantly clear. In deserts, tree roots, wind directions, and interpersonal relationships take primacy over lot frontages and building setbacks designed to maintain view corridors. Planning mechanisms which are common in “globalised” cities utterly lose their meaning. I also grew increasingly frustrated with how architecture in a “Canadian” context mostly produced environmental, and symbolic sterility. I began to wonder what the opposite of a zoning map would look like. At the same time, the George Floyd protests had just taken place and people were rethinking lands in inspiring ways that never quite permeated the space of architectural production. 

This led me to develop an ongoing project called countermap, in partnership with Jesse McKee at 221A and Clayton Windatt at ARCA (Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference), as well as some of the original cohort at The Architecture Lobby’s T’karonto chapter. The goal of the project is to create a digital spatial archive of colonial monuments, recognizing an expanded definition of ‘monument’ which encompasses ecologies, communities, histories, erasures, and movements. We also work with community groups and collectives to build and spatialize microhistories of the land, as well as ‘countermonuments’—speculative, anti-hegemonic alternatives. countermap, and its digital platform are being developed in a piecemeal manner. 

As part of my initial research for *countermap I began to more closely interrogate architecture’s colonial technologies, and to trace them through time. Prior to the establishment of the colonial state, or the “Dominion of Canada,” many settler maps focussed on hydrography because colonisers would use waterways to expediently settle land and expand their economies (through trade and extraction). Waterways were drawn at a high fidelity while depictions of lands and the Indigenous communities to whom they belonged remained speculative. See for example; Carte de la Nouvelle France by Samuel de Champlain. Waterways were the first colonial frontiers.

Even in early treaties with Indigenous communities, which relied on text more than cartography, land was described through its relations to water bodies–see for example the violent and deceitful “Toronto Purchase” which describes the “purchased” tract using these terms— “all that tract or parcel of land commencing on the east bank of the south outlet of the River Etobicoke; thence up same, following the several windings and turning of the said river to a maple tree blazed on four sides at the distance of three miles and three-quarters, in a straight line from the mouth of the said river…”  

Of course, I am recalling this text to highlight the violence of colonial cartography. The Dish With One Spoon, T’karonto Carrying Place, and other Indigenous ways of relating to land are another kind of map. As are oral traditions. You cannot understand the morphology of so-called “Canada” without Indigenous presences, contributions, covenants, and relations.

Per my understanding the focus on hydrographic surveys largely changed with the establishment of land surveys that were conducted on urban or regional scales. This occurred in the late 18th and 19th centuries as part of a surveying “rush” in “Canada,” and many of those tools are still in use today. Every time a property is assessed by a surveyor in the present, these tyrannical histories of land abstraction and commodification are re-inscribed.

When Spiders Spin Dusk is concerned with the relationship between emerging technologies, particularly the rise of Artificial Intelligence, and the ways the underlying assemblage reconfigures our inhabited landscape, what are you noticing? In Canada and elsewhere?

Every representation of landscape is an abstraction that leads to questions around perspective, presences, and erasures. I think AI opens up interesting possibilities for speculation—both towards the future, and as a means to address archival and epistemological violences, or silences. At *countermap, we are developing methodologies that use AI to build critical datasets of monuments. I spend a lot of time stepping back and trying to ‘see’  beyond the shiny interface and its glossy outputs. AI obfuscates the labour, energy, and violences that are embedded within it—as evidenced by the use of AI to generate kill lists in Gaza. In this case, AI enhances machine visions of the landscape, and abstracts lives within it. I think we need to consider our own positionalities in the work and to spend time interrogating the technologies we platform and utilise. I find both comfort and trepidation in AI’s glitches and moments of imprecision.

I understand that your research relates to technology, locality, and colonialism. I believe that contemporary technology and land development are closely intertwined with anthropocentrism and colonialism. In South Korea, many corporations and government bodies have traditionally viewed both technology and land as resources for humanity, considering them targets for development to advance human prosperity and convenience. The Korean government, prioritizing efficiency and convenience, often constructs tunnels through mountains. For instance, the 150 km highway from Seoul to Yangyang contains 63 tunnels. Similarly, new technologies that increase efficiency and save time are frequently launched without sufficient ethical scrutiny. I think this perspective of viewing nature as an object of development also extends to technology. What do you think shapes humanity’s attitudes toward technology and nature? Do you believe that experiences of colonisation, whether as the colonised or colonisers, influence how societies approach technology?

 I’ve actually thought quite a lot about how postcolonial and post-war development in Korea has been referred to as ‘Miracle on the Han River,’ and its explicit mirroring of Western economic development. To describe a transformation towards “modernity” as a mythological event tied to a landscape is quite curious (see also: “Miracle on the Rhine.”) It points towards the entangled meanings of the river as a simulacrum for prosperity and as a site of collective imaginaries. Through attempts to conquer “nature,” colonialism and postcolonialism were implicated within it. Economic exploitation is always ecological. The “human,” or the “anthropocentric” is tied to land, despite attempts to isolate nature and culture.

 In the early postcolonial ‘Global South,’ a sense of developmental ‘lack’ was also pervasive. This was tied to the perceived need to compete within global markets, and a perpetuation of colonial tropes of “traditional” or “local” as “backwards.” In order to maintain their presence in postcolonial states, Western countries provided large loans, gifts, and agreements under the guise of developmental aid (see: UNKRA). I think the legacies and continued implementations of these massive development agendas promote illusions that the future can be controlled; further cementing imperialism, neocolonialism, and internal colonialism. This largely occurs through the ‘taming’ and exploitation of the traditional, local, ‘natural,’ and a process of othering that enmeshes communities within these dichotomies. 

Digital technologies are directly tied to the establishment of spatial hegemonies and rely on commodification through abstraction. My Master’s thesis explored how airborne surveillance technologies—from the carrier pigeon to Project Loon—changed the production of space. In order to develop large tracts of land, you had to see them with increasing precision. Machine eyes are not simply tools for representation, they are active agents in exploitation. Today, both machine eyes and large-scale postcolonial infrastructures have become ubiquitous. Still, there is room for hope. Rivers are being granted legal personhood, such as Muteshekau-shipu, Turag, and Whanganui. The removal of some concrete embankments on the Han River is a small part of this reversal.

Artists brought with them many tools for mapping: such as trail cameras, drones, and LiDAR scanners. Many of these tools find their beginnings in military uses before turning into consumer products. We are interested in whether these tools can be turned over to different values such as care.

I think this is an interesting provocation, and something that I have explored in my own critical fabulations and through *countermap. There are many groups thinking about the ethical implications of tech and looking for ways to incorporate care. I would look towards the work of Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led program that is doing critical work on ethics, AI, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Also the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement. Artists and researchers like Trevor Paglen or Forensic Architecture, who turn surveillance technology against itself, are also practising care by revealing to us how classified technology operates. 

On the other hand, works that use technology to critique positivist relationships to landscape are becoming abundant. Artists are confronting modernity (read: colonisation and its aftereffects) and its profound sensory and spiritual losses—which is why I think words like “situated” or “grounded” have become so pervasive in cultural production. Tech opens up space to restore the agencies of environments and our phenomenological relationships to them. 

These conversations need to be mediated by an acceptance of intentional refusals and silences. We need to normalise spaces where tech is not allowed to enter, and to become more intentional about maintaining technological voids as a form of care.

In Unmake Lab’s research, they are interested in traces of narratives left in supposedly “neutral” technologies and the representations of real-world these technologies re-produce. In Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology & Impossibility by Matthew Fuller and OLga Goriunova, this is described as Ghost Logic, referencing the technologies that began in the Cold War era having a certain “flavour” that is difficult to pinpoint. How has this showed up in your research? What do you see as openings for artists to intervene and make visible?

My research actually relies on AI’s representational regurgitations and the limits of its data landscape. *countermap works to reveal colonial aesthetics through data aggregation; our eye is fixated towards hegemonic archives, while simultaneously pursuing the co-development of alternatives with community partners. Sometimes these community-led alternatives are never made digital as part of a privileged process. 

At the same time, I view AI’s downfalls in addressing ‘other’ cultural worlds as a form of protection that I am interested in exploiting. Think of it as accidental cultural encryption. When AI makes mistakes, or when culturally-specific prompts produce glitches, an aesthetic emerges that reflects tech’s formulations of the ‘typical’ as Western, white, male, able-bodied, etc. as well as its complete inability to reconcile other worlds. My personal view is that we should revel in the bleakness of normativity and find comfort in the glitches instead of correcting them. It opens up a space for subaltern interpretations, allowing those of us excluded from the algorithm to return our gaze towards it.

It is often easy to centre AI ethics through ideological lenses and try to decide a moral right or wrong. As AI seeps into every crevice of our lives, curating our behaviours and interactions with others, what can we do to live among AI and values that are not in our best interest?

Every few years we are told by technological optimists that an emerging technology will redefine our lives. See: blockchain, NFTs, etc. These claims rarely live up to their full promise. Has the internet become the egalitarian digital commons it was designed to be? Digital turns are often just digital pivots. While I believe speculation can be fruitful, I think it can distract us from resisting present harms.

My palpable fear is around AI’s entanglements with racial capitalism as enacted by police and military forces. Specifically; the extension of surveillance and targeting capabilities, and subsequent social and environmental degradation at massive scales. As an extension of this, fake news generated by AI and its impacts on public opinion fuel conflicts and political manoeuvres that are happening now. Most recently, we can look to the 2024 US Election. These are the clear moral wrongs we should focus on, and quickly.

In relation to ecology, I’m interested in wasteland and ruins. I think the internet is in the process of digesting and regurgitating itself as AI produces more and more content that’s disembodied from narratives and stories. Narratives and stories used to anchor people in communities, places, and provide a sense of ancestral connection. What  “it” produces, are immense amount of data and “it” also harvests massive amounts of data from people who use AI, but there’s no meaning, no narrative, no culture, and no anchoring in a place and time. This seems difficult to resist. What are your thoughts?

It’s worth asking ourselves which cultures we are losing, and why they are so susceptible to co-optation. So much cultural dissemination happens offline, and when it does manifest itself digitally, the interactions are often culturally coded. I think people who have resisted technological colonialism (and other attempts at subjugation) will continue to do so. I would also look to digital resistance movements which maintain their visibility despite censure by social media companies for inspiration.

You’ve talked about the possibilities of making use of technologies and imperial frameworks of understanding the world “as wrongly as possible.” How does this approach create new modes of inhabiting technologies and potentially re-organizing our material landscapes?

I consider colonial archives as technologies. My recent work has focussed on infiltrating them. 

First, *countermap’s research is working to appropriate and reinterpret public data sets in “Canada” in order to reveal colonial strategies that have shaped the landscape. 

Second, I am interrogating depictions of a particular landscape in Egypt through inaccurate accounts by colonisers. Imperial archives are full of fabrications and uncertainties that are masked by an air of authority. Following Bruno Latour, facts are factishes. At the same time, local folklore, rumours, and cosmologies have resulted in multiple identities and temporalities which overlap on a single site. This malleability has become pretty central to the work. Thinking through this landscape is a process of confronting unequal power relations and schisms in representational strategies. This “wrongness” creates space for relearning landscapes—and allows for other disturbed approaches to material and immaterial archives. These are pathways for reclaiming epistemological power.

American ecologist David Abram describes modern culture as: “an estrangement from the animate Earth” and “the flattening of our human relationships.” in his book The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. Where do you see as potential for re-entering relationship with the natural world when technologies have often been widely used towards distinguishing “humaness” from everything else?

Technology is composed of and reliant on more-than-human worlds. How many tonnes of cobalt from the Congo have been used to power the AI boom? Reciprocally, how many habitats have been destroyed by technology?  I think we need to attach every digital process to its material footprint in order to undergo this process of “unflattening.”

Where can we learn to reimagine our relationship with our material and digital landscape if not from a botched past? What are some possibilities for artistic methods of inquiry to drive better storytelling when we find ourselves in a relatively dire situation: climate disasters, mass automation enabled by AI, rising authoritarianism worldwide, etc.? 

Following Kathryn Yussof, for historically-subjugated people who have experienced catastrophe, the end of the world has already occurred. I find it interesting that discourse about an impending climate apocalypse, and sexy post-disaster speculations come from contexts which are most equipped to navigate the climate crisis. Much of the rest of the word continues to survive, resist, adapt, and anticipate that the world will end again and again. Speculations of future crumbling worlds come from relatively privileged spheres. The modern condition focuses on a long past and calculable future while neglecting the present. As a sweeping generalization, it would be refreshing to see the present addressed more pressingly in cultural production. I think part of the challenge is that the present feels fleeting, but it’s an important precursor to the future. Who better to take up this task than artists? I am inspired that so many of the works from When Spiders Spin Dusk engages real-time in order to access deep time.

Through this project, When Spiders Spin Dusk, Korean and Canadian artists and curators had a one week residency having workshops and discussions. To promote exchanges and collective intelligence and creation, what do you consider as a good method for exchanging knowledge and experiences to foster collective intelligence and creativity? Additionally, to better understand ecosystem intelligence, we had engaged in activities like setting up trail cameras to observe animal behaviors and generating electricity through bacterial network systems. Are there any activities you have tried, or would like to try with the artists, to understand the intelligence or structure of ecosystems or landscapes? Feel free to draw from your experience with SHEEEPschool as well.

I think slow beginnings are key, particularly in settler-colonial contexts. This allows for engagement, reciprocity, and input from Indigenous and other communities implicated in the work. I want to re-emphasize reciprocity. And sometimes reciprocity isn’t possible, but those conversations need to be had. Interrogating our positionalities, ethics, and the intended outcomes of our work is crucial. Being transparent about our missteps and failures is also important I think. 

Although I am primarily employed by post-secondary institutions, I understand the importance of situated experimentation and creating space for alternative knowledge-sharing. And I am wary that the term ‘experimentation’ is a loaded one—perhaps we can call it intentional play instead. Together with Reza Nik, Lily Jeon, Dana Prieto, and Nam Hoang, I co-founded SHEEEPschool, a space for spatial ‘experiments’ in T’karonto (www.sheeep.school). Part of our ongoing discussions have revolved around embedding ethical dilemmas into our pedagogies instead of shying away from them. For example, I led a workshop with Dana Prieto called GROUND WORK where we guided participants and collaborators through a series of phenomenological interpretations of SHEEEPschool’s immediate surroundings. We focussed on tracing material flows (both visible and hidden) as part of this process, and explored what it meant to extract knowledge and material from the landscape, connecting it to wider historic processes and legacies of cartography. 

We imagined GROUND WORK as a series. In the first workshop we traced various prompts through the site; movement, toxicity, sound, etc. then we compiled them and discussed them as a thick representation.  I can envision an iteration of the workshop where we more closely interrogate one prompt such as toxicity, for example. This would allow for multiscalar and multitemporal readings of the land. Similarly, I would be curious to see new relationships emerge when works from When Spiders Spin Dusk are aggregated. Which tensions, overlaps, other readings will arise?