Aerial view of DEW Line radar station DYE-Main and DEW Drop troposcatter telecommunication system, Cape Dyer, Nunavut, Canada, circa 1960. Canadian Centre for Architecture, PH2016:0004:004
Dispatches
- Tallcree, Outbound
In 1987, on the Tall Cree reserve, just a few hundred kilometres north of Edmonton, a South African refugee and schoolteacher named Joe Pillay quietly became a node in Operation Vula. Meaning “open the road” in isiXhosa, Vula was the African National Congress’s encrypted command-and-control network — the secret backbone that kept leadership exiled in Lusaka, in touch with operatives inside South Africa. The gear came from an Edmonton computer store.
Probes
- Symbolic vs. Historical Truth
In 1938, Abraham Maslow lived with the Blackfoot (Siksika) Nation in southern Alberta for six weeks. Has it generated a modern myth that is still, somehow, meaningful and truthful? - Four Views of Earth from the Moon
Stewart Brand, Martin Heidegger, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ivan Illich each saw something different. - Vula / Vela
A poem that situates two South African histories next to each other: Operation Vula and Vela Hotel. What questions do these parallel lines raise?
“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
// Marshall McLuhan
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Canadian Media Ecologist Marshall McLuhan argued that while most people focus on the content of media, the artist focuses on the effects of technology, serving as an early warning system for the impending transformation of human life.
McLuhan often described Canada itself as a “land of the DEW line” — a country on the periphery with a clearer view of the changes happening at the centre.
“McLuhan has a paradoxical attitude toward the ‘modern’ arts. On the one hand, he says artists are geniuses who serve as ‘early warning systems’ for changes in society’s sensory balance. But at the same time, he says so-called ‘modern’ art is always one technology behind.”
Tom Wolfe, “What If He’s Right?” (1965)
V13, New Star Broadcasting (新星廣播電臺 Xinxing Guangbo Diantai) is a Taiwanese numbers station. Added (once per session) for ambiance.
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