Underwater Time



The time before language, the time of the pre-ancestors.




CyberPowWow - Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew "Repent School"

AP: I don’t remember when I first met him, but I remember the first performance I saw, mestih’kusowin (Holocaust) at the Pitt Gallery, 1990, an eight person ensemble piece about residential school.

I hated it. My mother, and all my aunts and uncles had gone to residential school. I was so badly triggered I left the gallery shaking with rage.

It would not be the last time his performance work affected me so profoundly.

SU: Funny. but I can’t remember when I met him either. He was just there, filling this perfect Ahasiw-sized hole in my heart.
We really bonded in the mid ’90s around the web: he was an early artist adopter like me. What this new tech would mean (and semantically that it was called the web!) attracted us to it, and to each other. This made the Spider Language project so perfect to work on. I wrote every single bit of code for the site, and he did the images, the writing and the content gathering from the other artists. And we sat side by side day after day building the site, the structure, the journey, literally weaving it together.