Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/899551
Heritage Matters 43 But you're likely documenting your life with digital images regularly. The average iPhone user takes about 150 pictures a month. It could be phone pics of your son dancing at Grand Entry during the annual pow wow. Or GIFs of you taste-testing at last weekend's community butter tart festival. Or perhaps you're taking in a virtual reality installation at your nearby art gallery. There's no question that Ontarians, like the rest of the planet, have become a digital species. More and more, our stories are captured and experienced – sometimes entirely – in virtual space. It's the very definition of intangible. Digital culture is not only intangible, but digital tools are also great for documenting intangible heritage. The simple family photograph is a great metaphor for this digital shift. Instead of printing hard copies of our pics, we are storing years and years' worth of them on our devices, our hard drives, sometimes up on the cloud, and sharing them with our communities over Facebook, email, Instagram and other forms of social media. Most of them never materialize on paper or in a picture frame on our wall. So what happens to these pics – these memories – when our devices break down, or when we lose our hard drive? Or when Facebook or YouTube changes its policies? And who owns the servers that our photographs are stored on? Are we caring enough about how to preserve these digital stories, these family albums, for future generations? Or even for next year? It's not just personal. Ontarians of all walks of life use digital tools to capture, share and preserve our collective intangible cultures, including food, dance and oral traditions. Community groups on Facebook, bloggers, Instagrammers and YouTubers are all documenting and sharing stories of identity. For example, Ontario's top farming Instagrammers document the province's extraordinary bounty and food culture. Ottawa-based Garnement Inc. is a group of young Franco-Ontarian comedians sharing laughs and culture on a YouTube channel. The connections between participatory culture and social media are strong. Just this summer, Toronto's Caribana festival has been renamed and rebranded as the Peeks Toronto Caribbean Festival, because its new major sponsor is Peeks, a mobile livestreaming app. It's not hard to imagine the possibilities of kaleidoscopic citizen- livestreaming from such a spectacular event. Food, festivals and oral traditions are a great match for participatory and sharing digital tools. It's not just our personal artifacts of photos, videos and music. Our professional, collective cultural creation is increasingly digital, and those projects themselves become "intangible." Often these projects have no physical manifestations at all. I've been making contemporary documentaries exclusively native to the web for over 15 years, as have so many artists working with cutting edge digital tools to make video games, apps, interactive and immersive projects and, now, virtual reality installations. In fact, Ontarians produced The Intangibility of Our Digital Worlds By Katerina Cizek When was the last time you printed your photographs or made a photo album that you could hold in your hands? It's probably been a while. Left: Summer Leigh is a Toronto-based artist. In her photographic series, The Past is Never Far, she explores the extraordinary changes Toronto has seen since its founding. The exhibit displays the city in a way you've never seen before, using old technology with new to blend past and present. The series has been exhibited at several sites around Toronto, including the Trust's Parliament Interpretive Centre.