TOOLKIT FOR TIME TRAVEL

SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE is a living research project that began as an online writing collaboration where we channeled our shared interest in contemporary and historical science fiction — cinema and literature — as a critical and reflective lens for political currents. We are not alone in our interest of sci-fi (aesthetics, narratives, and tropes) as a critical mirror of contemporary society that speculates alternative environments, systems, relationships, and ideologies. As a research project, SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE exists to to invite and include more voices in our ongoing conversation, so as to render the mirror more plural and complex in its [imaginative/speculative] potential.

Beginning in 2017, SMA hosted two participatory workshops at YYZ as part of our collaborative exploration of science fiction narrative worldbuilding. On Time Travel in Spring 2017, invited Jasmin Winter and Rayna Slobodian into the gallery to share their recent research with an intimate group of participants. Jasmin Winter spoke about recent research by Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), guiding us through new VR works by artist Skawennati that describe several Indigenous perspectives on time travel. Rayna Slobodian presented her research that looks critically at the colonization of Mars and the ongoing Space Race. In Winter 2017, for our second workshop On Time Travelling, guest speakers Natasha Myers and Ayelen Liberona presented their collaborative anthropological research and movement-based art installation Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds, followed by a guided meditation, all of which asked us to think differently about ecologies and anthropo-centric hierarchies.

Toolkit for Time Travel presents this research in the form of a transmedia publication that sits at the intersections of ‘anthology,’ ‘recipe book’ and ‘tool-kit.’ Stemming from the ethos that publishing is to call an audience, to create a public, to decentre and disperse authorship amongst a community through discourse in various formats and platforms, the publication engages with a series of questions that imagine the tools needed for time travel as a fait accompli, as a process, as an aspiration.

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On Wednesday, October 31, 2018, SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE will host a Participatory Workshop from 6pm to 9pm as part of the Toolkit for Time Travel exhibition. Leading up to the workshop we welcome you to contribute glass jars that will be used for candle-making during the workshop.

Members of the public can leave clean, empty jars of varying sizes (suitable for a candle) at the Toolkit for Time Travel exhibition at YYZ Artists’ Outlet during gallery open hours.