“Trade Routes of the Mind”: A Brief History of Information Art in Canada

H& IT ON probes the turbulent social environments generated by information technologies. In a suite of all-new photo- and language-based works, conceptual artist IAIN BAXTER& (a.k.a. Iain Baxter) stages a satirical theatre of far-from-equilibrium behaviours and trends characteristic of a chronically web-surfing culture. The artist’s intervention loosely adapts the irreverent format of Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 collaboration with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage—a constant inspiration to “the&Man,” as BAXTER& has recently re-branded himself—to explore the effects of social media on the contemporary information landscape. But make no mistake, there is nothing nostalgic about BAXTER’s nod to the “McCoolman,” as he calls him. As in all his work since 1968, BAXTER&’s approach to information is always hands on. H& IT ON follows BAXTER& as he plays with and repurposes artifacts and affects circulating within the trade routes of the Information Society to create an unruly collage of observation and ideas. H& IT ON also includes new essays by Adam Lauder and Dennis Durham that, for the first time, situate BAXTER&’s pioneering information- based practice historically within a North American context. Lauder’s essay positions BAXTER& within a distinctly Canadian tradition of information art characterized by a persistent focus on affect, embodiment, and the multitude. The first history of information art in Canada, Lauder’s “Trade Routes of the Mind” explores Canadian artists’s reading against the grain of indigenous formulations of information and the Information Society in the work of Harold A. Innis, McLuhan and others—from Bertram Brooker to General Idea and beyond. Durham’s essay compares and contrasts BAXTER&’s art of Visual Sensitivity Information as Co-President of the Vancouver- based N.E. Thing Co. with cybernetic representations of entropy found in the contemporaneous work of American artists Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. Durham’s essay is essential reading for understanding the international significance of BAXTER&. H& IT ON also includes a preface by renowned McLuhan and BAXTER& scholar, Richard Cavell.