CFC Media Lab Alumni, Tahir Mahmood, Kalli Paakspuu, and Suzette Araujo exhibit “World Without Water” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running February 4-21, 2010. World Without Water will be exhibited at Great Northern Way Campus (577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver) as part of the Eco-Art series, co-presented with the Canadian Film Centre.

Through a physical interaction in a bathroom vanity, World Without Water offers a new media interactive documentary experience that witnesses the world’s diminishing fresh water supply.

The banal act of walking into a private bathroom and turning on the faucet while looking into a mirror, is the framework for a meditation on the future of this precious resource – water.

By turning on the tap we see photos streamed from the website flickr.com in the mirror.  Tagged flickr images reflect a global public’s view on the absence and abundance of fresh water. If both taps are turned the user is invited into an associational play with the “hot” (absence) and “cold” (abundance) images that have been uploaded from all across the world by professional and amateur photographers and made available through a live internet connection.

The user, while washing, makes narratives from views of our water use from Eurasia to Africa and from Australia to the Badlands of North America in a fun, clean and exploratory experience.

Artist Biographies:

Tahir Mahmood is a multi-talented creative personality with a Bachelors degree in Graphic Design. His career has spanned the last decade working as an Art Director and Set Designer for numerous music videos, documentary productions and TV commercials, including Art Direction for the Mountain Dew Survivor Reality Show for Castaway Production USA. Tahir co-founded World Without Water during his time at the Canadian Film Center’s Interactive Art and Entertainment Program in 2007.

Kalli Paakspuu is a founder of the nonprofits Womenfilm/Womenart and Collective for Living Theatre as well as a Genie-winning filmmaker. She expects to defend her doctoral dissertation, “Rhetoric’s of Colonialism in Visual Documentation” at the University of Toronto this summer.  The thesis examines early colonial cross-cultural photographic practices and the dialogical storytelling on both sides of the camera as international mediations.  Part-time faculty at York University, she currently teaches cultural studies and has taught film production and screenwriting in the Fine Arts programmes.

Suzette Araujo’s acting, comedic and musical talents have been showcased in a diverse range of performances, including a two-year North American tour with Cirque du Soleil, shows in China with Theatre Beyond Words, A Ross Petty production of Snow White at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, and a guest role as Mrs. Chintro in CBC television production of Twitch City. Her original one-woman show, Chandeleirva, won Patron’s Pick Award at the Toronto fringe and was first runner up for the Quincy Award in the Montreal fringe festival.  She performed this show at the Fringe Theatre Festival in New York in August, 2008.

Visit World Without Water.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.