We have an update for you on the FJPP’s new digital project, Mapping Black Holes. Despite the pandemic, we’re moving ahead!
The project, headed by Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, is aimed at developing an interactive online platform to archive and share dancers’ hidden stories. Catherine met with several dancers who generously shared accounts of the perils associated with their practice: injuries, yearning and loss. We are very grateful for their accounts. Web programmer Cyrus Lognonné and graphic designer Emilie Allard are working on the design of the site.
At the same time, Karine Ledoyen and Catherine-Ève Gadoury are editing podcasts based on the project De la glorieuse fragilité, also to be posted on the site.
Finally, digital content consultant Josée Plamondon held two workshops with the team on the topics of discoverability and metadata. We’ll share the content of the second workshop, which shows how the approach to metadata in this project—a repository for the traces artists leave in the form of writings, audio and visual accounts—is necessarily different from standard approaches to metadata.
As Josée Plamondon explains, this project is not simply about promoting content (documenting for search engines), but also about giving voice (naming injuries) and highlighting the ways in which dancers’ accounts are interrelated. In this sense, the project will promote a participatory and decentralized act of naming by artists. To see the stages of reflection around the project’s digital challenges, click here (powerpoint in French).