“Global Social Railway” is part of a larger series of work entitled "Convergence: Video and Performance Art with Live Electronics." In GSR artist Chris Shofner collaborates with musicians to engage the intersection of art and technology through a 15-20 minute site-specific improvisational cinema and sound/music performance. The video artist and musicians respond to one another.

“Global Social Railway” conceptualizes political economist and communication theorist Harold Innis’ history of the Canadian Pacific Railway into an artistic performance of visual and aural improvisation. Robert Babe notes that for Innis, the Canadian Pacific Railway’s equipment “comprised a massive, energy-consuming, fast-moving, powerful, capital-intensive ‘sign’ dropped into the very midst of indigenous peoples, whose entire way of life was disrupted and eventually shattered as a result” (Babe 62) “Global Social Railway” combines the “time-binding” media of music performance with the “space-binding” media of electronics (Innis 27). The performance through the lens of communication theorist Neil Postman creates “a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility” (Postman 10). If as Postman notes, “technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind” then the internet is to social-networking what the physical apparatus of the brain is to the mind, a medium “which a use to a physical apparatus is put” (84). “Global Social Railway” is an attempt to restore Innis’ time and space while the train becomes a media-metaphor for the electronic dissemination of information.

Works Cited

Babe, Robert. "The Communication Thought of Harold Adams Innis". In Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Peguin Books,1984.