It does seem a bit incongruous at first. Why are two London grime artists - not to mention two Egyptian rappers - appearing in a work by a 62 year-old Canadian artist at the Venice Biennale?
Douglas’s much-admired new two-part installation at the festival (he’s representing Canada) is a continuation of interests that the artist has been pursuing the whole of his career. 2011 ≠ 1848, as it is titled, is a richly layered collection of works, stuffed with ideas in that dizzying way contemporary art so often is, but inspired by the 10th anniversary of the seemingly unrelated but near-simultaneous protests and unrest that broke out across the globe in 2011, including the riots in London, and the music that began to emerge there around that time.
The first part of his show, in the Canadian pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, comprises four large-scale photographs which restage protests and riots from that year from four different locations - Tunis, in January at the beginning of the Arab Spring, the aftermath of the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver in June, clashes between young people and police in Hackney in the August, and the kettling of Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in October.
In the second, two huge screens hanging in one of the vast salt warehouses down in the Dorsoduro area of the city, right on the water, depict what seems to be a call-and-response between two duos: the London-based rappers TrueMendous and Lady Sanity (both of whom originally hail from Birmingham) and two male MCs in Cairo, El Joker and Raptor.
Protest, and music as a form of cultural protest or expression of political and social frustration has long been an area of fascination for Douglas - and that particular type of expression, he tells me, “is manifest in grime, to a large degree”. Grime began to appear, he says, just before the events of 2011, which he believes were a manifestation of a “widespread intuition of something being wrong”.
He is representing Canada at the Venice Biennale with photos about riots and a video about grime
Music has permeated Douglas’s life: he was named after the jazz performer Stan Kenton and fell in love with John Coltrane early on. Studying fine art in Vancouver in the late 1970s, he started making slideshows, then films, using archive materials. On Friday nights he DJ’d in a local gay bar, splicing Herbie Hancock tracks he’d picked up in New York into other hits, reviving the venue’s fortunes in the process.
Since then, in his film works, Douglas has often used music to elaborate on the sticky issues of race, class and social inequality. An early audio and slide projection work — “Deux Devises” (1983) — questions assumptions of European superiority, “measuring” a formal 19th-century ballad against the febrile improvisational blues of Robert Johnson. A fictional recording session in “Luanda-Kinshasa” (2013) imagines what would have happened if Miles Davis had discovered Afrobeat.
“Music,” says Douglas, over Zoom from his kitchen in LA, “is a time-based medium and a model of how people share time together. Film is too.” This year, Douglas will be bringing both to the Venice Biennale, where he is representing Canada, having been commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada.
in his most ambitious exploration of photography to date — the central focus of his practice since the late 1980s — stan douglas has reconstructed nine remarkable but forgotten moments from history that took place at the original pennsylvania station in new york city. the landmark railroad station, which occupied two city blocks in midtown manhattan from 1910–1963, was an architectural marvel in the beaux-arts style, with its imposing colonnade columns and concourse covered by magnificent glass domes. its controversial demolition, to make way for madison square garden, went on to catalyze the architectural preservation movement in the united states.
stirred by this rich historical backdrop, douglas drew on archival research to capture the serendipity and poignancy of daily life for his artwork, ‘penn station’s half century’.
‘penn station’s half century’ comprises nine vignettes arranged into four thematic panels, whose historical scenes were painstakingly re-created by douglas over a four-day shoot in vancouver. this process called for more than four hundred actors to be scanned and dressed in one of five hundred unique period costumes, before being posed digitally. douglas then photographed the live actors, and seamlessly combined them with digitally-recreated interiors of the demolished station, whose architectural elements were generated through an intensive CG post-production process.
Sunlight is not typically associated with the dingy basement vibe that envelops commuters passing through Penn Station.
But natural light spills across the new Moynihan Train Hall through its massive, 92-foot-high skylight ceiling and illuminates another surprise: permanent installations by some of the most celebrated artists in the world.
Kehinde Wiley, Stan Douglas and the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset have major pieces prominently displayed in the new $1.6 billion train hall set to open Friday, offering an expansion of Penn Station’s concourse space and serving customers of Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road. The hall, designed by the architecture firm SOM, also connects to subway lines, although they are some distance away.
The 255,000-square-foot train hall is inside the James A. Farley postal building, the grandiose Beaux-Arts structure designed by McKim Mead & White in 1912, two years after the original Pennsylvania Station. (New Yorkers may know the Farley Building from rushing up its giant staircase to file income taxes before midnight in mid-April.)
The new hall is named for Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, who first introduced plans for a renovation in the early 1990s, but they were mired in delays for years. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the driving force behind the project, in 2016 announced a public-private partnership for developing the hall, including Empire State Development, Vornado Realty Trust, Related Companies, Skanska and others.
Stan Douglas, the Canadian video artist and photographer, likes to think about when things go awry. This is the premise of his video installation, Doppelgänger, currently on view at David Zwirner in New York and Victoria Miro in London. As its title suggests, the work, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2019, is a tale of doubles. Douglas’s video, projected on two translucent screens, visible on both sides, centers around two parallel realities—two Earths orbiting at opposite ends of the galaxy, unaware that they’re identical to each other.
On each Earth, an astronaut named Alice is copied via stem cells and teleported to a spaceship light-years away, bound for a distant planet. Scientists at Mission Control are shocked, however, when the vessels, thought to be progressing deep into the cosmos, inexplicably return to Earth’s orbit. Unbeknownst to them, the Alice clones have actually crossed the galaxy, arriving on the Earth opposite from that which they emerged. The astronomers, a political official, and the original Alice together grapple with how to treat this uncanny other. In one case, Douglas says, “Alice is treated like a returning citizen who needs comfort, B12 injections, and bed rest. The other one is treated like a dangerous alien who gets quarantined, interrogated, and shot up with sodium Pentothal.” For Douglas, the work functions as an allegory for immigration, pointing to the artist’s penchant for deploying speculative fiction as a mode of social inquiry.
2020 finds Douglas’s career in the midst of its own thrilling saga: back-to-back openings on two continents, an evening talk at the Guggenheim Museum, and a career-changing announcement; Douglas will be representing Canada at the next Venice Biennale. Amidst all that, Interview sat down with the artist to discuss Doppelgänger, Star Trek, and his fascination with the hypothetical.
If Stan Douglas weren’t a filmmaker, video artist and photographer, he’d be a writer. He thinks like a writer. When he talks about his projects and bodies of work, how they come into being and how they develop, it is like listening to a novelist outlining a plot, setting a scene or describing a character. He provides a narrative frame in which stories and characters present and configure themselves, often in complicated situations. Douglas has been interested in written language for a long time. In Vancouver in the ’90s he attended the talks and readings organized by the KSW, the Kootenay School of Writing, a writers’ collective in which artists, writers and poets discussed the various connections among their art forms. The discussions at KSW were also resolutely political. Douglas has said that the KSW was a fundamental influence on his practice, the trace of which is evident in the ways that art and politics overlap in much of his work.
What is consistent about Douglas’s narratives is that they are always in flux. It is a literary convention that the epic poem begins in media res, so the reader enters the story in the moment of its occurrence. In this sense Douglas’s predisposition is epic (I am inclined to use that word to describe the amount and quality of his production, as well). Characteristically, there are no beginnings and endings in his work; as he says, “life is all middles.” He has gone to considerable lengths to reflect that temporal condition. Suspiria, a video made in 2003, is constructed from over 250 story fragments and two hours of music that together generate an infinite number of visual and aural sequences. In making it he designed a system that makes its own decisions. The effect is an inconclusiveness, a kind of parallax in which the same story is told in different ways. As early as Klatsassin, 2006, he took the example of the contradictory plots in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, 1950, and constructed what he called a “dub western” that investigated a murder from multiple perspectives.
Stan Douglas’s images are often works of historical fiction in the guise of documentary realism. Since the 1980s, when he was a key figure among a group of emerging photo-conceptualists in Vancouver, Douglas has depicted the social fissures of the postwar period. By re-creating in vivid detail scenes of urban unrest and anti-colonial struggle, he depicts people coming to terms with various wars that may never conclude. Key to the work is what anthropologists might call a thick description of different eras and places. Detailed observations of fashion, architecture, or urban space in his photographs can encapsulate moments in history. In installations that re-create historical jazz and funk performances, music carries tensions felt by entire generations.
Douglas’s massively scaled, high-production-value images bear the weight that history paintings once did. The series "Disco Angola" (2012) pairs photographs of revelers at underground discos in New York in the late 1970s with scenes of ordinary people in post-independence Angola during that period. In other series, generic conventions, or what Douglas calls visual idioms, distill historical worldviews. The relatively small black-and-white images of "Midcentury Studio" (2011) were purportedly created by a North American photographer in the 1940s and early ’50s. Within this fictional narrative conceit, commissioned portraits, journalistic shots, and diverse studio-lighting experiments embody changing twentieth-century values. What might have been unremarkable individual photographs in their time speak volumes in the present.
In his recent works, Douglas has focused on moments when social structures break down. Two vast images show the London riots in 2011 from an aerial perspective, as police and demonstrators confront one another on windy Hackney streets. The pictures are what Vilém Flusser—a theorist whose writings have informed Douglas’s practice—would call "informative" images, which not only deliver information but also lay bare a visual regime linked to twenty-first century surveillance techniques.
Douglas’s video installations can be demanding. Most recently, he realized a six-screen film, The Secret Agent (2015), that transposes the anarchist violence of Joseph Conrad’s novel about nineteenth-century London to Lisbon in the 1970s, wracked by a wave of bombings that preceded Portugal’s Carnation Revolution.
Whether creating still or moving images, Douglas often works more like a feature filmmaker than a typical photographer. He employs a full crew, ranging from lighting technicians to set designers, and his post-production team takes full advantage of digital technology to construct tableaux. His current exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York features "Blackout," a series of ten such compositions that show New York during an imagined power-loss crisis. A second series comprises abstract images that he compares to digital photograms. Uniting these works is a profound and career-long interest in what the artist calls the photographic apparatus.
I spoke several times with Douglas, who is based in Vancouver but constantly travels the world, both on the phone from Los Angeles and in person in New York as he was preparing the exhibition.
SMITH What was the origin of "Scenes from the Blackout"?
DOUGLAS It begins, as all my work does, with an intuition that this is the right thing to do. I wanted to make a photograph of blackness, which is an impossible thing to do. What can I still see in the absence of light? The work is brand-new, and I won’t know if my intuition was right until I’ve had a chance to sit with the images and think about them.
This is supposed to be contemporary New York. In one image there’s even a cell phone displaying a date in August of last year. The premise is that if a blackout occurred these days, we would see a combination of what happened in 2003 and in 1977. The 2003 blackout, when the electrical grid for part of the United States and Canada went down, took place not long after 9/11, and people were motivated to help each other through the event. As normal social conventions fell away in the emergency, there were new opportunities for sociability. In one image I show a crowd outside the old post office across from Penn Station. Or there were moments of real resourcefulness: one photo depicts a woman stuck in an elevator who has MacGyvered a candle out of a can of Crisco using a shoelace as a wick. But in 1977 the situation was more desperate, with people taking the opportunity to loot. Now is not the best time to be poor in America, and so we’d certainly see people looting because they need stuff. So I have a shot of that happening. It was made in a store on 14th Street and it looks like it is illuminated by a flash, as if it were taken by a photojournalist.
SMITH But of course your work isn’t a spontaneous image shot in the moment. Can you tell me about how you construct your photographs?
DOUGLAS I worked with a crew of about thirty people for some of the shots, which can be quite layered. For example, one is an exterior of a building on Broome Street in SoHo. There was an exposure for the moonlight, a second exposure for the shadow, and then a series of exposures for the candlelight inside—all merged together. We shot another on 39th Street and Sixth Avenue. I had a platform on the street and did a day-for-night shot of the background. And then another exposure was made for the light on the street, and then I used flashes to illuminate performers in the foreground crossing the street.
SMITH You don’t see many police officers or signs of control and authority.
DOUGLAS Well, I was most interested in individual reactions. How would people behave in this breakdown of order? In the largest image there’s one police horse without a rider, which kind of captures that sense of breakdown.
SMITH Your other new series is quite different. The images look like photographs taken through a microscope—the opposite of the socially oriented scenes in "Blackout."
DOUGLAS I call these DCTs, which stands for Discrete Cosine Transforms. It gets technical. I consider these to be like digital photograms. With a photogram you’re kind of taking away the exterior world of photography and just working with the photosensitive material and the light. With digital photography, your light goes into the camera and you turn the resulting image into code. So what I did was reverse engineer that: I made software and a bit of hardware so that I can produce a code that makes an image. My process is based on JPEG compression; I’m manipulating the kinds of harmonic interactions that essentially undergird all digital images.
At first, I was using this technique to make color field images, shading in one direction or another. But this was a kind of arbitrary aesthetic experimentation. Then I found out there was something that the images wanted to do themselves, they wanted to be more than one thing simultaneously. So you can see a primary image, like an "X" or overlapping boxes. But then many secondary images appear, including circular forms. These are images of nonidentity: one thing that is multiple things simultaneously. And when I realized I could find a visual form to present that idea, it became more satisfying.
SMITH I imagine that if I took a picture of one of these on my phone it wouldn’t come out.
DOUGLAS It would look terrible.
SMITH Is that, then, an expression of resistance to a culture of endless digital image circulation?
DOUGLAS These are the substrates of imaging. We’re seeing these forms all the time, but we can’t see them. This is something that’s presented to us with every digital image, but we’re never aware of it. Only when your Netflix stream breaks down can you see this happening—this static. But then when it speeds up again the forms disappear. My work is looking at where things break down, and in that moment of breakdown what choices we make.
SMITH These share the same production values as your "Blackout" pictures. They may be about breakdown, but they can hardly be considered examples of what some theorists call the "poor images" characteristic of online visual culture.
DOUGLAS I think it’s important to remember the experience of being in a room with an object. One of my early art thrills was being at an exhibition of Agnes Martin paintings at Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris. It was a big space with natural light coming in. I walked into the room, turned around, and at the same time a cloud went over the sun and the color temperature changed. These paintings were pale yellow, pink, and blue, so the whole room transformed. And this experience—of having a sense of myself in the room, in a body, with light—was something I’d never really had before with art. I’d always thought of paintings as being pictures, not as things in the room with me. In the end, these works are quite difficult to reproduce, just like the “Blackout” photographs or the photographs of the riots. You don’t have the same experience unless you’re there with them. Which is kind of an important thing. Otherwise, why make the art?
SMITH The production value also ascribes importance to the image, asking for a certain kind of attention on the part of the viewer.
DOUGLAS The pictures give more, the more time you spend with them. You kind of have to slow down and pay attention. And look at how you look.
SMITH You’ve stayed very current with technology for the last thirty years. What are the interesting aspects of new image-making devices and techniques for you?
DOUGLAS The main thing is that you’re taking responsibility for the image now. You can’t just say, oh, that’s how it was, so that’s why the photograph is that way. Now, a photograph is something you make and something you have responsibility for having made. Of course, photography has been that way from the very beginning. Some of the earliest photographs were composite images. Gustave Le Gray and Alphonse Giroux made elaborate constructions by doing montage after the fact to improve their images.
But there was a sense, briefly, about photography being somehow an authentic, indexical trace of reality. This is an alluring idea even though photography has always been inhuman. Photographs always transform what the world looks like; they do not resemble the way we humans actually see. We see in terms of meaning, not in terms of pure optics. Despite this, we have a weird tendency to identify with the machine. We think that we see like a camera or dream like a movie, even though we don’t really do those things.
Maybe by breaking the rules of realism in photography—the rules of this automatic, perspectival image—we can get back to a trace of the humanity of looking. So I want to get past this identification with the machine, and to encourage viewers to look at images as objects that are in front of them. The way you look at the DCTs, or the way you look at the riot photographs, is not by identifying with the camera’s perspective, but by actually choosing which details of the object you want to focus on.
SMITH Is it important, then, for you to foreground your authorship, to identify as the one constructing these images?
DOUGLAS Sometimes there’s a fictional character standing in as the photographer, as in "Midcentury Studio." In that case I adopted a persona, a character who had made the photographs. Sometimes I adopt different gazes. In the riot images, we see helicopters in the image, but I’m also in a helicopter making the overall photograph. The gestalt is the point of view of surveillance, which I can then treat theatrically. I admit the fact that it isn’t an intimate image whatsoever. This is an image of administration and control.
SMITH Do you approach contemporary events differently than you do historical periods?
DOUGLAS I guess I feel less constrained by contemporary images. I’m in it, so I can depict scenes more freely. I don’t have to constantly imagine what’s right. With "Disco Angola," I was interested in historical situations that happened simultaneously, and I was trying to show things in the most detailed fashion possible. You can either try to use the look of that moment or else use our technology to capture an image of the past. I didn’t want to mimic a grainy 35mm photo from the era. It was less about that kind of realism that was part of "Midcentury Studio" and more about clarity. I wanted to draw a parallel between two autonomous situations on the brink of collapse: the underground disco scene in New York just before being ruined by an exterior force coming in and Angola’s Independence Day being ruined by the country’s fall into a proxy Cold War conflict that lasted for the next eighteen years.
SMITH You often cite Vilém Flusser’s theoretical writings as an inspiration. What does his theory of photography mean to you?
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While poles apart visually, the two series excerpted in Stan Douglas’s 14th solo appearance at David Zwirner through April 7 have more in common than may initially appear; both are products of sophisticated processes of manipulation, and both position the photographic medium as an arena in which the staged and the real (however that’s defined) are not simply pitted against one another, but are fused into new and confounding wholes.
For the first series, Blackout (2017), Douglas staged incidents from an imaginary but all-too-believable New York emergency, tracing the various effects of a large-scale loss of power on the city’s population and infrastructure. In ten rather painterly shots, the artist presents familiar scenes of isolation and camaraderie, theft and rescue, drawing on accounts of comparable real events, including the 1977 blackout and Hurricane Sandy. It’s a method that he’s used several times before as a way to explore how unexpected shifts in living conditions affect our relationships with our surroundings and each other, but here the lighting (or lack thereof) makes the experiment visually as well as psychologically satisfying. As figures emerge from and return to darkness and the familiar nocturnal skyline seems to vanish, light is made to feel more and more like a precious resource; the action in these charged scenes often unfolds under something like a spotlight, with all the theatrical intensity that implies.
In the second series, DCT (2016-ongoing), Douglas manipulates the photographic process in a different way, treating digital color as a painter would a palette. The title is an acronym for "discrete cosine transform," a term for an informational sequence used in the processing of a JPEG file. Inputting chromatic and other values himself as opposed to relying on automated assistance, the artist has arrived at a set of abstract designs that occasionally suggest Ben-Day dots, but which ultimately float free from any recognizable imagery. Printed on gessoed square panels (another link to painting), radiant segments of pure color interlock and overlap, springing into existence where two forms meet, again throwing the relationship of a photograph to any stable and/or external reality into fascinating doubt.
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Henry James once described Joseph Conrad's writing as a "prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground" of his stories.
For more than 30 years, the artist Stan Douglas has performed a similar kind of flight pattern with his lush, eerie photographs and films, collected by the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art and many other institutions around the world. But it has often seemed as if Mr. Douglas's own viewpoint were less that of a subjective human than of historical consciousness itself, peering down on the streets of Vancouver, where he has lived and worked his entire life; on the ruins of Detroit; on the economic stasis of Cuba; and on scenes he has carefully constructed to mimic documentary realism.
His newest film, "The Secret Agent"—based on Conrad's unusual 1907 novel about a terrorist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England—is in many ways one of the most straightforward pieces ever made by Mr. Douglas, 55, whose work can draw deeply and abstrusely on economic theory, linguistics and postcolonial politics. (The art critic Richard Dorment once described him, difficulty-wise, as "the Mount Eiger of contemporary artists," best approached from the foothills.)
Just as Conrad was coy in describing his novel as a "simple tale of the 19th century," Mr. Douglas's six-channel film—on view at the David Zwirner gallery through April 30—is far from a simple tale of the 21st. It closely follows Conrad’s plot, inspired by a real, failed, 1894 anarchist attempt to destroy the observatory. But Mr. Douglas's film transposes the story to Portugal in the "Hot Summer" of 1975, in the politically fragile days after that country's dictatorship fell. The target this time is the terminal of an underwater telephone cable that connects Portugal to the rest of the world, an attack that, as one instigator says, would be to "bomb modernity itself."
Canadian artist Stan Douglas has won the 2016 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. He will receive around $110,000 and an exhibition at the Hasselblad Center, as well as a book of his work published by MACK.
He has been included in such exhibitions as the 1995 Whitney Biennial, the 1997 Skulptur Projekte Münster, the 1997 Documenta, the 2005 Venice Biennale, and the 2011 Moscow Biennale, among others.
The foundation praised Douglas for his "open and highly innovative approach to both analogue and new digital formats, stating, "At the heart of his work lies a strong interest and commitment to social issues of race, gender, identity and post-colonial politics, whilst maintaining a valuable self-critical perspective on the role of the artist in contemporary culture."
What happens when the imaginary "fourth wall" between theater actors and audiences is actually a translucent scrim? And how about a play that doubles simultaneously as a movie, using cameras to film and project the action back onto that scrim in real time?
Such questions will find an answer this week in "Helen Lawrence," an ambitious cinema-meets-live-theater event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, created by the boundary-pushing visual artist Stan Douglas with TV screenwriter Chris Haddock.
Drawing its story and spirit from the bygone world of film noir, "Helen Lawrence," running Wednesday through Saturday as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival, features live actors in a hybrid performance format meant to be both unsettling and bemusing.
Der Künstler Stan Douglas hat eine App entwickelt, die eine Reise in die Vergangenheit erlaubt und die Bilder zukunftsfähig macht.
Blaugraue Abenddämmerung. Eine schmale Straße aus Schotter. Zweistöckige Holzhäuser, klapprige Zäune, rostige Fässer. Kläffen, Knurren von Hunden. Jemand klopft an eine Tür. Das Geräusch ist laut, nah. Doch man sieht keinen Menschen. Ein Blick nach oben. Dicke Kabel ziehen sich von Mast zu Mast tief durch den Himmel: wie lang gezogene Gitterstäbe, die den Ausblick begrenzen. Als wäre diese Gegend ein einziges Gefängnis.
Das soll Vancouver in der Nachkriegszeit sein - so, wie es wirklich aussah. Wer die Szenerie betreten will, braucht ein iPhone oder ein iPad und muss eine 1,3-Gigabyte-Applikation laden, eine sogenannte App. Der kanadische Künstler Stan Douglas erfand diese neue, alte Welt, und er nannte sie "Circa 1948". Alles ist hyperrealistisch und zugleich irreal, betont altmodisch in der Anmutung und gemacht für den Sehnerv der Smartphone-Zeit.
One of Canada's great artists is back with a project that explores Vancouver's historical hotels, gambling dens and beer halls
"There's more truth in the lie than in the documentary," Stan Douglas tells me. We're standing in a cavernous New York art gallery, gazing up at one of his larger photographs, a hyperreal panoramic tableau of West Indian men playing cricket in a Vancouver park. The title is Cricket Pitch, 1951—but it wasn’t shot then. It was photographed in 2010, and while it purports to be a traditional vintage print, it actually combines multiple shots with digital technology that makes Photoshop look like amateur hour.
Nothing's ever simple in Douglas's images, but that's the only way he knows how to work. "Because of technology, nobody believes any more that a photograph is real. But that just means that we have to take more responsibility as creators of images. We can't just say, 'Oh, this happened to be there when I was there.' You have to take ownership. It's always a construction, no matter what."
Douglas, whose films, videos and photography have given him as strong a claim as anyone to the title of Canada's greatest artist, is back in New York this week to unveil his latest work, a murder-mystery film noir titled Circa 1948. Instead of appearing at a gallery, Douglas has taken Circa 1948 to the Tribeca Film Festival, where it’s one of the highlights of this year’s massive selection. It is the artist’s first appearance in a cinematic setting, but what’s even more surprising is that Circa 1948 isn’t really a film at all. It’s an interactive and bafflingly intricate multimedia project, and its images, though disturbingly lifelike, have all been digitally rendered. In New York, festivalgoers can use their bodies to navigate the spaces of postwar Vancouver, and starting this week, anyone with an iOS device can download Circa 1948 for free.