Spawning in Concrete: Bridging Urban and Wild withUninterrupted: A Cinematic Spectacle

Abstract

Every evening from 28 June to 24 September 2017, twenty-five minutes of digitally mapped and projected images transformed the concrete undersurface of Vancouver’s Cambie Street Bridge into a wild river filled with migrating salmon. Billed as a hybrid form that blends “cinematic storytelling and high-tech art installation” (Uninterupted.ca), the work spun a complex web of relations between humans, non-humans, and places, with a goal of inciting activist-style commitment to the issue of salmon depletion. The article argues that Uninterrupted manifests a civic imaginary in which urban infrastructure, a major catalyst of environmental degradation, can participate, through aesthetic intervention, in an act of recovery of biotic life.