Wide is an exhibition angle that draws attention to the pervasiveness of hybrid practices and encourages their nomadic inclinations. It creates a temporary network that can be entered through any one of eighteen portal spaces. Travelling the city, encountering the situations that the exhibition comprises, the Wide audience follows a flexible circuit in which each concentrated moment rebounds back to the collecting question: What happens to the screen when its shards are everywhere?

In Wide, the audience will find new works by David Rokeby and Elizabeth vander Zaag that explore the thresholds of intentional and unintentional visibility and participation.

Rokeby’s piece, Guardian Angel, uses new motion-tracking technologies and online data-mining and consumer privacy contracts to explore the relationship between two types of ubiquitous surveillance. The piece combines a large-screen display of the images from the camera that monitors the nearby intersection with text from online agreements between consumer and corporation regarding the consumer's privacy and specialized needs. In the gallery, visitors are offered an opportunity to express their opinions about their own privacy thresholds.

Rokeby creates interactive installations that directly engage the human body or involve artificial perception systems. He was awarded the first Petro Canada Award for Media Arts in 1988, the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Interactive Art in 1991, and 1997 (with Paul Garrin), and recently installed a permanent exhibition at the London Science Museum in London, UK.

Talk Nice by vander Zaag uses the SAY (Speak and Yell) voice analysis software tool in combination with 100 video clips to create an interactive environment examining the speech styles associated with young women and Canadians. Using "upisms," the viewer is able to enter the world of the teenage characters. The interactivity of the work provides the user with a unique performance-based sense of agency and an opportunity to explore the dynamics of social inclusion.

Talk Nice was produced at the Banff Centre as part of the Canadian Creative Innovation Initiative. vander Zaag has been working in video and computer arts since the 1970s. She lives in Vancouver and has been actively involved with Video In and Western Front. Her work was featured in a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery, and she has shown extensively in Canada, the US, and Europe.

Wide is part of the 2001 Images Festival and was developed, coordinated and executed by Deirdre Logue, Kathleen Pirrie Adams and Amanda Ramos.