Calgary-based artist Kay Burns was in residence at the Banff Centre's ART Mobile Lab during Winter 2007-08. She created a locative media walk for the Banff town site called Footnotes.

Project Description
Footnotes is a locative audio walk offering a mobile media experience punctuated with sound delivered through GPS-equipped cell phones and headsets. Much of Burns' artwork involves the exploration of humans conflicted relationships with place.

This project takes as its starting point the underlying notion that we have a connection to place that is shared, nurtured, and cultivated through story and lore. The spoken-word audio elements allude to factual or plausible histories of sites combined with fiction; they are delivered as a first-person narrative, giving the participant a glimpse into a more personal and intimate interpretation of each location as lived and experienced by a past resident/visitor. The sound files allude to paradoxes and attributes of human presence within a National Park, as well as human interrelation associated with place. The audio content becomes a kind of hybrid between fact and fiction, for the evolution of new "truths" and alternative or unexpected stories about place. The spoken word stories are offered as non-linear fragments of memories, as histories remembered from the past and from the present. The stories are from multiple points of view, a series of sound vignettes of recollections across time and place.

Footnotes was produced in the winter and spring 2007-08 and involves a walk of approximately 5.5 kms through trails in and around the Banff townsite as well as part of downtown.

Kay's website: http://www.kayburns.ca