I am a Toronto based electronic media artist working primarily in the field of interactive installations.

I received my PhD (Dec 09) in Communications & Culture from York University with a thesis titled Bandwidth is Political: Reachability in the Public Internet. The paper has been nominated for the York University Doctoral Dissertation Award. I am an Associate Professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design teaching 'Time-Based Media'. I am Facilities Coordinator at Charles Street Video, a media access centre in Toronto. I have also developed a course titled 'Creativity and New Media' in which students are required to work through various methodologies of creativity, at Seneca@York. I am also faculty representative and chair of the Pension committee at OCAD.

I will be giving a demo of IXmaps, a project which illustrates Internet infrastructure focusing on exchange points as a locus of control. This work consists of a geographic map of North America, upon which are situated images of major internet peering exchange points called Carrier Hotels. The interactivity so far, consists of clicking to see which exchange points contains US based secret NSA (National Security Agency) eavesdropping rooms and which exchange points are owned by the Carlyle Group (CRG West - now called Coresite), in an overall map of approximately 45 carrier hotels. Discussion of the Google datacenter network will be presented. Google has recently announced the launch of private DNS, collaboration with the NSA and a new product titled 'BUZZ' which is causing concern among privacy experts.

Further software developments such a user initiated trace-route, to view the path one's Internet activities (email, data searches or video viewing) take through these peering facilities, are being implemented with funding from the SSHRC ITST program. IXmaps is under the Information Policy Research Program (IPRP) at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.

For more about my work check out my website - http://www.vacuumwoman.com