Boomtown:Convention

Boomtown is a psycho-geographic space that Siemens has been developing since 2010—a speculative city where narratives of techno-utopia collide with the looming spectre of environmental collapse. In Boomtown, the notion of a shared future has disintegrated, leaving only a perpetual “now,” where objects and ideas are trapped in cycles of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This relentless motion fractures the possibility of progress, exposing its citizens to relentless forms of institutional violence and cacophony.

Boomtown: Convention depicts the aftermath of the city’s chaotic attempt to construct a convention centre. To begin to build such a structure is to optimistically propose a forum for future-oriented public discourse; however, in Convention, the project has unraveled, revealing it as a hollow promise and locus for competing ambitions and financial interests.

The centrepiece of the series is a large drawing of the convention centre grounds. For the main structure, Siemens drew inspiration from the Kyoto International Conference Centre. As the site of the signing of the Kyoto protocols — which, in 1997, addressed environmental degradation and greenhouse emissions with legally binding legislation — the ideals of the KICC are now firmly situated in the realm of retro-futures, having been de and reterritorialized many times. In Convention, the unfinished building is rife with structural and social incongruities, among them, damaged and labyrinthine infrastructure, the technocratic spectre of AI data centres, unkempt carbon capture plants, ill-placed shipping ports, and monuments and memorials funded by various Boomtown special interests. As depicted by Siemens, the project’s collapse divided Boomtown’s citizens into ideologically fractured groups, each pursuing survival in isolation, yet still under the watchful eye of satellite surveillance, as suggested by the calibration marks north of the main building.

The smaller drawings in the exhibition depict a selection of the convention centre’s many unfinished rooms. The leftover lattices and half-finished facades evoke behind-the-scenes glimpses of movie sets. Boomtown ideology and its absence are simultaneously present, fashioning the rooms into unintentional sanctuaries of thought for the city’s citizens. While new ideas may yet be generated within these spaces, grand aspirations of collective action have curdled into a fixation with personal agency and self-sufficiency.

Luke Siemens would like to thank the Ontario Art Council for their support with this work