Spaceport Saskatoonia.

It would be appropriately wonderful if biggie-size plastic-grey space shuttles landed right here each Saturday. Dispersing the light snow and frozen dust to touch down on Saskatoonia. Then Hollywood-brand aliens could disembark to haunt the several dimly lit Moloko bars and dicker over the price of tri-hexyl methamphetamine fuel cells. And the Saskatoonians could smuggle inter-galactic software or lunar tie-clips or Venuvian pocket waste. This would indeed be appropriate and wonderful.

Appropriate because transience is more than the norm in Saskatoonia, it is the expected. It is an immanent and daily part of who we are at this lunar outpost. Also apropos, this spaceship trope, because extreme landscapes engender extremes of creative energy. Often, this energy is focused on the aliens that arrive, depressurize and are immediately thereafter to be found sipping frosty cocktails through leopard-spotted two-foot nostrils. Here, creative energy is often fuelled by any imported creativity that we might find in transient star-bars. Or, in Saskatoonia, the artists are somewhat prone to cargo culture. And why is that? Why indeed? Cold reappraisals of all that passes too fast for art in the great outsmoke.

How long has he lived out there?

Wonderful? Where do you get wonderful out of this spaceport analogy? One searches very hard for any glimmer of the barely wonderful within the prairie winterness. It may be wonderful because not all the expressive minds are content with subliminal cargo culting or studying de loose or guttsier theories that arrive from farther nebula. A few have managed to channel their own isolation and allow that strict, cold precipitous meditation to fuel their work. A feather-light, full-size chair fashioned from wasps' nests, and suspended above it, a tiny video monitor in a bird's nest. (Terry Billings, Model Home, 2002) An erratic robot surveillance eye that makes the placid viewing world into some jumping nauseating circus. How do you say in Latin, "the stupid from the machine" - Stupida ex machina? (Ray Lodoen, Cameran, 2002) And last, an imploding series of mad drawings (winter scratchings upon the asylum walls) that draw us into themselves as into some futurist hypnotist's pocket watch. I saw temple cars, the pin-c ushion buildings on wheels that oxen and human oxen draw down back alleys in Pun, India, crushing all flowers and small animals in their path as they travel the few thousand metres from their bamboo garages to the stupendous dying temples of Vishnu. Drawn into that scene through her drawings. Lovely transporter! (Alison Norlen, Float, 2002)

And in high season, just as the Romulan asteroid belt is being loosened in preparation for summer barbecues, more and more aliens stumble many-eyed out from the inter-stellar bars to enjoy Saskatoonia's fresh summer breezes. We look forward to a new crop of diverse divers from their choice of several dozen city bridges. It is the rite here, the passageway through from cold long winterness to a summer that lasts only slightly longer than some near-fatal electric shocks.

Plugs: Canada's newest artist-run media-arts presentation/producton centre is called paved: Art + New Media. AKA's girl in the plastic cube (Cindy Baker) will be walking this summer. Spaceport Saskatoonia presents a new video by Winnie Fung titled: Corporate Pigs. It may appear on: <www.pavedarts.ca>.

Dermot Wilson is Co-Director (with Donna Jones) at paved: Art + New Media in Saskatoon (formerly Video Verite Artist Run Centre and the Photographers Gallery). He also makes digital-based installation and performance works with Christopher McNamara at the hind end of a collective called machy-derm inc.