Royal Canadian Air Force Station Dawson Creek (British Columbia): All the stations are now closed there is no military presence at any of the former stations today. The line operated for a very brief time from 1956 until 1965, when improvements in technology made the line unnecessary. Source material (unless noted): Larry Wilson’s Mid-Canada Line web site – Mid Canada Line | The DEWLine ().īetween the DEW Line and the Pinetree Line was the Mid-Canada Line, consisting of 8 Sector Control Stations and approximately 90 unmanned Doppler radar sites.
#Dew lin ephotos 1950s free
Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism.Ĭlick here to learn more about the project.Mid Canada Line stations. If you value coverage of Manitoba’s arts scene, help us do more. Steven Leyden Cochrane is a Winnipeg-based artist, writer and educator. When Aceart director hannah_g asked if the work spoke to difficulties generations of men have had opening up about wartime experiences, the affable Haligonian became flustered and changed the subject. McCormack conceded that his grandfather mostly talked about the food.
The Stevenson screen compulsively rebroadcasts its findings whether anyone comes to record them or not.Īt McCormack’s artist talk, visitors asked about the psychological toll of working under extreme conditions during paranoid times. The firing squad of half-barrels blinks out a message nobody can decipher. The heartbeat - a choice that somehow seems both too obvious and weirdly arbitrary- is no longer recognizable as such. The sparseness of the installation might echo the physical isolation of the scattered DEW Line operators, but it also suggests more intimate missed connections. Each image is onscreen for fractions of a second, barely long enough to register.
#Dew lin ephotos 1950s tv
Up close, we see that the light comes from a TV monitor inside that plays a frenetic slideshow of Cosman’s photographs. In the rear of the space, faint light flickers through the slats of a re-creation Stevenson screen, a wooden structure like a large birdhouse designed to protect weather-monitoring equipment in polar regions. Inside the barrels, spotlights fire in time with a soundtrack of abstract bleeps and bloops sounds of a heartbeat processed into a cascades of sonar-ish pings and string-like stabs. A semicircle of halved oil barrels aim at one wall, seeming to rise from or sink into the floor and recalling either industrial waste or a cul-de-sac of Quonset huts. There are just a few elements in the dimly lit gallery. Cosman’s accounts of life at the isolated outpost, along with hundreds of colour slide photographs documenting his time there, lend the exhibition context and texture.
Cosman, a telecommunications engineer, was dispatched to Stokes Point, a DEW Line station near Herschel Island and the Yukon-Alaska border. For some time in the 1950s, McCormack’s grandfather B.W. by Michael McCormack, but there’s a personal connection for the Halifax-based artist. This all provides foundation for Station, an exhibition at Aceartinc. Michael McCormack’s exhibition Station is based on his grandfather’s accounts of working on the DEW Line in the 1950s. Some sites have been cleaned up, others haven’t. Over the years the sites were variously abandoned, automated or repurposed. The Americans had become preoccupied with long-range missile and submarine attacks, which the stations couldn’t detect. Just the year before, to the same ends, the government had forcibly relocated at least seven Inuit families to the far north to serve as “human flagpoles” in the region.Ĭonstruction required the movement of 25,000 personnel and almost half a million tons of material from the south, devastating fragile permafrost and coastal ecosystems and permanently disrupting the migrations of people and animals alike.Īnd within a decade the DEW Line was all but obsolete. Though spearheaded by the United States military, the DEW Line was a pointed assertion of Canadian sovereignty in the arctic. Within three years, a band of 63 radar stations stretched from the Aleutians to Iceland, roughly tracing the 69th parallel across the Canadian Arctic, all scanning the airwaves for rumblings of disaster. The Distant Early Warning or DEW Line Project roared into action in 1954, fuelled by Cold War nightmares of a Soviet nuclear airstrike. This article was published (2066 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
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