Utility Pole

Utility Pole is a poetry film collaboration between poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and poetry filmmaker Mary McDonald.

Utility Pole explores the transformation of trees into the poles that hold our communications, the many branched network that connect us, as the trees have been severed from each other and their own living networks.

The soundscape is a binaural, 360 soundscape featuring a mix of urban forest sounds, with the sounds of technology today and the pointed call of Morse code, our earliest technologically enabled transatlantic communication. Morse code recording is from Freesound.org credits, Bryce835.

[Advice from Mary McDonald: To experience the binaural audio soundscape, please wear headphones or earbuds. Binaural audio provides an immersive audio experience, in which you will be able to place the sounds you hear in the space around you.]

Mary McDonald is a multimedia artist -- a writer and storyteller, photographer and fine art multimedia animator, singer/songwriter.

I am fascinated by the movement contained within all art. I discovered a love for creating animation using photography, multimedia and stop motion techniques while producing projects for the international Master's of Educational Technology program at UBC. I combine that love for creating animation with writing, poetry and songs to tell the stories that I am passionate about. Mary MacDonald

Fiona Tinwei Lam was Vancouver’s Poet Laureate between 2022-2024. The text of the poem appears in Tinwei Lam’s third collection, Odes & Laments.