Jordan Matthew Yerman isn’t a cat person, but he’s taken 2,500 photos of feral felines in cities around the world.
The Vancouver-based writer and photographer will talk about The Street Cat Project: Exploring Cities through the Eyes of Feral Cats at the second BIL event in Vancouver, March 21 and 22.
Yerman was searching for an aspect of cities to train his lens on when he spied a scrawny but scrappy feline in Israel’s largest city, Haifa, in 2011. Soon he noticed street cats everywhere.
He’s come to see them as more than mere strays.
“I see them as neighbours that just don’t happen to be humans,” Yerman said. “How we treat these cats can tell us a lot about ourselves.”
Yerman wants viewers to consider how built environments affect their inhabitants.
“The jump from looking at cats that way to also then looking at marginalized communities in the city is actually not a jump at all, it’s a very small step,” he said. “I’m not saying that that’s what it’s about, but I’m not saying that’s not what it’s about.”
After he shot kitties in Japan, Yerman started applying text to his cat photographs.
“Laughing? Singing? Crying?” reads text in English on a photo of a feline with its mouth stretched open, one paw held aloft. “Killing with one bite,” it also says in Japanese.
Yerman is one of more than 60 speakers at BIL, “the semi- and the anti-TED,” as he put it. As with the previous year, this year’s BIL event is purposely booked to coincide with the far pricier TED conference taking place at the Vancouver Convention Centre this week.
Michael Cummings co-founded BIL with a group of 10 scientists, inventors and web developers from California and Texas in 2007. They wanted to attend the 2008 TED (technology, entertainment and design) in Monterey, Calif. but knew they weren’t getting into the pricey event, so they organized their own accessible affair across the street, dubbing it BIL as a riff on the title of the 1989 movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
“You don’t have to pay $8,500 to attend the conference to network with people with really cool ideas and capabilities of actually spreading these ideas around,” Cummings said.
Like TED, BIL features passionate people presenting in less than 20 minutes on a range of topics. Unlike TED, entrance to BIL is by donation and anyone can sign up to speak. Organizers choose who will present on the main stage, and speakers can sign up for slots in other simultaneously running spaces.
“I like the way that you don’t even know who’s going to be speaking in some of the slots, you can show up and be surprised,” Yerman said.
BIL speakers include technologists, scientists, artists and hackers. There’s live music and BIL Bodies, which focuses on yoga, plyometrics (also known as “jump training”) and meditation.
Yerman is particularly interested to hear digital media pioneer Alfred Hermida speak about social media, SFU scientist, activist and professor Lynne Quarmby, who was recently arrested during protests on Burnaby Mountain against Kinder Morgan’s TransMountain Pipeline Expansion, speak about activism and politics, and John Biehler present on 3D printing.
TED speakers, fellows and attendees sometimes sidle over to BIL. Last year, musician Amanda Palmer and author Neil Gaiman spoke and performed at BIL in Vancouver.
“TED, they don’t do this intentionally, but it embodies a lot of what’s happening in Vancouver right now. Vast amounts of money move into the city and colonize it and now we’re left going, ‘OK, are we visitors in someone else’s holiday resort?’” Yerman said. “We’re not invited to the party. With BIL, we are the party… Vancouver needs to have both.”
Cummings says anyone can organize a BIL event. In addition to North American cities, BIL has taken place in Afghanistan, India, England and France, with 25 BIL events scheduled in Tunisia this year.
Pre-registration to attend BIL, at the Imperial at 319 Main St., is recommended. For more information, see 2015.bilconference.com.
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