Public Code under Upheaval: Counter-Policy, NFB Interactive Media, and Creative Agency in Canada

Counter-policy under upheaval traces how public institutions encode participation, access, memory, and obligation through interfaces, metadata, credits, preservation systems, and public-facing cultural forms. National Film Board interactive works—Brett Gaylor’s Do Not Track, Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ Bear 71, and Lisa Jackson’s Biidaaban: First Light—serve as case archives for reading public code. Close interface analysis links data extraction, ecological surveillance, Indigenous language presence, and institutional afterlives to cultural studies debates about technology, environmental justice, and public responsibility. The presentation shows how experiential archives can guide revised obligations for public institutions within Canadian public culture and institutional redesign today.