Children naturally learn by building foam compositions on this interactive sculpture. Maja Baska Photography
Sanné Mestrom’s (Senior Lecturer, DECRA Fellow, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney) September 2, 2025 essay for The Conversation explores the importance of touch where visual art is concerned and describes an exhibition she developed for the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Note: Links have been removed,
Walk into most art galleries with children, and you’ll hear the familiar refrain “look but don’t touch”. This instruction reveals something troubling about how cultural institutions understand learning. Museums have become temples to visual consumption, where knowledge is received through eyes rather than constructed through bodies.
This fundamentally misunderstands how humans learn – and what we deny young people when we privilege looking over all other forms of engagement.
At my exhibition The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Her Parts, I have watched visitors consistently spend significantly longer with touchable elements compared to visual-only displays. Visitors engaging tactilely ask fundamentally different questions, too, moving from “what is this?” to “how was this made?” and “what if I tried…?”
So what happens when we design cultural spaces honouring the full range of human learning capacities?
Touch reveals what eyes miss
My exhibition includes bronze reliefs visitors can touch while viewing corresponding paintings. This simple addition reveals artistic knowledge that visual observation alone cannot provide.
Take a moment I witnessed with the work The Weight of Connection, where a child placed her hands on reliefs while looking at paintings.
These bronze sculptures translate semi-abstract paintings into three-dimensional form, but with a twist. What appears to recede in the painting might actually protrude in the bronze relief.
“This looks like the background, but it feels raised,” she said, as her fingers traced raised areas that appeared sunken in the painting. Suddenly she had to work harder to understand what was actually happening, comparing what her eyes told her with what her hands discovered.
This is spatial reasoning in action: understanding emerging not from a single sense, but from reconciling conflicting information.
The exhibition’s large playable sculpture, Ludic Folly, transforms semi-abstract figurative forms into an interactive adventure. Visitors climb, rest and navigate space. I repeatedly observe children and adults having “aha moments” as physical position fundamentally changes their understanding of sculptural forms.
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Mestrom’s exhibition ran from May 31 to September 21, 2025, which means that a visit to Australia now will not yield an experience at “The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Her Parts” but there are still materials available online via the National Gallery of Australia’s Sanné Mestrom, The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Her Parts Learning Resources webpage, Note: Links have been removed,
This catalogue and learning resource has been written by artist Sanné Mestrom offering essays, activities, and inquiry questions designed to complement her work The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Her Parts. This resource aims to deepen understanding of how art challenges traditional perspectives, develop observational and critical thinking skills, showcase the value of play-based learning in connecting with complex artistic and philosophical ideas, support inclusive education for diverse learning styles and connect historical artistic movements with contemporary practices.
The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Her Parts, 2025 is a dedicated interactive space created by Sanné and presented as part of the exhibition Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie on display from 31 May – 21 Sep 2025. This space builds on Sanné’s artistic engagement with female representation in modern Western art. Drawing on iconic 20th century works, Sanné filters their legacies through her own systems of reference, to question notions of lineage, originality and influence.
For Sanné her works are always expressive of the body and driven by an understanding of art’s role as a conduit for embodiment and locator of place and how art can bridge the built and natural environments.
The connection to the exhibition running concurrently and serving as inspiration “Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie” is briefly explained in a July 10, 2025 University of Sydney press release, Note: Links have been removed,
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Running alongside the NGA’s blockbuster Cézanne to Giacometti exhibition until 21 September, Dr Mestrom’s interactive installation responds to works by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Klee, and Giacometti. Through participatory experiences, the exhibition examines female representation in the modernist canon and reimagines how audiences engage with art.
“We’re taught to look at art from a distance, but what happens when we’re invited to touch it, build with it, and even inhabit it?” asked Dr Mestrom. “This work is about inviting people of all ages to experience art through their bodies, not just their eyes.”
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Dr Mestrom has a long tradition of incorporating play into her artwork. She uses interactive, large-scale and functional sculptures, from skating installations to children’s playgrounds, to question the physical and social aspects of urban design. Her research investigates ways that art in public places has the potential to create spaces for intergenerational play.
“I make sculptures that people can move through and interact with, because I want art to feel like part of everyday life, not something distant or untouchable,” she said. “When we play with art, we start to see the world differently. It’s a way to break out of the usual rules and routines, and that kind of freedom can be quietly powerful, even political.”
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Commercialising visual arts research
Dr Mestrom’s exhibition is the outcome of a four-year Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRA) research project and an example of research translation and commercialisation in the arts. Her broader research into playful environments and inclusive spaces has influenced urban policy and generated $1.7 million in research income, demonstrating the civic and commercial value of her work to the wider public.
The exhibition also contributes to the NGA’s Know My Name initiative, which aims to address the gender imbalance and increase the representation and visibility of women artists in Australian art collections. Through her work, Dr Mestrom is actively challenging audiences to rethink how the female body is represented and experienced.
“This is about loosening the grip of hierarchy and ownership in art,” said Dr Mestrom. “My work is inclusive, it’s playable, and it’s about making space for new ways of seeing and being in spaces accessible by all.”
Finally, there’s a May 20, 2025 posting here that reveals a certain synchronicity with Mestrom\s work across time; it’s titled, “Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and “multi-sensory museology”.”
For anyone unfamiliar with multi-modal (or multimodal), here’s a definition for when the word is used in conjunction with AI, from the IBM “What is multimodal AI?” webpage,
Multimodal AI refers to machine learning models capable of processing and integrating information from multiple modalities or types of data. These modalities can include text, images, audio, video and other forms of sensory input.
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Moving onto the point, an October 8, 2025 invitation to the upcoming Vancouver AI meetup arrived via email (you can see the invite online, presumably for a limited time),
You’re invited to
Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 10/29
Wednesday, October 29 [2025] 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM PDT
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre Vancouver, British Columbia
Oct 29 [2025] we’re back with the monthly dose of “what if we just tried the thing nobody said would work?” Indigenous knowledge meets machine learning. Film meets fever dream. Quantum computers meets grandma’s kitchen.
For anyone curious about BC’s artificial intelligence community events, there’s this BC+AI webpage.
For the meetup, the price of an ‘Earlyworm’ ticket is $47.25 (7 left) until 11:59 pm PT on October 15, 2025. The standard ticket is $63.00.
There are three free tickets for the October 29, 2025 meetup if you are a member of the Creative Mornings Vancouver community. You can signup to Creative Mornings Vancouver (part of the world’s largest creative community) for free and get announcements from the international organization and notices from the local chapter which hosts a monthly event that is also free.
The November 7, 2025 at the Vancouver Art Gallery runs from 8:15 am to 10:15 am (breakfast is included gratis the event sponsor). The guest is Brandon Wint (from the Creative Mornings Vancouver November 2025 event page),
Brandon Wint
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For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon Wint’s poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. In recent years, his films have screened at DOXA documentary film festival and Reelworld Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival Centre.
Each month we ask our speaker some probing questions to give us a deeper glimpse into their life and relationship with creativity:
At each CMVan event, the 30-second pitch segment gives audience members a chance to step on stage and spotlight upcoming local creative events happening around the city.
Check out what’s coming up this October [2025]:
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10. Vancouver+AI Community Meetup #21 : Enter their raffle to win 1 of 3 tickets (Oct 29 [2025])
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To sum up, you can buy your ticket for the Vancouver AI community meetup or you can take a chance on getting one of three free tickets by signing up to the Creative Mornings Vancouver community newsletter or signing up to attend the November 7, 2025 event (Brandon Wint) and entering the raffle. Good luck!
This February 10, 2025 article on phys.org was a bit of a surprise as I haven’t seen Marshall McLuhan mentioned in a very long time, Note 1: Links have been removed, Note 2: There’s more (not much) about Marshall McLuhan in the next excerpt,
In recent decades, museums and galleries have made a sensory turn when it comes to designing displays and engaging visitors.
Museums like the Metropolitan in New York offer multi-sensory activities so visitors so can smell, touch and hear art, and museums have curated exhibitions about the senses.
The move is part of larger efforts to make public institutions more accessible.
It’s also aligned with museum and gallery institutional efforts to decolonize governance structures, and widen opportunities for museum and gallery participation from Indigenous and Global South artists and their communities, who have long been marginalized. Museums and galleries have sought to shape policy, reinterpret and repatriate artifacts stolen from Indigenous and Global South societies in response to social movements, community advocacy and decolonial theory.
Thinkers like Taiaiake Alfred have written about Indigenous cultural resurgence and resistance to colonialism, and shaped a questioning of curatorial practices.
As anthropologist David Howes argues, museums’ questioning of traditional forms of museum display and visitor engagement is aligned with the kind of re-ordering traditionally associated with unsettling colonial regimes.
In my forthcoming study, Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum, I examine the influence of exhibition designer and painter Harley Parker (1915-92) on this “sensory turn” in museum curatorial practices.
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A February 10, 2025 article for The Conversation by Gary A Genosko (Professor of Communication and Digital Media, Ontario Tech University), which originated the phys.org piece, delves further into the topic of his forthcoming book (publication date: May 15, 2025), Note: Links have been removed,
Parker was head of design at the Royal Ontario Museum [ROM] for 11 years from 1957-68. By applying media theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s ideas to museums, Parker created what has become known as “multi-sensory museology.” It is only beginning to be recognized as a precursor to the sensory museology in practice today.
Head of design at the ROM
Beyond being head of design at the ROM, Parker was an influential media thinker and a longtime collaborator of McLuhan’s.
Parker’s name is not yet well known. One reason is that his book manuscript, The Culture Box: Museums Are Today, was lost for almost 50 years.
Working with Parker’s children, I uncovered a typescript and will be bringing it into print. Retitled The Culture Box: Museums as Media, it contains detailed discussions of how Parker conceived of exhibition display through the lens of McLuhan’s idea that all media were sensory extensions of human capacities
Multisensory design
For Parker, the museum became a laboratory in which a designer could experiment with multi-sensory exhibition designs. These reflected McLuhan’s claim that new electronic media supplanted an older visually oriented linear model with a non-linear, aural-tactile environment.
Getting beyond the close link between visibility and linear thinking was one of main pillars of Parker’s efforts.
Between 1963 and 1967, Parker was considering designing with alternative orchestrations of perception, especially with regard to displays of Indigenous artifacts. He didn’t, however, achieve a fusion of what current sensory studies scholars call “sensory decolonization.”
In museums, “sensory decolonization” refers to shifting sensory and cultural perceptions around the meaning of “artifacts” from Indigenous or Global South communities. It means revisiting assumptions about protocols for engaging with or handling these, and developing new ethical protocols in relationship with communities.
Parker investigated the necessity of changing sensory assumptions around the display of artifacts, but lacked a decolonial critique.
Hypothetical exhibits
In the early 1960s, Parker published essays on hypothetical exhibits of Indigenous artefacts in the museum’s holdings.
He considered using recordings of Indigenous languages, visitor-controlled heating, cooling and lighting, odours, as well as multi-media projections. He tried to provoke, through design, some empathetic correlation between the mental modes of a contemporary museum visitor and the sensory attitudes of an Indigenous maker and creator of objects.
He linked the reordering of the senses with calls for greater community involvement in museums. He also expressed frustration about museum elitism and the gulf between philanthropic culture and visitors’ concerns.
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Genosko’s February 10, 2025 article goes on to mention the changes that have been attempted, in some situations more successfully than others, to incorporate principles of decolonization and inclusion. It also describes one of Parker’s more avant-garde ideas, a ‘newseum’, a space for multi-sensory and multimedia exhibitions..
I don’t usually advertise for authors but I have a soft spot these days for Marshall McLuhan (Canadian communications theorist and philosopher) and Parker’s ideas sound interesting to me. You can order “Harley Parker; The McLuhan of the Museum” by Gary Genosko, published May 15, 2025 by the University of Alberta Press here.
The Eagle Nebula (also known as M16 or the Pillars of Creation) was one of the 3 cosmic objects sonified and used in the study. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/M.Guarcello et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI [downloaded from https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2024/03/25/communication-nasa-scientists-space-data-sounds]
Apparently, it’s all about communication or so a March 24, 2024 Frontiers news release (also on EurekAlert but published March 25, 2024) by Kim Arcand and Megan Watzke suggests, Note: Links have been removed,
Images from telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope have expanded the way we see space. But what if you can’t see? Can stars be turned into sounds instead? In this guest editorial, NASA [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] scientists and science communicators Dr Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke explain how and why they and their colleagues transformed telescope data into soundscapes to share space science with the whole world. To learn more, read their new research published in Frontiers in Communication.
When you travel somewhere where they speak a language you can’t understand, it’s usually important to find a way to translate what’s being communicated to you. In some ways, the same can be said about scientific data collected from cosmic objects. A telescope like NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory captures X-rays, which are invisible to the human eye, from sources across the cosmos. Similarly, the James Webb Space Telescope captures infrared light, also invisible to the human eye. These different kinds of light are transmitted down to Earth packed up in the form of ones and zeroes. From there, the data are transformed into a variety of formats — from plots to spectra to images.
This last category — images — is arguably what telescopes are best known for. For most of astronomy’s long history, however, most people who are blind or low vision (BLV) have not been able to fully experience the data that these telescopes have captured. NASA’s Universe of Sound data sonification program, with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s Universe of Learning, translates visual data of objects in space into sonified data. All telescopes — including Chandra, Webb, the Hubble Space Telescope, plus dozens of others — in space need to send the data they collect back to Earth as binary code, or digital signals. Typically, astronomers and others turn these digital data into images, which are often spectacular and make their way into everything from websites to pillowcases.
The music of the spheres
By taking these data through another step, however, experts on this project mathematically map the information into sound. This data-driven process is not a reimagining of what the telescopes have observed, it is yet another kind of translation. Instead of a translation from French to Mandarin, it’s a translation from visual to sound. Releases from the Universe of Sound sonification project have been immensely popular with non-experts, from viral news stories with over two billion people potentially reached according to press metrics, to triple the usual Chandra.si.edu website traffic.
But how are such data sonifications perceived by people, particularly members of the BLV community? How do data sonifications affect participant learning, enjoyment, and exploration of astronomy? Can translating scientific data into sound help enable trust or investment, emotionally or intellectually, in scientific data? Can such sonifications help improve awareness of accessibility needs that others might have?
Listening closely
This study used our sonified NASA data of three astronomical objects. We surveyed blind or low-vision and sighted individuals to better understand participant experiences of the sonifications, relating to their enjoyment, understanding, and trust of the scientific data. Data analyses from 3,184 sighted or blind or low-vision participants yielded significant self-reported learning gains and positive experiential responses.
The results showed that astrophysical data engaging multiple senses like the sonifications could establish additional avenues of trust, increase access, and promote awareness of accessibility in sighted and blind or low-vision communities. In short, sonifications helped people access and engage with the Universe.
Sonification is an evolving and collaborative field. It is a project not only done for the BLV community, but with BLV partnerships. A new documentary available on NASA’s free streaming platform NASA+ explores how these sonifications are made and the team behind them. The hope is that sonifications can help communicate the scientific discoveries from our Universe with more audiences, and open the door to the cosmos just a little wider for everyone.
Throughout the festive season, countless individuals delight in the enchantment of ballet spectacles such as “The Nutcracker.” Though the stories of timeless performances are widely known, general audiences often miss the subtle narratives and emotions dancers seek to convey through body movements—and they miss even more when the narratives are not based on well-known stories.
This prompts the question: how can dance performances become more accessible for people who are not specialists? [emphasis mine]
Researchers think they have the answer, which involves putting dancers in sensor suits.
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Putting dancers into sensor suits would not have been my first answer to that question.
Loughborough University academics are working with the English National Ballet and the University of Bremen [Germany] to develop software that will allow people to understand the deeper meanings of performances by watching annotated CGI [computer-generated imagery] videos of different dances.
Leading this endeavour is former professional ballerina Dr Arianna Maiorani, an expert in ‘Kinesemiotics – the study of meaning conveyed through movement – and the creator of the ‘Functional Grammar of Dance’ (FGD), a model that deciphers meaning from dance movements.
Dr Maiorani believes the FGD – which is informed by linguistics and semiotics (the study of sign-based communication) theories – can help create visualisations of ‘projections’ happening during dance performances to help people understand what the dance means.
“Projections are like speech bubbles made by movement”, explains Dr Maiorani, “They are used by dancers to convey messages and involve extending body parts towards significant areas within the performance space.
“For example, a dancer is moving towards a lake, painted on the backdrop of a stage. They extend an arm forward towards the lake and a leg backwards towards a stage prop representing a shed. The extended arm means they are going to lake, while the leg means they are coming from shed.
“Using the Functional Grammar of Dance, we can annotate dances –filling the projection speech bubbles with meaning that people can understand without having background knowledge of dance.”
Dr Maiorani and a team of computer science and technology experts – including Loughborough’s Professor Massimiliano Zecca, Dr Russell Lock, and Dr Chun Liu – have been creating CGI videos of English National Ballet dancers to use with the FGD.
This involved getting dancers – including First Soloist Junor Souza and First Artist Rebecca Blenkinsop – to perform individual movements and phrases while wearing sensors on their head, torso, and limbs.
Using the FGD, they decoded the conveyed meanings behind different movements and annotated the CGI videos accordingly.
The researchers are now investigating how these videos can facilitate engagement for audiences with varying levels of dance familiarity, aiming to eventually transform this research into software for the general public.
Of the ultimate goal for the research, Dr Maiorani said: “We hope that our work will improve our understanding of how we all communicate with our body movement, and that this will bring more people closer to the art of ballet.”
The Loughborough team worked with expertsfrom the University of Bremen including Professor John Bateman and Ms Dayana Markhabayeva, and experts from English National Ballet. The research was funded by the AHRC-DFG and supported by the LU Institute of Advanced Studies.
They are also looking at how the FDG can be used in performance and circus studies, as well as analysing character movements within video games to determine any gender biases.
You can find the Kinesemiotic Body here, where you’ll find this academic project description, Note: Links have been removed,
The Kinesemiotic Body is a joint research project funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in cooperation with the English National Ballet (ENB). The project brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with the aim of evaluating whether a description of dance discourse informed by multimodal discourse analysis and visualised through enriched videos can capture the way dance communicates through a flow of choreographed sequences in space, and whether this description can support the interpretative process of nonexpert audiences. The theoretical framework of the research project is based on an extended dynamic theory called segmented discourse representation theory (SDRT) and on the Functional Grammar of Dance Movement created by Project Investigator Maiorani. Project’s long-term goal is to develop an interdisciplinary area of research focusing on movement-based communication that can extend beyond the study of dance to other movement-based forms of communication and performance and foster the creation of partnerships between the academia and the institutions that host and promote such disciplines.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a piece that touches on multimodal discourse.
*March 20, 2024 1630: Head changed from “How can ballet performances become more accessible? Put on a sensor suit on the dancers*” to “How can ballet performances become more accessible? Put a sensor suit on the dancers”
I’m going to start with the fun, i.e., “Max the Demon Vs Entropy of Doom”,
Found on Assa Auerbach @AssaAuerbach·Twitter feed: 6:57 AM · Feb 17, 2018 [downloaded from: https://theconversation.com/3-reasons-we-use-graphic-novels-to-teach-math-and-physics-211171]
Engaging introduction to James Clerk Maxwell’s and his thought experiment concerning entropy, “Maxwell’s demon.”
It’s one of the points that Sarah Klanderman and Josha Ho (both from Marian University; Indiana, US) make in their co-authored August 17, 2023 essay (on The Conversation) about using graphic novels to teach STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) topics in the classroom, Note: Links have been removed,
Graphic novels – offering visual information married with text – provide a means to engage students without losing all of the rigor of textbooks. As two educators in math and physics, we have found graphic novels to be effective at teaching students of all ability levels. We’ve used graphic novels in our own classes, and we’ve also inspired and encouraged other teachers to use them. And we’re not alone: Other teachers are rejuvenating this analog medium with a high level of success.
In addition to covering a wide range of topics and audiences, graphic novels can explain tough topics without alienating student averse to STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. Even for students who already like math and physics, graphic novels provide a way to dive into topics beyond what is possible in a time-constrained class. In our book “Using Graphic Novels in the STEM Classroom,” we discuss the many reasons why graphic novels have a unique place in math and physics education. …
Klanderman and Ho share some information that was new to me, from the August 17, 2023 essay, Note: Links have been removed,
Increasingly, schools are moving away from textbooks, even though studies show that students learn better using print rather than digital formats [emphasis mine]. Graphic novels offer the best of both worlds: a hybrid between modern and traditional media.
This integration of text with images and diagrams is especially useful in STEM disciplines that require quantitative reading and data analysis skills, like math and physics.
For example, our collaborator Jason Ho, an assistant professor at Dordt University, uses “Max the Demon Vs Entropy of Doom” to teach his physics students about entropy. This topic can be particularly difficult for students because it’s one of the first times when they can’t physically touch something in physics. Instead, students have to rely on math and diagrams to fill in their knowledge.
Rather than stressing over equations, Ho’s students focus on understanding the subject more conceptually. This approach helps build their intuition before diving into the algebra. They get a feeling for the fundamentals before they have to worry about equations.
After having taken Ho’s class, more than 85% of his students agreed that they would recommend using graphic novels in STEM classes, and 90% found this particular use of “Max the Demon” helpful for their learning. When strategically used, graphic novels can create a dynamic, engaging teaching environment even with nuanced, quantitative topics.
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I encourage you to read the essay in its entirety if you have the time and the interest.
Here’s a link to the publisher’s website, a citation for and description of the book along with a Table of Contents, Note: it seems to be available in the UK only,
Using Graphic Novels in the STEM Classroom by William Boerman-Cornell, Josha Ho, David Klanderman, Sarah Klanderman. Published: 30 Nov 2023 Format: Paperback Edition: 1st Extent: 168 [pp?] ISBN: 9781350279186 Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic Illustrations: 5 bw illus. Dimensions: 234 x 156 mm Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Pre-order. Available 30 Nov 2023
Description
This book provides everything STEM teachers need to use graphic novels in order to engage students, explain difficult concepts, and enrich learning. Drawing upon the latest educational research and over 60 years of combined teaching experience, the authors describe the multimodal affordances and constraints of each element of the STEM curriculum. Useful for new and seasoned teachers alike, the chapters provide practical guidance for teaching with graphic novels, with a section each for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. An appendix provides nearly 100 short reviews of graphic novels arranged by topic, such as cryptography, evolution, computer coding, skyscraper design, nuclear physics, auto repair, meteorology, and human physiology, allowing the teacher to find multiple graphic novels to enhance almost any unit. These include graphic novel biographies of Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall, Alan Turing, Rosalind Franklin, as well as popular titles such as T-Minus by Jim Ottaviani, Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine, Theodoris Andropoulos’s Who Killed Professor X, and Gene [Luen] Yang’s Secret Coders series.
Table of Contents
List of Figures Foreword, Jay Hosler Acknowledgements 1. What Research Tells us about Teaching Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics with Graphic Novels 2. Teaching Life Science and Earth Science with Graphic Novels 3. Teaching Physical Science with Graphic Novels 4. Teaching Technology with Graphic Novels 5. Using Graphic Novels to Teach Engineering 6. Teaching Mathematics with Graphic Novels 7. Unanswered Questions and Concluding Thoughts Appendix: List of STEM Graphic Novels References Notes Index
Toronto’s Art/Sci Salon’s January 30, 2023 announcement (received via email) lists information for two organizations, the Onsite Gallery’s events and the Salon’s own events.
Onsite Gallery
This gallery is located in Toronto, Ontario at 199 Richmond St. W. From the homepage, “It is the flagship professional gallery of OCAD [Ontario College of Art and Design] University and an experimental curatorial platform for art, design and new media.”
From the Onsite Gallery ‘more-than-human‘ event page. First, there’s the exhibition (Note 1: I found the gallery’s event page I’m using here more informative than the email announcement; Note 2: I have not included the images featuring the artists and their work),
more-than-human
February 01 to May 13, 2023
Curated by Jane Tingley
Core exhibition of the CONTACT Photography Festival
more-than-human presents media artworks at the intersection of art, science, Indigenous worldviews, and technology that speculatively and poetically use multimodal storytelling as a vehicle for interpreting, mattering, and embodying more-than-human ecologies. The artworks in this exhibition aim to critically and emotionally engage with the important work of decentering the human and rethinking the perspective that sees nature as a lifeless resource for exploitation. Many of the artworks use technological and scientific tools as entry points for witnessing and interacting with these more-than-human worlds, as they help visualize phenomena beyond human sensory perception while nevertheless situating us within them. Combined, the artworks in the show weave a story that tells a tale of symbiosis, intersections, and more-than-human relationality. They incorporate scientific, philosophical, and Indigenous perspectives to create an experiential tapestry that asks the viewer to reconsider, reorient, and rethink relationships with the more-than-human.
Jane Tingley is an artist, curator, Director of the SLOlab: Sympoietic Living Ontologies Lab and Associate Professor at York University. Her studio work combines traditional studio practice with new media tools – and spans responsive/interactive installation, performative robotics, and telematically connected distributed sculptures/installations. Her works is interdisciplinary in nature and explores the creation of spaces and experiences that push the boundaries between science and magic, interactivity, and playfulness, and offer an experience to the viewer that is accessible both intellectually and technologically. Using distributed technologies, her current work investigates the hidden complexity found in the natural world and explores the deep interconnections between the human and non-human relationships. As a curator her interests lie at the intersection art, science, and technology with a special interest in collaborative creativity as impetus for innovation and discovery. Recent exhibitions include Hedonistika (2014) at the Musée d’art contemporain (Mtl, CA), INTERACTION (2016) and Agentsfor Change (2020) at THE MUSEUM (Kitchener, CA). As an artist she has participated in exhibitions and festivals in the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe – including translife -International Triennial of Media Art at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, Elektra Festival in Montréal (CA) and the Künstlerhause in Vienna (AT). She received the Kenneth Finkelstein Prize in Sculpture (CA), the first prize in the iNTERFACES – Interactive Art Competition (PT).
more-than-human artists
Ursula Biemann is an artist, author and video essayist. Her artistic practice is research oriented and involves fieldwork from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water. In her multi-layered videos, she interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, science fiction poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. In 2018, Biemann was commissioned by Museo de Arte, Universidad Nacional de Colombia in the co-creation of a new Indigenous University in the South of Colombia led by the Inga people in which she contributes the online platform Devenir Universidad. Her recent video installation Forest Mind (2021) emerges from this long-term collaboration. She has published numerous books, including Forest Mind (2022) and the audiovisual online monograph Becoming Earth on her ecological video works between 2011-2021. Biemann has exhibited internationally with recent solo exhibitions at MAMAC, Nice and the Centre culturel suisse, Paris. She is appointed Doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea, and has received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art, and the 2022 Zurich Art Award.
Lindsey french (she/they) is a settler artist, educator and writer whose work engages in multi- sensory signaling within ecological and technological systems. She has exhibited widely including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), the Miller Gallery for Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh), and SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen). Recent publications include chapters for Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural (Actar, 2022), Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge, 2021), Why Look at Plants (Brill, 2019), and poetry for the journal Forty-Five. They earned an interdisciplinary BA in Environment, Interaction, and Design (Hampshire College), and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Newly based in the prairie landscape of Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan, french teaches as an Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina.
Grace Grothaus Is a computational media artist whose research explores ecosystemic human and plant relationships in relation to the present global climate crisis and speculative futures. She is interested in art’s potential to foster empathy with more-than-human worlds. Frequently collaborative, Grace works with scientists, engineers, musicians and other visual and performing artists. Her research-creation is expressed as physical computing installations which take place both outdoors or in the gallery and often center around the sensing and visualization of invisible environmental phenomena. Her artworks have been exhibited widely including at the International Symposium of Electronic Art (Barcelona, ES & Durban, SA), Environmental Crisis: Art & Science (London, UK), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, FR), and the World Creativity Biennale (Rio de Janiero, BR). Grothaus has received numerous awards including from the United States National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Currently she is working towards a PhD in Digital Media from York University where she has been named a VISTA scholar and a Graduate Fellow of Academic Distinction.
Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning is an interdisciplinary artist and Queen’s National Scholar in Anishinaabe Language, Knowledge, and Culture (ALKC) in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Manning has expertise in Anishinaabe ontology, mnidoo interrelationality, phenomenology, and art. A member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation, her primary philosophical influence and source of creativity is her early childhood grounding in Anishinaabe onto- epistemology. She is Principal Investigator of Earthdiver: Land-Based Worlding (MITACS), and Co-Investigator on Pluriversal Worlding with Extended Reality. Manning co-directs the cross- institutional Peripheral Visions Co-Lab (York and Queen’s). She is an affiliate of Revision Centre for Art and Social Justice, and Fellow of The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI).
Mary Bunch is a media artist, Canada Research Chair, and Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Arts at York University. Through theoretical inquiry and collaborative research creation, Bunch mobilizes queer, feminist, disability and decolonial frameworks to better understand peripheral worldmaking imaginaries in media arts and intermedial performance. She is co-editor of a special issue on Access Aesthetics in Public, Principal Investigator on the research creation project Pluriversal Worlding with Extended Reality (SSHRC Insight) and co-investigator on Earthdiver: Land- Based Worlding (MITACS). Dr Bunch is co-director of the Peripheral Visions Co- Lab, Executive Committee member of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, a core member of Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA), a Fellow at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and an Affiliate of Revision Centre for Art and Social Justice.
Suzanne Morrissette (she/her) (she/her) is an artist, curator, and scholar who is currently based out of Toronto. Her father’s parents were Michif- and Cree-speaking Metis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire loyalists and Mennonites from Russia. Morrissette was born and raised in Winnipeg and is a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation. As an artistic researcher Suzanne’s interests include: family and community knowledge, methods of translation, the telling of in-between histories, and practices of making that support and sustain life. Her two recent solo exhibitions, What does good work look like? and translations recently opened in Toronto (Gallery 44) and Montreal (daphne art centre) respectively. Her work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions such as Lii Zoot Tayr (Other Worlds), an exhibition of Metis artists working with concepts of the unknowable, and the group exhibition of audio-based work about waterways called FLOW with imagineNATIVE Film + Media Art Festival. Morrissette holds a PhD from York University in Social and Political Thought. She currently holds the position of Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director for the Criticism and Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Histories Masters programs at OCAD University.
Joel Ong (PhD, MSc.Bioart) is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment, developed from more than a decade of explorations in sound, installation and socially conscious art. His conceptual explorations revolve around metaphors of distance, connectivity, assiduously reworking this notion of the ‘environment’ – how different tools and scales of observation reveal diverse biotic and abiotic relationalities, and how these continually oscillate between natural and computational worlds. His works have been shown at internationally at the Currents New Media Festival, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Seattle Art Museum, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, the Penny Stamps Gallery and the Ontario Science Centre etc. Joel is Associate Professor in Computational Arts and Director of Sensorium:The Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University, in Toronto, Canada. His research has been funded by such as SSHRC, eCampus Ontario, Women and Gender Equality Canada.
Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are Riga and Karlsruhe based artists and co-founders of RIXC Center for New Media Culture in Riga [Latvia], co-curators of RIXC Art and Science Festival, chief-editors of Acoustic Space, as well as co-chairs of recently founded NAIA – Naturally Artificial Intelligence Art association in Karlsruhe, Germany. Together they create visionary and networked artworks – from pioneering internet radio experiments in 1990s, to artistic investigations in electromagnetic spectrum and collaborations with radio astronomers, and more recent “techno-ecological” explorations. Their projects have been nominated (Purvitis Prize 2019, 2021, International Public Arts Award – Euroasia region 2021), awarded (Ars Electronica 1998, Falling Walls – Science Breakthrough 2021) and shown widely including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Latvian National Museum of Arts, House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, and other venues, exhibitions and festivals in Europe, US, Canada and Asia. More recently they both also have been lecturers in MIT ACT – Art Culture Technology program (2018-2021), Boston.
Rasa Smite holds a PhD in sociology of media and culture; her thesis Creative Networks. In the Rear-View Mirror of Eastern European History (11) has been published by The Amsterdam Institute for Network Cultures. Currently she is a Professor of New Media Art at Liepaja University, and Senior Researcher at FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland.
Raitis Smits holds his doctoral degree in arts, and he is a Professor at the Art Academy of Latvia. In 2017 Raitis was a Fulbright Researcher in the Graduate Center of NYC.
Artists Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits, Grace Grothaus, Suzanne Morrissette and Lindsey french introduce their works exhibited in more-than-human and engage in a discussion about their practice. Moderated by Jane Tingley.
Join Dr Karen Houle for an introductory talk on basic premises of Cartesian humanism followed by an exhibition tour discussion of the artworks in that context with Jane Tingley.
Forest Mind (31 minutes) tackles the underlying concepts that distinguish the Indigenous knowledge systems from that of modern science, gauging the limits of rationalism which has dominated Western thinking for the last 200 years.
Artists Joel Ong, Jane Tingley, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning and Mary Bunch introduce their artworks their works exhibited in more-than-human and engage in a discussion about their practice. Moderated by Lisa Deanne Smith.
Join us for a slow paced, sensory-based guided walk that connects you with the healing power of the natural world. Space is limited, advance registration required.
Registration is limited, free tickets will be released on 1 April [2023] at 12 p.m.: https://bit.ly/3XlyOga
There’s more.
Art/Sci Salon February 28 – May 7, 2023 events
From the January 30, 2023 Art/Sci Salon announcement (received via email), Note: Most of the in-person events take place in Toronto,Ontario,
Mark your calendar for the following events (more details coming up soon)
Artsci Dialogues
Ecology, Symbiosis, Human/Plant Relations
Feb 25 [2023], 3:00-5:00 pm, The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences [222 College Street · Toronto, Ontario] In person and Online
Ethics of Care
March 25 [2023], 3:00-5:00 pm The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical sciences In person and Online
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is investigating the ‘Future of Being Human’ and has instituted a global call for proposals but there is one catch, your team has to have one person (with or without citizenship) who’s living and working in Canada. (Note: I am available.)
New program proposals should explore the long term intersection of humans, science and technology, social and cultural systems, and our environment. Our understanding of the world around us, and new insights into individual and societal behaviour, have the potential to provide enormous benefits to humanity and the planet.
We invite bold proposals from researchers at universities or research institutions that ask new questions about our complex emerging world. We are confronting challenging problems that require a diverse team incorporating multiple disciplines (potentially spanning the humanities, social sciences, arts, physical sciences, and life sciences [emphasis mine]) to engage in a sustained dialogue to develop new insights, and change the conversation on important questions facing science and humanity.
CIFAR is committed to creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. We welcome proposals that include individuals from countries and institutions that are not yet represented in our research community.
…
Here’s a description, albeit, a little repetitive, of what CIFAR is asking researchers to do (from the Program Guide [PDF]),
For CIFAR’s next Global Call for Ideas, we are soliciting proposals related to The Future of Being Human, exploring in the long term the intersection of humans, science and technology, social and cultural systems, and our environment. Our understanding of the natural world around us, and new insights into individual and societal behaviour, have the potential to provide enormous benefits to humanity and the planet. We invite bold proposals that ask new questions about our complex emerging world, where the issues under study are entangled and dynamic. We are confronting challenging problems that necessitate a diverse team incorporating multiple disciplines (potentially spanning the humanities, social sciences, arts, physical sciences, and life sciences) to engage in a sustained dialogue to develop new insights, and change the conversation on important questions facing science and humanity. [p. 2 print; p. 4 PDF]
First off, there’s Canada’s annual Science Odyssey (see my April 26, 2021 posting for more about the government initiative or you can go directly to the Science Odyssey website for a listing of the events).
Since posting about Science Odyssey, I have received a number of emails announcing event and not all of them are part of the Odyssey experience.
From the looks of things, May 2021 is going to be a very busy month. Given how early it is in the month I expect to receive another batch of notices and most likely will post another May 2021 events roundup.
At this point, there’s a heavy emphasis on architecture (human and other) and design.
Proximal Spaces on May 3, 2021
This is one of those event within an event notices. There’s a festival: FACTT 20/21 – Improbable Times. Trans-disciplinary & Trans-national Festival of Art & Science in Portugal and within the festival there is Proximal Spaces in Toronto, Canada. Here’s more from the ArtScience Salon (ArtSci Salon) May 1, 2021 announcement (received via email),
Proximal Spaces
May 3, 2021 – 3.00 PM (EST) [12 pm PST]
Join us at this poetry reading by six Canadian artists responding to the work of eight bioartists. Event with be streamed on Facebook Live.
Please note that you don’t need to sign up in order to access the streaming as it is public.
Proximal Spaces’ is a multi-modal exhibition that explores the environment at multiple scales in concentric circles of proximity to the body. Inspired by Edward Hall’s [Edward Twitchell Hall or E. T. Hall] 1961 notation of intimate (1.5ft), personal (4ft), social (12ft) and public (25ft) spaces in his “Proxemics” diagrams, the installation portion presents similar diagrams of his concentric circles affixed to the wall of the gallery space, as well as developed in Augmented Reality around the venue. Each of these diagrams is a montage of microscopic and sub-microscopic images of the everyday environment as experienced by a collaborative team of international bioartists, and arrayed in a fractal form. In addition, an AR-enabled application explores the invisible environments of computer generated bioaerosols suspended in the air of virtual space.
This work visualizes the variegated response of the biological environment to unprecedented levels of physical distancing and self-isolation and recent developments in vaccine design that impact our understanding of interpersonal and interspecies ‘messaging’. What continues to thrive in the 6ft ‘dead spaces’ between us? What invisible particles linger on and create a biological archive through our movements through space? The artwork presents an interesting mode of interspecies engagement through hybrid virtual and physical interaction.
In the spring of 2021, six Canadian poets – Kelley Aitken, nancy viva davis halifax, Maureen Hynes, Anita Lahey, Dilys Leman, & Sheila Stewart – came together to pursue a lyric response to Proximal Spaces. They were challenged and inspired by the virtual exhibition with its combination of art, science, and proxemics. The focus of the artworks – what inhabits and thrives in the spaces and environments where we live, work, and breathe—generated six distinctive poems.
Poets: Kelley Aitken, nancy viva davis halifax, Maureen Hynes, Anita Lahey, Dilys Leman, & Sheila Stewart
Bioartists: Roberta Buiani, Nathalie Dubois Calero, Sarah Choukah, Nicole Clouston, Jess Holtz, Mick Lorusso, Maro Pebo, Felipe Shibuya
This project is part of FACTT-Improbable Times (http://factt.arteinstitute.org/), a project spearheaded and promoted by the Arte Institute we are in or production and conception partners with Cultivamos Cultura and Ectopia (Portugal), InArts Lab@Ionian University (Greece), ArtSci Salon@The Fields Institute and Sensorium@York University (Canada), School of Visual Arts (USA), UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico], Arte+Ciência and Bioscénica (Mexico), and Central Academy of Fine Arts (China). Together we will work and bring into being our ideas and actions for this during the year of 2021!
Morphogenesis: Geometry, Physics, and Biology on May 5, 2021
i love this image, he seems so delighted to show off the bug (?),
Harvard professor L. Mahadevan
Here’s more from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) April 30, 2021 announcement (received via email),
Earth is home to millions of different species – from simple plants and unicellular organisms to trees and whales and humans. The incredible diversity of life on Earth led Charles Darwin to lament that it is “enough to drive the sanest man mad.”
How can we make sense of this diversity of form, which arises from the process of morphogenesis that links molecular- and cellular-level processes to conspire and lead to the emergence of “endless forms most beautiful,” as Darwin said?
In his May 5 [2021] lecture webcast, Harvard professor L. Mahadevan [Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan] will take viewers on a journey into the mathematical, physical, and biological workings of morphogenesis to demonstrate how scientists are beginning to unlock many of the secrets that have vexed scientists since Darwin.
Possible Worlds: “How Will We Live Together?” on May 6, 2021
For those who are interested in human architecture, there’s this from a May 3, 3021 Berggruen institute announcement (received via email) about a talk by Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker Prize winner, Alejandro Gastón Aravena Mori (Alejandro Aravena),
Possible Worlds: How Will We Live Together
May 6, 2021
11am — Virtual
Possible Worlds: The UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] – Berggruen Institute Speaker Series is a new partnership between the UCLA Division of Humanities and the Berggruen Institute.
Please click here to submit a question to Alejandro Aravena
About Alejandro Aravena Alejandro Aravena is an architect, founder and executive director of the firm Elemental. His works include the “Siamese Towers” at the Catholic University of Chile and the Novartis office campus in Shanghai. In 2016, the New York Times named Aravena one of the world’s “creative geniuses” who had helped define culture. He and Elemental have received numerous honors, including the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 2015 London Design Museum’s Design of the Year award and the 2011 Index Award. Aravena currently serves as the president of the Pritzker Prize jury. Aravena’s lecture title, “How Will We Live Together?” echoes the theme of the upcoming international architecture exhibition, Biennale Architettura, in which Elemental will be participating.
Featuring a discussion with moderator Dana Cuff
Dana Cuff is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she is also Director of cityLAB, an award-winning think tank that advances goals of spatial justice through experimental urbanism and architecture (www.cityLAB.aud.ucla.edu). Since receiving her Ph.D. in Architecture from Berkeley, Cuff has published and lectured widely about affordable housing, the architectural profession, and Los Angeles’ urban history. She is author of several books, including The Provisional City about postwar housing in L.A., and a co-authored book called Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City, documenting her collaborative, crossdisciplinary research and teaching at UCLA funded by the Mellon Foundation. Based on cityLAB’s design research, Cuff co-authored landmark legislation that permits “backyard homes” on some 8.1 million single-family properties, doubling the density of suburbs across California (AB 2299, Bloom-2016). In 2019, cityLAB opened a satellite center in the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhood where a deep, multi-year exchange with community organizations is already demonstrating ways that humanistic design of the public realm can create more compassionate cities. Cuff recently received three awards that describe her career: Women in Architecture Activist of the Year (2019, Architectural Record); Distinguished Leadership in Architectural Research (2020, ARCC); and Educator of the Year (2021, American Institute of Architects Los Angeles).
About the Series Possible Worlds: The UCLA – Berggruen Institute Speaker Series is a new partnership between the UCLA Division of Humanities and the Berggruen Institute. This semiannual series will bring some of today’s most imaginative intellectual leaders and creators to deliver public talks on the future of humanity. Through the lens of their singular achievements and experiences, these trailblazers in creativity, innovation, philosophy and politics will lecture on provocative topics that explore current challenges and transformations in human progress.
UCLA faculty and students have long been at the forefront of interpreting the world’s legacy of language, literature, art and science. UCLA Humanities serves a vital role in readying future leaders to articulate their thoughts with clarity and imagination, to interpret the world of ideas, and to live as informed citizens in an increasingly complex world. We are proud to be partnering in this lecture series with the Berggruen Institute, whose work addresses the “Great Transformations” taking place in technology and culture, politics and economics, global power arrangements, and even how we perceive ourselves as humans. The Institute seeks to connect deep thought in the human sciences — philosophy and culture — to the pursuit of practical improvements in governance.
A selection committee comprising representatives of UCLA and the Berggruen Institute has been formed to make recommendations for lecturers. The committee includes:
• Ursula Heise, Professor and Chair, Department of English; Professor, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies • Pamela Hieronymi, Professor of Philosophy • Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Professor of Urban Planning; Associate Provost for Academic Planning • Todd Presner, Associate Dean, Digital Initiatives; Chair of the Digital Humanities Program; Michael and Irene Ross Endowed Chair of Yiddish Studies; Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature • Lynn Vavreck, Professor, Department of Political Science; Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy • David Schaberg, Senior Dean of the UCLA College; Dean of Humanities; Professor, Asian Languages & Cultures • Nils Gilman, Vice President of Programs, the Berggruen Institute
Generative Art and Computational Creativity starts May 7, 2021
A Spring 2021 MetaCreation Lab (Simon Fraser University; SFU) newsletter (received via email on April 23, 2021) highlights a number of festival submissions and papers along with some news about a free introductory course. First, the video introduction to the course,
This first course in the two-part program, Generative Art and Computational Creativity [there’s a fee for part two], proposes an introduction and overview of the history and practice of generative arts and computational creativity with an emphasis on the formal paradigms and algorithms used for generation. The full program will be taught by Associate Professor from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University and multi-disciplinary researcher, Philippe Pasquier.
On the technical side, we will study core techniques from mathematics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life that are used by artists, designers and musicians across the creative industry. We will start with processes involving chance operations, chaos theory and fractals and move on to see how stochastic processes, and rule-based approaches can be used to explore creative spaces. We will study agents and multi-agent systems and delve into cellular automata, and virtual ecosystems to explore their potential to create novel and valuable artifacts and aesthetic experiences.
The presentation is illustrated by numerous examples from past and current productions across creative practices such as visual art, new media, music, poetry, literature, performing arts, design, architecture, games, robot-art, bio-art and net-art. Students get to practice these algorithms first hand and develop new generative pieces through assignments and projects in MAX. Finally, the course addresses relevant philosophical, and societal debates associated with the automation of creative tasks.
Music for this course was composed with the StyleMachineLite Max for Live engine of Metacreative Inc.
Artistic direction: Philippe Pasquier, Programmation: Arne Eigenfeldt, Sound Production: Philippe Bertrand
Schedule
This course is in adaptive mode and is open for enrollment. Learn more about adaptive courses here.
Session 1: Introduction and Typology of Generative Art (May 7, 2021) To start off this course, we define generative art and computational creativity and discuss how these relate through the study of prominent examples. We establish a typology of generative systems based on levels of autonomy and agency.
Session 2: History Of Generative Art, Chance Operations, and Chaos Theory (May 14, 2021) Generative art is nothing new, and this session goes through the history of the field from pre-history to the popularization of computers. We study chance, noise, fractals, chaos theory, and their applications in visual art and music.
Session 3: Rule-Based Systems, Grammars and Markov Chains (May 21, 2021) This session introduces and illustrate the generative potential of rule-based and expert systems. We study generative grammars through the Chomsky hierarchy, and introduce L-systems, shape grammars, and Markov chains. We discuss how these have been applied in visual art, music, design, architecture, and electronic literature.
Session 4: Cognitive Agents And Multiagent Systems (May 28, 2021) This session introduces the concepts underlying the notion of artificial agents. We study the belief, desire, and intention (BDI) cognitive architecture, and message based agent communication resting on the speech act theory. We discuss musical agents, conversational agents, chat bots and twitter bots and their artistic potential.
Session 5: Reactive Agents And Multiagent Systems (June 4, 2021) In this session, we introduce reactive agents and the subsumption architecture. We study boids, and detail how complex behaviors can emerge from a distributed population of simple artificial agents. We look at a myriad of applications from ant painting to swarm music and we discuss artistic approaches to virtual ecosystems.
Session 6: A-Life And Cellular Automaton (June 11, 2021) In this concluding session, we introduce artificial life (A-life). We study cellular automaton, multi-agent ecosystems for music, visual art, non-photorealistic rendering, and gaming. The session also concludes the class by reflecting on the state of the art in the field and its consequences on creative practices.
If you’re interested in the lab and its other projects, go to metacreationlab.net.
Architectural Portraits on May 13, 2021
From the May 2021 Dante Alighieri Society of British Columbia’s newsletter,
ARCHITECTURAL PORTRAITS: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODY, DESIGN & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT A talk by architect & photographer Oliviero Godi (Politecnico di Milano)
Photo by Oliviero Godi – Frantoio Ipogeo nel Salento
THURSDAY, May 13, 2021 IN ENGLISH – ON ZOOM at 5:00 pm (PST)
Admission:
FREE for the Dante Society’s members
$5 MINIMUM DONATION for non-members
Become a member! Annual membership $30.00 – See membership benefits here
The human being – so fragile, so ethereal, speaking a sweet language. A piece of architecture – so physically imminent, so solid, speaking a language of hardness.
Photo by Oliviero Godi – Frantoio Ipogeo nel Salento
Join photographer & architect Oliviero Godi as he explores the relationship between the body & the material, the transient & the permanent, in search of the correct balance where neither element prevails.
To make your donation, please send an e-transfer to info@dantesocietybc.ca. Thank you!
Learn More [about this other upcoming Cultural Events]
Respiration and the Brain on May 25, 2021
Before getting to the April 29, 2021 BrainTalks announcement, here’s a little bit about BrainTalks from their webspace on the University of British Columbia (UBC) website,
BrainTalks is a series of talks inviting you to contemplate emerging research about the brain. Researchers studying the brain, from various disciplines including psychiatry, neuroscience, neuroimaging, and neurology, gather to discuss current leading edge topics on the mind.
As an audience member, you join the discussion at the end of the talk, both in the presence of the entire audience, and with an opportunity afterwards to talk with the speaker more informally in a catered networking session. The talks also serve as a connecting place for those interested in similar topics, potentially launching new endeavours or simply connecting people in discussions on how to approach their research, their knowledge, or their clinical practice.
For the general public, these talks serve as a channel where by knowledge usually sequestered in inaccessible journals or university classrooms, is now available, potentially allowing people to better understand their brains and minds, how they work, and how to optimize brain health.
[UBC School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry]
Onto the April 29, 2021 BrainTalks announcement (received via email),
BrainTalks: Respiration and the Brain
Tuesday, May 25th, 2021 from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM [PT]
Join us for a series of online talks exploring questions of respiration and the brain. Emerging empirical research will be presented on ventilation-associated brain injury and breathing-based interventions for the treatment of stress and anxiety disorders. We presenters will include Dr. Thiago Bassi, Dr. Lloyd Lalande and Taylor Willi, MSc.
Dr. Thiago Bassi will address the biological connection between the brain and lungs, exploring the potential adverse effects of mechanical ventilation on the brain. Dr. Bassi is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, who worked clinically for more than ten years in Brazil. He joined the Lungpacer Medical team and C2B2 lab in 2017, and is currently completing his doctorate in Biomedicine Physiology at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Lloyd Lalande will describe Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy (GRMT), as an emerging clinical breathwork intervention for its effectiveness in reducing depression, anxiety and stress, and in increasing mindfulness and sense of wellbeing. Dr. Lalonde is an Assistant Professor teaching psychology at the Buddhist TzuChi University of Science and Technology, and the developer of GRMT. His current research is based out of the TzuChi Buddhist General Hospital, investigating GRMT as an evidence-based treatment for a variety of outcomes.
Mr. Taylor Willi will present the findings of his dissertation research comparing the effect of performing daily brief relaxation techniques on measures of stress and anxiety. Mr. Willi completed a Masters Degree of Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, and is currently completing his doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Simon Fraser University.
Each of the speakers will present an overview of their research findings investigating respiration in three unique ways. Following their presentations, the speakers will be available for an audience-drive panel discussion.
They don’t mention COVID-19 but given that seriously ill patients with the disease are routinely placed on ventilators, it is almost certainly going to be mentioned in the presentations.
S.NET once stood for Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies and then the name started changing with the most recent being, Society of the Studies of New and Emerging Technologies. As I noted in my 2017 end-of-year comments (Dec. 30, 2017 posting), the nano blogosphere is also shifting as nanotechnology is being absorbed into and enables other scientific and technical efforts.
S.NET is celebrating its 10th year at their annual meeting, which will be held in Maastricht (Netherlands). Here’s their call for papers,
2018 Annual S.NET Meeting
Image: Geert Budenaerts, Wikimedia
CALL for PAPERS.
The 10th annual S.NET meeting will take place June 25-27, 2018 at the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. The theme is Anticipatory Technologies: Data and Disorientation.
Invitation
S.NET invites contributions to the tenth annual meeting of The Society for the Study of New and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), to be held at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, on June 25 – 27, 2018. The three-day conference will assemble scholars, practitioners and policy makers from around the world interested in the development and implications of emerging technologies.
About S.NET
S.NET is an international association that promotes intellectual exchange and critical inquiry about the advancement of new and emerging technologies in society. The aim of the association is to advance critical reflection from various perspectives on developments in a broad range of new and emerging fields, including, but not limited to, nanoscale science and engineering, biotechnology, synthetic biology, cognitive science, ICT and Big Data, and geo-engineering. Current S.NET board members are: Michael Bennett (chair), Marianne Boenink, Ana Delgado, Clare Shelley-Egan, Chris Toumey, Poonam Pandey, Christopher Coenen, Colin Milburn, Kornelia Konrad, Nora Vaage, Maria Belen Albornoz, and Ryan LaBar.
Conference Theme: Anticipatory technologies – data and disorientation
Any effort on new and emerging technologies unavoidably deals with the non-existing and the speculative. The future is permanently mobilized to promote decisions and policies regarding the science, technology and society nexus. Anticipatory technologies like predictive policing and preventive medicine promise to give us better epistemic access and practical control over the future. The basic irony, however, is that anticipatory technologies do not only increase data but also disorientation. Is the disorientation vis-á-vis the future in spite of the astonishing growth of data, or can it be a result of that growth? Does the growing control over future events in terms of risk make people more acutely aware of what they don’t control? Contributions are invited that explore existing ways in which the future is mobilized, technologically mediated, and economically exploited; that map the manifold ways it is contested both in discourse and in action; and that reflect on the extent to which new technologies ironically undermine our faith in the future.
Key note speakers
Prof Cyrus Mody is an historian of recent science and technology and has published on the history of nanotechnology and micro-electronics. He studies the commercialization of academic research, countercultural science and technology, and the longue durée of responsible research and innovation. He worked at Rice University, Texas, the NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society and now has a chair at Maastricht University.
Prof Marjolein van Asselthas a strong profile on governance, risk and uncertainty in both academic and policy circles. Currently she is member of the Dutch Safety Board and was a member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy for many years. She has a Governance chair at Maastricht University.
Third key note speaker to be announced.
Themes, topics and conference strands for the 10th Annual Meeting
S.NET encompasses communities, perspectives, and methodologies from across the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences, and welcomes contributions from technology developers and other practitioners. The program committee invites contributions from the full breadth of disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives, as well as from applied, participatory, and practical approaches to studying these emerging fields. Regionally or internationally comparative perspectives are especially welcome. Possible themes and topics have been organized into one overarching conference theme and six ‘strands’. While applicants are asked to indicate the strand relevant to the topic of their paper, submissions dealing with themes or topics outside the present strands are also welcome.
R&D practices and the dynamics of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Research networks & collaborations, ways of organizing research & development, emerging research fields, practices of ‘doing’ new and emerging fields of science and technology, including historical and philosophical studies of these practices.
Innovation and the use of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Innovation networks and systems, commercialization, implications for industry structures, translation from lab to practice, application and use of products and other innovations, critical analyses of growth and consumption, including economic, social and cultural approaches of innovation processes.
Governance of newly emerging sciences and technologies
Regulations, anticipatory governance practices, risk assessment, risk concerns, (constructive) TA, forms of public participation and engagement, including critical evaluation of forms of governance.
Visions and cultural imaginaries of newly emerging sciences and technologies
Promises, expectations, visions, science fiction, imagination, socio – technical change, moral change, role of media, including assessments of such visions and analyses of their role in innovation processes.
Publics and their relations to newly emerging science s and technologies
Science communication, risk communication, public engagement, participation and discourses on NEST, science museums, informal science learning initiatives, including critical evaluation of such initiatives and the notion of ‘publics’.
Politics and ethics of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Responsible innovation, (in)equality, equity, development, global and social distribution of benefits and risks, sustainability, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ impacts of emerging technologies, including theoretical perspectives on NEST and global developments.
How to apply
S.NET encourages proposals for individual papers, posters, traditional panels, roundtable discussions and other innovative formats. Abstracts should be approximately 250 words in length. Proposals for panel sessions should include a general introduction and abstracts of the separate contributions. Proposals should include the theme or strand to which the abstract/panel session is submitted. If an abstract fits more strands, or does not fit the existing strands, simply note that in your submission. The deadline for abstract submissions is March 2, 2018; send your abstract in PDF form to 2018snet@gmail.com. All submitters will be notified about the results of the review process by the end of April 2018. Details of the submission process are available online: www.maastrichtsts.nl/snet.
The local organizing committee
Tsjalling Swierstra, Harro van Lente, Nora Vaage, Conor Douglas, Danielle Shanley, Darian Meacham, Cindy van Montfoort, Jacqueline Graff.
Location
Maastricht is an ancient Roman city of some 120.000 inhabitants in the south of The Netherlands and has a beautiful medieval inner-city. Generally known as the venue of the Treaty of Maastricht, it has a distinctly international orientation. Maastricht can easily be reached by plane, train and car. Maastricht University is internationally oriented; its students come from all over the world. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) is located in the centre of Maastricht.
