A November 4, 2024 ArtSci Salon notice (received via email and visible here, along with some embedded images, for a limited time) announces a series of events and a book launch,
Fall 2024 has brought us climate and political uncertainty. In November, we bring you some food for thought: join us at these events to reflect on uncertainty, shapeshifting Matter, Unstable Universes and Viral Phenomena .
Mark Your calendars on November 14, November 18 and November 21 see details below (in reverse chronological order)
Shapeshifting Matter for an Unstable Universe artist talk and discussion with Daniela Brill Estrada Thursday, November 21, [2024] 5:30-7:30 pm The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Science
Shapeshifting matter for an unstable universe is an in-disciplinary artistic project that challenges taxonomies and categories that divide nature into different boxes, not allowing bodies to exist freely, simply as part of the shapeshifting matter that inhabits this universe. The research tackles topics from astrophysics to origin of life research, and is based on daniela’s own experiences in understanding her own existence outside of these categories.
DANIELA BRILL ESTRADAis and artist and researcher from Bogotá based in vVenna [?]. inspired by origin of life research and astrobiology, she explores chemical trajectories, particularly those based on carbon. Currently, Daniela is an artist in residence at the SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] institute and at the University at Buffalo, and a PhD candidate at the art x science school for transformation in Linz, Austria.
Join us at Celebrate Research Week and ORIHI launch (Osler Centre Institute for Health Innovation)
November 18, 2024 1. 11:00 am -12:00 pm Opening of Art and Science Exhibition with Daniela Brill Estrada and others 2. 2:00-3:30 pm Discussion and artist talk with Daniela Brill Estrada and Roberta Buiani
Osler Centre Institute for Health Innovation Brampton Civic Hospital Atrium 2100 Bovaird Drive East Brampton, ON L6R 3J7
Stay tuned for the the link to the Hybrid Event see more information and full program below
In a new era of global virology that requires novel methodologies to improve the comprehension of viruses and viral phenomena, Viral Behaviors explores the cultural, material, and artistic significance of viruses and viral phenomena.
The book contains a decade of research across art, science and technology and examines the struggles and successes of science and technology to tame the elusive nature and behavior of viruses, and the potential of art-based and cross-disciplinary collaborations to better communicate their complex making and intense entanglement with the world at large. Combining perspectives from art, philosophy, science and technology, it places biological and informational viruses alongside each other, revealing that, while the two types of agents affect the world in very different ways, their histories and manifestations contain surprising similarities that speak to a cultural continuum.
The book can be also borrowed from the University of Toronto Library and York University Library. don’t forget to tell your library to get a copy!
I wonder why they’re using the US spelling for ‘behaviours’. Leaving that aside, I’m sure it’s possible to enjoy one or more of the events and/or the book.
Join us to welcome Cerpina and Stenslie as they introduce us to their book and discuss the future cuisine of humanity. To sustain the soon-to-be 9 billion global population we cannot count on Mother Earth’s resources anymore. The project explores innovative and speculative ideas about new foods in the field of arts, design, science & technology, rethinking eating traditions and food taboos, and proposing new recipes for survival in times of ecological catastrophes.
To match the topic of their talk, attendees will be presented with “anthropocene snacks” and will be encouraged to discuss food alternatives and new networks of solidarity to fight food deserts, waste, and unsustainable consumption.
This is a Hybrid event: our guests will join us virtually on zoom. Join us in person at Glendon Campus, rm YH190 (the studio next to the Glendon Theatre) for a more intimate community experience and some anthropocene snacks. If you wish to join us on Zoom, please
This event is part of a series on Emergent Practices in Communication, featuring explorations on interspecies communication and digital networks; land-based justice and collective care. The full program can be found here
This initiative is supported by York University’s Teaching Commons Academic Innovation Fund
Zane Cerpina is a multicultural and interdisciplinary female author, curator, artist, and designer working with the complexity of socio-political and environmental issues in contemporary society and in the age of the Anthropocene. Cerpina earned her master’s degree in design from AHO – The Oslo School of Architecture and Design and a bachelor’s degree in Art and Technology from Aalborg University. She resides in Oslo and is a project manager/curator at TEKS (Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre). She is also a co-founder and editor of EE: Experimental Emerging Art Journal. From 2015 to 2019, Cerpina was a creative manager and editor at PNEK (Production Network for Electronic Art, Norway).
Stahl Stenslie works as an artist, curator and researcher specializing in experimental media art and interaction experiences. His aesthetic focus is on art and artistic expressions that challenge ordinary ways of perceiving the world. Through his practice he asks the questions we tend to avoid – or where the answers lie in the shadows of existence. Keywords of his practice are somaesthetics, unstable media, transgression and numinousness. The technological focus in his works is on the art of the recently possible – such as i) panhaptic communication on Smartphones, ii) somatic and immersive soundspaces, and iii) design of functional and lethal artguns, 3D printed in low-cost plastic material.He has a PhD on Touch and Technologies from The School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway. Currently he heads the R&D department at Arts for Young Audiences Norway.
If you’re interested in the book, there’s the anthropocenecookbook.com, which has more about the book and purchase information,
The Anthropocene Cookbook is by far the most comprehensive collection of ideas about future food from the perspective of art, design, and science. It is a thought-provoking book about art, food, and eating in the Anthropocene –The Age of Man– and the age of catastrophes.
Published by The MIT Press [MIT = Massachusetts Institute of Technology] | mitpress.mit.edu
Supported by TEKS Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre | www.teks.no
*Date changed* Streaming Carbon Footprint on October 27, 2023
Keep scrolling down to Date & location changed for Streaming Carbon Footprint subhead.
From the Toronto ArtSci Salon October 5, 2023 announcement,
Oct 27, [2023] 5:00-7:00 PM [ET] Streaming Carbon Footprint
with Laura U. Marks and David Rokeby – Room 230 The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences 222 College Street, Toronto
We are thrilled to announce this dialogue between media Theorist Laura U. Marks and Media Artist David Rokeby. Together, they will discuss a well known elephant in the room of media and digital technologies: their carbon footprint. As social media and streaming media usage increases exponentially, what can be done to mitigate their impact? are there alternatives?
This is a live event: our guests will join us in person.
if you wish to join us on Zoom instead, a link will be circulated on our website and on social media a few days before the event. The event will be recorded
Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus, and on small-footprint media. She programs experimental media for venues around the world. As Grant Strate University Professor, she teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her upcoming book The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos will be published I March 2024 by Duke University Press.
David Rokeby is an installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. He has been creating and exhibiting since 1982. For the first part of his career he focussed on interactive pieces that directly engage the human body, or that involve artificial perception systems. In the last decade, his practice has expanded to included video, kinetic and static sculpture. His work has been performed / exhibited in shows across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia.
Awards include the first BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for Interactive Art in 2000, a 2002 Governor General’s award in Visual and Media Arts and the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art 2002. He was awarded the first Petro-Canada Award for Media Arts in 1988, the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Interactive Art (Austria) in 1991 and 1997.
I haven’t been able to dig up any information about registration but it will be added here should I stumble across any in the next few weeks. I did, however, find more information about Marks’s work and a festival in Vancouver (Canada).
Fourth Annual Small File Media Festival (October 20 -21, 2023) and the Streaming Carbon Footprint
When was the last time you watched a DVD? If you’re like most people, your DVD collection has been gathering dust as you stream movies and TV from a variety of on-demand services. But have you ever considered the impact of streaming video on the environment?
School for the Contemporary Arts professor Laura Marks and engineering professor Stephen Makonin, with engineering student Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva and media scholar Radek Przedpełski, worked together for over a year to investigate the carbon footprint of streaming media supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
“Stephen and Alejandro were there to give us a reality check and to increase our engineering literacy, and Radek and I brought the critical reading to it,” says Marks. “It was really a beautiful meeting of critical media studies and engineering.”
After combing through studies on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and making their own calculations, they confirmed that streaming media (including video on demand, YouTube, video embedded in social media and websites, video conferences, video calls and games) is responsible for more than one per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And this number is only projected to rise as video conferencing and streaming proliferate.
“One per cent doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s significant if you think that the airline industry is estimated to be 1.9 per cent,” says Marks. “ICT’s carbon footprint is growing fast, and I’m concerned that because we’re all turning our energy to other obvious carbon polluters, like fossil fuels, cars, the airline industry, people are not going to pay attention to this silent, invisible carbon polluter.”
One thing that Marks found surprising during their research is how politicized this topic is.
Their full report includes a section detailing the International Energy Association’s attack on French think tank The Shift Project after they published a report on streaming media’s carbon footprint in 2019. They found that some ICT engineers state that the carbon footprint of streaming is not a concern because data centres and networks are very efficient, while others say the fast-rising footprint is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Their report includes comparisons of the divergent figures in engineering studies in order to get a better understanding of the scope of this problem.
The No. 1 thing Marks and Makonin recommend to reduce streaming’s carbon footprint is to ensure that our electricity comes from renewable sources. At an individual level, they offer a list of recommendations to reduce energy consumption and demand for new ICT infrastructure including: stream less, watch physical media including DVDs, decrease video resolution, use audio-only mode when possible, and keep your devices longer—since production of devices is very carbon-intensive.
Promoting small files and low resolution, Marks founded the Small File Media Festival [link leads to 2023 programme], which will present its second annual program [2021] of 5-megabyte films Aug. 10 – 20. As the organizers say, movies don’t have to be big to be binge-worthy.
And now for 2023, here’s a video promoting the upcoming fourth annual festival,
The Streaming Carbon Footprint webpage on the SFU website includes information about the final report and the latest Small File Media Festival. Although I found the Small File Media Festival website also included a link for purchasing tickets,
The Small File Media Festival returns for its fourth iteration! We are delighted to partner with The Cinematheque to present over sixty jewel-like works from across the globe. These movies are small in file size, but huge in impact: by embracing the aesthetics of compression and low resolution (glitchiness, noise, pixelation), they lay the groundwork for a new experimental film movement in the digital age. This year, six lovingly curated programs traverse brooding pixelated landscapes, textural paradises, and crystalline infinities.
Join us Friday, October 20 [2023] for the opening-night program followed by a drinks reception in the lobby and a dance party in the cinema, featuring music by Vancouver electronic artist SAN. We’ll announce the winner of the coveted Small-File Golden Mini Bear during Saturday’s [October 21, 2023] award ceremony! As always, the festival will stream online at smallfile.ca after the live events.
We’re most grateful to our future-forward friends at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, and SFU Contemporary Arts. Thanks to VIVO Media Arts, Cairo Video Festival, and The Hmm for generous distribution and exhibition awards, and to UKRAïNATV, a partner in small-file activism.
Cosmically healthy, community-building, and punk AF, small-file ecomedia will heal the world, one pixel at a time.
I got a notice (via email) from Toronto’s ArtSci Salon about Sensoria: The Art and Science of Our Senses 2022. This looks interesting and it is confusing as to which site is hosting which installations/art pieces. It starts nice and easy and then … Here’s more from the notice,
Sensoria: the Art & Science of Our Senses is a multi-site exhibition and symposium that bridges LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Held simultaneously in both locations, the exhibition and symposium will engage multi-sensory research that revitalizes our sensory connections to our surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies.
The exhibition component is co-curated by distinguished curator Nina Czegledy (Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene, 2020 & Leonardo/ ISAST 50th Celebrations, 2018) and Sensorium director Joel Ong. Czegledy brings together an international network of artists and scholars who explore the intersection of art, science and the senses. Sited concurrently in both Poland and Toronto, the exhibition will explore the dissociative potential of contemporary technologies on the senses, treating it not only as a social crisis but also an opportunity for creative play and experimentation. It aims to engage a conversation about the senses from the perspective of art, but also science, incorporating artists that straddle the boundaries of knowledge production in a variety of ways.
The event will be complemented by a workshop by Csenge Kolozsvari.
Kolozsvari brings together somatic practices (crawling side by side, drawing, moving with bags full of water, walking backwards, playing with breath, touching textures, voicing etc.) with the concept of the schiz, cut, or interval, following philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus. The aim is to build practices that do not presuppose where bodies begin and end, and to agitate the habitual narratives of bodily borders and edges as solid and knowable.
The symposium leverages the exhibition content as the starting point for more in-depth conversation about the connective aesthetics of everyday sensing and the knowledge-creation potential of artists and scientists collaborating in innovative ways. The socio-political turbulences we have experienced worldwide during the last decade have created unprecedented social and personal strife. While connections are sustained now amongst virtual networks that straddle vast spaces, how might we consider the sharing of intimate senses through smell, touch, and bodily movement as a form of mutual support? The symposium explores questions such as these with keynote presentations by Ryszard Khuszcynski [I believe this is the correct spellling: Ryszard Kluszczyński], Chris Salter and David Howse, as well as roundtables between artists and scientists, and performances by Csenge Kolozsvari and York University’s DisPerSions Lab (led by Doug Van Nort). All aspects of the symposium will be presented with virtual components, so as to allow both in-person engagement in Toronto and virtual presence in Gdansk and elsewhere.
Now for details about the Gdansk portion, from the LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) event page, (Note 1: This is quite lengthy. Note 2: If you follow the link to the LCCA event page, you may need to click the English language option [upper right hand corner of the screen] and, then, scroll down to click MORE at the bottom of the left text column.)
Dates of the exhibition: 16 September–30 October 2022 Location: CCA Laznia 1 oraz CCA Laznia 2 Curator: Nina Czegledy
Exhibition: September 16-October 30, 2022 Places: Laznia 1 ( Jaskółcza 1) and Laznia 2 (Strajku Dokerów 5), Gdańsk
Opening: September 16, 2022 – time. 19.00 (Laznia 1, Dolne Miasto) – time. 20.30 (Laznia 2, Nowy Port)
During the vernissage, we provide transport by bus from Łaźnia 1 to Łaźnia 2 and back.
Artists: Guy van Belle | Karolina Hałatek | Csenge Kolozsvari | Hilda Kozari | Agnes Meyer-Brandis | Gayil Nalls | Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris | Artur Żmijewski
Sensoria, The Art & Science of Our Senses
Curatorial Statement
Nina Czegledy
Introduction
Sensoria, The Art & Science of Our Senses a multi-site project is focused on multisensory perception in the arts and the sciences. The cross-disciplinary initiative explores our sensory world through scientific, social, cultural and scholastic interpretations. The exhibitions, performances and the symposium link LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland (1) and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art and Technology at York University, Toronto, Canada (2) in a cross-institutional and inter-cultural collaboration. The participation of international artists in the exhibition and symposium span the globe from New Zealand to Finland to the Czech Republic and reflect on the effects of recent ecological and socio-cultural alterations on sensory organisms in humans and other species.
We perceive the world through our senses, yet for a long time the senses were treated as independent perceptual modules. Contemporary research confirmed that our senses are fundamentally interrelated and interact with each other (3). Moreover, our perception of visual, auditory or tactile events change as a result of information exchange between receptors (4). The impact of radical changes such as the constraints of the COVID 19 Pandemic caused extensive psycho-emotional stress and has affected every aspect of our life from geopolitics to economies to the arts and sciences including sensory awareness (5). Considering implications of COVID-19 for the human senses Derek Victor Byrne noted that initial work has shown short- and likely longer-term negative effects on the human senses (6). Curatorial reflection of these issues presented in the last years became essential.
The way that we perceive our environment via our sensory systems has been frequently a source of controversy concerning one of the basic characteristics of our existence. (7).
As David Howes observed ”The perceptual is cultural and political, and not simply (as psychologists and neuroscientists would have it) a matter of cognitive processes or neurological mechanisms located in the individual subject” (8)
With the changing notions of the constitution of sentient beings a revision of knowledge – led to a closer engagement with the traditional experience by indigenous peoples. The benefits of Nature on our sensorial being are well known, however it is important to remember that our attitude to, and representation of Nature is always closely linked to political, religious, environmental and social considerations. In investigating sensory awareness the impact of the geographical, cultural and social context on individual sensory perception cannot be underestimated (9).
Curatorial research and development of the Sensoria project since 2019 was aimed to present the theme in an unconventional way. International artist residencies, workshops, presentations and thematically related round table discussions in collaboration with local Polish academic and corporate research institutions were offered before the Pandemic in 2019 and 2020. Strategically, the exhibitions now focus on a “return” to the sensory capacity of the body after the last two and a half years of telematic and virtual modes of communication that have biased the audio-visual spectrums of sensory experience.
While the estrangement of the senses have been exacerbated by technologies in the way media elements have contributed to the dissociation of the senses from one another and a subsequent bias of audio-visual content in our digital and virtual environments, the SENSORIA exhibition adapt what Caroline Jones (10) has described as the “creatively dissociated self”. In her landmark exhibition “Sensorium” of 2006 , she considers the dissociative potential of contemporary technologies on the senses as an invitation to engage in creative play and experimentations around this prospect. In this way, SENSORIA builds on the unique interests of the artists curated around the olfactory, tactile and sonic senses; and explores the tensions of telematic/virtual co-presence over two geographically separate galleries.
The exhibition’s primary goal is to create a broad visibility for the wide variety of art project concerning sensory perception. It aims to engage a conversation about the senses from the perspective of art, but also science, incorporating artists that straddle the boundaries of knowledge production in a variety of ways. In Poland, the exhibition linked established European artists with local Polish ones; the Toronto hub similarly links international artists in the main hubs with local artists. In this way, the exhibition forges networks across continents and ideas, bringing a range of different perspectives together to explore how our globalized world has both linked and disconnected us from one another. In addition, being situated simultaneously in both sites, Sensoria also builds on the unique interests of the artists curated around the olfactory, tactile and sonic senses; and explores the tensions of telematic/virtual co-presence over two geographically separate galleries. Sensoria artists, curated through a collaborative process with the project’s lead curators and team members, have been invited to considered site-specific adaptations of their internationally renowned artworks. In this way, the goal of the project is to revitalize our sensory connections to our immediate surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies; and to share in a collective experience and discussion of them. In addition, the symposium component hosted by Sensorium at York University focuses on a “return” to the sensory capacity of the body after the last two and a half years of telematic and virtual modes of communication that have biased the audio-visual spectrums of sensory experience. The constraints of the Pandemic have precipitated our current estrangement from our sensuous surroundings, and with the gradual and tentative reopening of regulations in North America, Europe and the world this Spring, we expect a resurgence in a desire for people to engage once again with the multi-sensory sensorium, prioritizing the senses of smell, touch and taste that have broadly been neglected in collective experience. The Sensoria symposium will feature artists, curators and theorists through a series of keynote lectures, performances and artist panels.
Sincere thanks to the LAZNIA Team, especially Lila Bosowska and Aleksandra Ksiezopolska for our curatorial collaboration in the difficult times of the last three years. Sincere thanks to Ryszard Kluszczyński for advising the Sensoria project.
Respectful acknowledgements to Jadwiga Charzynska Director of Laznia.
Last but not least deepest thanks to Prof. Yu-Zhi Joel Ong for his role in expanding Sensoria into an international cross-institutional collaboration.
2 Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art and Technology at York University (Sensorium) Toronto, Canada. https://sensorium.ampd.yorku.ca/
3 Burston, D and Cohen J. 2015 Perceptual Integration, Modularity, and Cognitive Penetration In: Cognitive Influences on Perception: Implications for Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Action (pp.123-143). Oxford University Press
4 Masrour F, Nirshberg, G, Schon Nm Leardi J and Barrett Emily Revisiting the empirical case against perceptual modularity Front Psychol. 2015; 6: 1676. Published online 2015 Nov 4. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01676
5. Tasha R Stanton, T,R and Spence Charles. The Influence of Auditory Cues on Bodily and Movement Perception. Front. Psychol., 17 January 2020 Sec. Perception Science https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03001
6. Byrne, V Effects and Implications of COVID-19 for the Human Senses, Consumer Preferences, Appetite and Eating Behaviour: Volume I Foods. 2022 Jun; 11(12): 1738. Published online 2022 Jun 14. doi: 10.3390/foods11121738
7. Mc Cann, H. Our sensory experience of the pandemic https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/
8 Howes, D Architecture of the Senses. https://www.david-howes.com/DH-research-sampler-arch-senses.htm
9 D B Rose Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Inter-actions in the Sentient World Environmental Humanities 3(1):93-19
10 Jones C. The Mediated Sensorium. https://citythroughthebody.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/sensorium.pdf
Descriptions of the artworks presented at Sensoria:
Agnes Meyer Brandis Berlin based artist contributes One Tree ID and Have a tea with a Tree“ to the Sensoria exhibition. One Tree ID is a biochemical and Biopoetic Odour Communication Installation The project One Tree ID transforms the ID of a specific tree into a perfume that can then be applied to the human body. By applying it, a person can invisibly wear not just characteristics of the tree he/she is standing next to, but also use parts of its communication system and potentially have a conversation that – although invisible and inaudible by nature – might still take place on the biochemical level plants use for information exchange. VOC and Have a tea with a Tree provides a booking link to a personal video conference with up to 16 trees. The trees will participate in real time. Address for conference booking: www.teawithatree.com. The internet protocol is secured.
Polish artist Karolina Hałatek will present “Ascent” – a large-scale site-specific light installation that embodies a variety of archetypical and physical associations – from microscopic observations, electromagnetic wave dynamics, and atmospheric phenomena of a whirlwind to a spiritual epiphany. Most importantly, Ascent offers a unique immersive experience, that invites the viewer to become its central point, and transforms the perception of the viewer on a sensual level. The light and the fog create a monumental dynamic space that is participatory, the space that opens up a new dimension and directs the attention toward the bodily sensations in the explicit environment. The viewer is free to approach the work according to its own sensual response, but direct interaction can offer the potential to evoke a new perceptual imagination.
Bodylandscapes by Csenge Kolozsvari is a single channel video piece feeling-with the fascial planes (connective tissues) of bodies; thinking them beyond human scales and temporalities, as constantly emerging fields. The camera is a listening device for the softness of skin-talk; a composition of detailed skin-textures and close-ups of body parts that are imperceptibly transitioning into one another, following creases and swellings, creating landscapes in-the-making. The video is a proposition for remembering the ecological ways of our belonging, of other ways of knowing, connecting into the vastness that surrounds us and moves across us, of becoming-environment once again.
Artur Zmijewski a Polish artist asked a group of visually impaired people to paint the world as they see it. The result is compiled in Blindly a video with sound. Some of the volunteers were congenitally disabled; others became blind in their lifetime. In the film they draw self-portraits and landscapes, occasionally asking the artist for instructions or giving verbal explanation for their decisions. Their paintings are clumsy and abstract. It is however not the resulting works but the process of making them that is at the core of the film.
Hilda Kozari leads a 3 hour-long memory workshop with visually impaired participants and Emilia Leszkowicz a local neuroscientist coordinated with the Education Department of LAZNIA. The workshop is focused on, triggering smell memories and discussions of the scents and the memories triggered by them. Tactility is also a theme of this workshop for the visually impaired participants which is conveyed via felt discs in various sizes. From the different sizes of the discs it is possible to form the Braille verbs and messages.
The findings and results of the workshop material to be transferred on the Sensoria exhibition walls. The multisensory installation is accessible for visually impaired visitors during the exhibition. For other visitors for rethinking perception, enjoying the smell and touch of the installation and seeing the Braille signs as spatial, visually fascinating structure. It is hoped that this is an opportunity recognising the visually impaired as active members of the community.
Gayil Nalls from New York city brings her World Sensorium project to Sensoria World Sensorium which was officially part of New York City’s millennium event “Times Square 2000: The Global Celebration at the Crossroads of the World,” where for 24 hours around New Year’s Eve, the peoples and cultures of nations around the world were celebrated through sight, sound, and—with World Sensorium— scent. World Sensorium is a large-scale, transdisciplinary, olfactory artwork comprised of botanical substances formulated by country population percentages into a single global essence. The phytoconstituents are those most valued by humanity since ancient times, plants established through ethnobotanical research and a global survey process with world governments. Discussion of the World Sensorium link between psychology and olfaction, and the phenomena of odor-evoked memory follows. Individuals attending are invited to participate in ‘Experience World Sensorium:Poland “ and have a chance to dive beneath the insightful a fragmentary memoir of their own experience at a future date.
Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris, New Zealand based artists present Read Reed at Sensoria. Read Reed proceeds from the mythological story of the discretion of Midas’s hairdresser who, feeling that he may betray Midas’s trust, dug a hole in the earth and spoke into it whereby he laid his secret, only to have the secret broadcast to the world via the whispering reeds which grew over the hole. ReedRead relates to data misinterpretation, hidden secrets and the desire for vast wealth. The artists are using the story of secrets whispered into a hole in the earth and the inevitable leakage and exposure of secrets as a starting point. Data from any source including reeds swishing in the wind may be formed into letters and words that relate to digital capitalism and the obscuring of knowledge through the unknowns of ambiguity, uncertainty and risk. Both the clandestine nature of pervasive monitoring and the authorization for increasing the scope and breadth of collected information originates with NSA’s aspiration to sniff it all, know it all, exploit it all etc., and is part of creating the conditions for digital capitalism.
Guy Van Belle in collaboration with Krzysztof Topolski and the Gdansk University Choir present Fanfara Gdansk performance using a simple and open setup for the participatory visitors/performers. For centuries the arts were rather interested in the non-human expressions around or communication and phenomena that we faintly or hardly understand. To quote Paul Demarinis “Music is sound to my ears”. The sound score gives an indication of discrete and continuous time, pitches and amplitudes, complexities and silences, some combinatory ideas, etc. in the form of sounds you can listen to, sing/play along with it or counter, imitate and enrich it… The expressivity and performativity aims at providing a real time interpretation of the sound score.
The Fanfara Gdansk performance consists of a backtrack with recorded and computer generated birdsongs, which is transmitted over local FM, and received by the musicians on headsets from their phones, tables, portable radio receivers. All musicians are ‘singing’ along with the birdsongs, but they can also bring additional small handheld objects that produce sound: battery operated electronics; resonating objects, … some megaphones and small amplifiers will be available, but all wearable. The singers from the choir move slowly in formation together with the additional musicians and participatory audience, towards the entrance of the exhibition. Any single movement from the musicians and the audience influences the position of the others.
There’s more about the Toronto portion of the exhibitions, etc. on York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technologies’ events page, Note: This is where it gets a little confusing as it seems that some of these artists are displaying the same pieces in two different cities at the same time: World Sensorium has a version in Poland and a version in Toronto; Read Reed is in Poland and ReedRead is in Toronto; I’m not sure about One Tree ID, which seems to be in two places at once,
Courtesy: York University
SENSORIA: the Art & Science of Our Senses is a multi-site exhibition and symposium that bridges LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Held simultaneously in both locations, the exhibition and symposium will engage multi-sensory research that revitalizes our sensory connections to our surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies.
September 26 – October 14, 2022 Gales Gallery, York University 105 Accolade West Building, 86 Fine Arts Road, Toronto, ON
Held at the Gales Gallery, the Sensoria exhibition will feature the works:
One Tree ID. Agnes Meyer-Brandis, SunEaters. Grace Grothaus, World Sensorium. Gayil Nalls, Emergent: A Mobile Gallery featuring “The Connection”, Michaela Pňaček, Roberta Buiani, Lorella Di Cintio and Kavi ReedRead. Raewyn Turner/ Brian Harris Kinetic Shadows. Hrysovalanti Maheras Marching Choir Guy Van Belle
Running from Oct. 4–5 (9am – 12noon EST), The symposium will feature keynote lectures by Ryszard Kluszcynski , Chris Salter and David Howse; roundtable discussions by the artists/theorists/scientists Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Rasa Smite, Katarzyna Pastuszak, Grace Grothaus, Katarzyna Sloboda, Raewyn Turner/Brian Harris, Hilda Kosari [a web search suggests that Kozari is a more correct spelling] and Agnieszka Sorokowska.
In addition, Csenge Kolozsvari will be leading the Schizo-Somatic Workshop on Oct. 3, 2022. Please click on the hyperlinks for separate registration.
Symposium Schedule:
Tuesday, Oct. 4: 9am – 130pm EST 9:00 : Introductions and land acknowledgement (Joel Ong) 9:05 : Introduction from Sensoria Curator (Nina Czegledy) 9:10 : Introduction from LAZNIA (Jadwiga Charzynska, Director) 9:30 : Keynote 1 —Professor Ryszard Kluszcynski 10:30 : Sensoria Panel 1 — Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Rasa Smite, Katarzyna Pastuszak, Grace Grothaus (Discussant) 12:00 : Lunch Break 12:30 : Keynote Performance 1 — Csenge Kolozsvari [Sensorium Flex Space] + Q&A 1:30 : End
Wednesday Oct 5th 9am – 130pm EST
9:00 : Introductions and land acknowledgement 9:10 : Curatorial presentation (Toronto curatorial team) 9:30 : Keynote 2 — Professors Chris Salter and David Howse 10:30 : Sensoria Panel 2 — Katarzyna Sloboda, Raewyn Turner/Brian Harris, Hilda Kosari, Agnieszka Sorokowska, Hrysovalanti Maheras (Discussant) 12:00 : Lunch Break 12:30 : Keynote Performance 2 — Doug Van Nort Telematic Orchestra [DisPerSions Lab] + Q&A 1:30 : Ending Notes
Description:
SENSORIA: the Art & Science of Our Senses is a multi-site exhibition and symposium that bridges LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Held simultaneously in both locations, the exhibition and symposium will engage multi-sensory research that revitalizes our sensory connections to our surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies.
The exhibition is co-curated by distinguished curator Nina Czegledy (Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene, 2020 & Leonardo/ISAST 50th Celebrations, 2018) and Sensorium director Joel Ong, with the support of assistant curators Eva Lu and Cleo Sallis-Parchet. Sensoria explores the intersection of art, science and the senses, bringing together an international network of artists: Guy van Belle, Roberta Buiani, Lorella Di Cintio, Grace Grothaus, Kavi, Hrysovalanti Maheras, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Michael Palumbo, Michaela Pnacekova, Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris. Sited concurrently in both Poland and Toronto, the exhibition will explore the dissociative potential of contemporary technologies on the senses, treating it not only as a social crisis but also an opportunity for creative play and experimentation. It aims to engage a conversation about the senses from the perspective of art, but also science, incorporating artists that straddle the boundaries of knowledge production in a variety of ways.
The symposium leverages the exhibition content as the starting point for more in-depth conversation about the connective aesthetics of everyday sensing and the knowledge-creation potential of artists and scientists collaborating in innovative ways. The socio-political turbulences we have experienced worldwide during the last decade have created unprecedented social and personal strife. While connections are sustained now amongst virtual networks that straddle vast spaces, how might we consider the sharing of intimate senses through smell, touch, and bodily movement as a form of mutual support? The symposium explores questions such as these with keynote presentations by Ryszard Khuszcynsk [Kluszcynski]i, Chris Salter and David Howse, as well as roundtables between artists and scientists: Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Rasa Smite, Katarzyna Pastuszak, Grace Grothaus, Katarzyna Sloboda, Hilda Kosari [Kozari], Agnieszka Sorokowska, Hrysovalanti Maheras, Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris. All aspects of the symposium will be presented with virtual components, so as to allow both in-person engagement in Toronto and virtual presence in Gdansk and elsewhere.
The event will be complemented by a workshop byCsenge Kolozsvari. Kolozsvari’s Schizo-Somatic Session brings together somatic practices (crawling side by side, drawing, moving with bags full of water, walking backwards, playing with breath, touching textures, voicing etc.) with the concept of the schiz, cut, or interval, following philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus. The aim is to build practices that do not presuppose where bodies begin and end, and to agitate the habitual narratives of bodily borders and edges as solid and knowable.
Csenge Kolozsvari’s performance The Power of the Spill is a multidisciplinary live performance working at the intersection of digital and imaginary technologies. It uses live video feedback, algorithmic processes of image (Hydra), sound as well as a movement-choreography informed by somatic practices. This project is a study on visual perception and how it affects our ways of making sense of the world, aiming to create an alternative lens that acknowledges the vitality of objects, a topology that is cross-species, the ways seemingly separate entities are in constant exchange, towards a more ecological way of being. The performance is in collaboration with Kieran Maraj, with original live coding by Rodrigo Velasco. Performance will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.
Doug Van Nort’s performance The Telematic Orchestra
The sense of touch (or tactility) is not highlighted in the image for the poster but there are some workshops which incorporate that sense.
I apologize for the redundancies and for not correcting or noting the errors in the various texts and with people’s names.
One final note, York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technologies was last mentioned here in an October 26, 2020 posting about an ArtSci Salon event.
In addition to the June 22 – July 16, 2022 exhibition in Toronto (These are a Few of Our Favourite Bees) highlighted in my June 14, 2022 posting, the ArtSci Salon has sent a June 20, 2022 announcement (received via email) about two events taking place for the first time in venues outside of Toronto,
IN VANCOUVER
A LIGHT FOOTPRINT IN THE COSMOS
SYMPOSIUM, EXHIBITIONS, PERFORMANCES, AND SCREENINGS
JUNE 24 – 27, 2022 | IN-PERSON AND ONLINE DJAVAD MOWAFAGHIAN WORLD ART CENTRE SFU GOLDCORP CENTRE FOR ARTS, 149 W. HASTINGS ST., VANCOUVER AND OTHER VENUES
REGISTRATION ON A SLIDING FEE SCALE. IN-PERSON REGISTRATION INCLUDES CATERED LUNCHES AND COFFEE BREAKS AND ADMISSION TO PERFORMANCES AND SCREENINGS.
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A Light Footprint in the Cosmos is a celebration of research methods and intercultural dialogue elaborated by the Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN).
Inspired by 17th–century Persian process philosopher Sadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, Azadeh Emadi and Laura U. Marks founded SMRN in 2018 for scholars and practitioners interested in cross-cultural exploration of digital media, art and philosophy. Sadra famously stated that each individual is “a multiplicity of continuous forms, unified by the essential movement itself,” which describes how SMRN’s members inform each other’s practice and how those practices weave across artistic and scholarly work. Our collective method unfolds hidden connections: researching histories of media in world cultures, tracing paths of transmission, seeking models for media in world philosophies, studying vernacular practices, cultivating cultural openness, developing hunches, building imaginative and fabulative connections, and diagramming the processes of unfolding and enfolding. We fold South, Central, and East Asian, Persian, Arab, North and sub-Saharan African and African diaspora, Eastern European, and global Indigenous practices into contemporary media and thought. Our light footprint lies in seeking appropriate technological solutions, often from non-Western and traditional practices, to contemporary overbuilt digital infrastructures.
Celebrating the substantial motion of thought and/as creative practice, A Light Footprint in the Cosmos will feature presentations by 60 scholars and artists, delivered both online and in person, at the acoustically sophisticated performance venue Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre.
The exhibitions, performances, and curated film screenings are integral to the event. We are delighted to present exhibitions of works of 17 artists, curated by Nina Czegledy and hosted by Vancouver contemporary art venues Or Gallery and Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and Studio T at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. The artworks explore, via a wide variety of analogue and digital media, the global circulation and connectivity of theories and technologies, addressing both historical inspirations and contemporary issues. They illuminate hidden connections and reveal diverse yet complementary concepts and practices. The musical performances literally draw breath from deep cultural sources. SMRN’s methods extend into the curated screenings Cinema of Breath: Rapture, Rupture and Cosmological Diagrams.
A Light Footprint in the Cosmos affirms the substantial movement of thought and practice by seeking to stage dialogues, provoke discussion and spark new collaborations in order to decolonize media studies, art history and aesthetics.
IN VENICE (ITA)
Emergent [emphasis mine]
a post pandemic mobile gallery
Part 1
Megachile Alienus Sala Camino Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa Venezia
June 22-25, 2022
Opening June 22, 18:30 …
Emergent is a mobile gallery featuring collaborations across the sciences and the arts. Its goal is to better comprehend and cope with the emergence, survival, and adaptation of life due to climate change and global mobility, laboratory manipulations and world making.
Emergent is a porous object: it encourages reflections across different experiences and sites of divergence through and with the arts; it may reach new human and non-human audiences, and have a transformative effect on the places it visits.
Emergent is a postpandemic gallery interrogating the role of exhibition spaces today. What possible experiences, what new dialogues could a redesign of the gallery as a living, breathing entity foster?
Emergent was Designed and executed by Roberta Buiani Lorella Di Cintio Ilze Briede [Kavi]
Fabrication: Rick Quercia
Megachile Alienus is an Installation by Cole Swanson
Scientific collaboration: Laurence Packer
Fabrication for installation: Jacob Sun
Thanks to: Alessandro Marletta Anna Lisa Manini
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Steven Baris, Never the Same Space Twice D29 (oil on Mylar, 24 x 24 inches, 2022). [downloaded from https://www.sfu.ca/sca/events—news/events/a-light-footprint-in-the-cosmos.html?mc_cid=f826643d70&mc_eid=584e4ad9fa]
My September 26, 2021 Art/Sci Salon notice (received via email) provides these details,
Naturalization = The ecological phenomenon in which a species, taxon, or population of exotic (as opposed to native) origin integrates into a given ecosystem, becoming capable of reproducing and growing in it, and proceeds to disseminate spontaneously. In some instances, the presence of a species in a given ecosystem is so ancient that it cannot be presupposed whether it is native or introduced How does adaptation through naturalization occur? What happens to the native population? How does coexistence happen?
Our first event will revolve around the Solanum Melongena, a plant species in the nightshade family Solanaceae commonly known as the eggplant. This plant (and the many different names it goes by Aubergine, Melanzana, Brinjal, Berenjena, باذنجان, vânătă, 茄子,بادمجان) uncertain origins, grown worldwide for its edible fruit. Eggplants exist in many shapes, sizes and colors.
Our event will be a harvest potluck, with dialogues, storytelling, and exchanges about and beyond food. Our guests will engage in creative interventions to reflect on the many ways food, and food mobility affects all sentient beings, both humans and non-humans; peoples and civilizations; individuals’ health and collective traditions. Food is nourishment, care, medicine, and art. Food is political. Food is ultimately about our survival.
This is the first of a series of networked meals titled “FOLLOW THE SPREAD,” which will be staged around the world and across time zones throughout Fall 2021-Spring 2022 in Canada (October 3, Spring 2022), Norway (October 7), the Netherlands and Taiwan (Spring 2022).
Join us online to meet 10 Canadian artists and scholars as they launch the series in Toronto and engage in a nourishing and inspiring feast
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Amira Alamary TBA
Antje Budde Antje Budde is a conceptual, queer-feminist, interdisciplinary experimental scholar-artist and an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies, Cultural Communication and Modern Chinese Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. Antje has created multi-disciplinary artistic works in Germany, China and Canada and works tri-lingually in German, English and Mandarin. She is the founder of a number of queerly feminist performing art projects including most recently the (DDL)2 or (Digital Dramaturgy Lab)Squared – a platform for experimental explorations of digital culture, creative labor, integration of arts and science, and technology in performance. She is interested in the intersections of natural sciences, the arts, engineering and computer science.
Charmaine Lurch Charmaine Lurch is a multidisciplinary artist whose painting, sculpture, and social engagement reveal the intricacies and complexities of the relationships between us and our environments. Her sculptures, installations, and interventions produce enchantment as she skillfully contends with what is visible and present in conjunction with what remains unsaid or unnoticed. Lurch applies her experience in community arts and education to create inviting entry points into overwhelmingly complex and urgent racial, ecological, and historical reckonings.
Lurch’s work contends with both spatiality and temporality, enchanting her subject matter with multiple possibilities for engagement. This can be seen in the interplay between light, wire, and space in her intricate wire sculptures of bees and pollen grains, and in what scholar Tiffany Lethabo King refers to as the “open edgelessness” of Sycorax. A sensuous dynamism belies the everyday tasks reflected in her charcoal-on-parchment series Being, Belonging and Grace. Lurch’s particular evocations and explorations of space and time invite an analysis of their own, and her work has been engaged with by academics. These include King, who chose Sycorax Gesture, a charcoal illustration for the cover of her book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, in which King discusses Lurch’s work in depth. Scholar Katherine McKittrick both inserted and engaged with Lurch’s work in her latest notable book, Dear Science & Other Stories.
Dave Kemp Dave Kemp is a visual artist whose practice looks at the intersections and interactions between art, science and technology: particularly at how these fields shape our perception and understanding of the world. His artworks have been exhibited widely at venues such as at the McIntosh Gallery, The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Mississauga, The Ontario Science Centre, York Quay Gallery, Interaccess, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, and as part of the Switch video festival in Nenagh, Ireland. His works are also included in the permanent collections of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Canada Council Art Bank.
Dolores Steinman Dolores Steinman is a trained pediatrician who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She is very active in several Art/Science communities locally and internationally.
Elaine Whittaker Elaine Whittaker is a Canadian visual artist working at the intersection of art, science, medicine, and ecology. She considers biology as contemporary art practice and as the basis for her installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings, and digital images. Whittaker has exhibited in art and science galleries and museums in Canada, France, Italy, UK, Ireland, Latvia, China, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, and the U.S. Artwork created as Artist-in-Residence with the Pelling Laboratory for Augmented Biology (University of Ottawa) was exhibited in La Fabrique du Vivant at the Pompidou Centre, Paris in 2019. She was one of the first Artists-in-Residence with the Ontario Science Centre in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. Her work has also been featured in art, literary, and medical magazines, and books, including Bio Art: Altered Realities by William Myers (2015).
Elizabeth Littlejohn Elizabeth Littlejohn is a communications professor, human rights activist, photojournalist, and documentary film-maker. She has written for Rabble.ca for the past thirteen years on social movements, sustainable urban planning, and climate change. As a running gun social movement videographer, she has filmed internationally. Her articles, photojournalism, and videos have documented Occupy, Idle No More, and climate change movements, and her photographs have been printed in NOW Magazine, the Toronto Star, and Our Times.
Recently Elizabeth Littlejohn has completed ‘The City Island’, a feature-length documentary she directed about the razing of homes on the Toronto Islands and the islanders’ stewardship of the park system, with the support of the Canada Council. Currently, Elizabeth is developing the Toronto Island Puzzle Tour, an augmented-reality smartphone application with five locales depicting hidden history of the Toronto Island, and funded by the City of Toronto’s Artworx Grant.
Gita Hashemi Gita Hashemi works in visual and performance art, digital and net art, and language-based art including live embodied writing, and in publishing. Her transdisciplinary, multi-platform and often site-responsive projects explore historical, trans-border and marginalized narratives and their traces in contemporary contexts. She has received numerous project grants from Canadian arts councils, and won awards from Toronto Community Foundation, Baddeck International New Media Festival, American Ad Federation, and Ontario Association of Art Galleries among others. Hashemi is an Ontario Heritage Trust’s Doris McCarthy Artist in Residence in 2021 with a land-based project. Her work has been exhibited at many international venues including SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles; Center for Book Arts, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Plug-In, Basel; Casoria Museum of Contemporary Art, Naples; Al Kahf Art Gallery, Bethlehem; Red House Centre for Culture, Sofia; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Yucatan, Merida; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Worth Ryder Gallery, Berkeley; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Santa Fe, Argentina; Museum of Movements, Malmo; and JolibaZWO, Berlin among others. In Canada her work has been presented at A Space Gallery, York Quay Gallery, YYZ, MAI, and Carlton University Art Gallery. She has exhibited in numerous festivals including Electroshock, France; VI Salon y coloquio internacional de art digital, Havana; New Media Art Festival, Bangkok; Biennale of Electronic Art, Perth; and New Music and Art Festival, Bowling Green and others.
Nina Czegledy Toronto based artist, curator, educator, works internationally on collaborative art, science & technology projects. The changing perception of the human body and its environment, as well as paradigm shifts in the arts, inform her projects. She has exhibited and published widely, won awards for her artwork and has initiated, led and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide at international events.
Roberta Buiani Artistic Director of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto). Her artistic work has travelled to art festivals (Transmediale; Hemispheric Institute Encuentro; Brazil), community centers and galleries (the Free Gallery Toronto; Immigrant Movement International, Queens, Museum of Toronto), and scientific institutions (RPI; the Fields Institute). She is a research associate at the Centre for Feminist Research and a Scholar in Residence at Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, at York University.
Tune in on Oct 3 [2021] at 10:30 AM EDT; 4:30 PM CET; 10:30 PM CST [Note: For those of us on the West Coast, that will 7:30 am PDT]
Toronto’s (Canada) Art/Sci Salon (also known as, Art Science Salon) sent me an August 26, 2021 announcement (received via email) of an online show with a limited viewing period (BTW, nice play on words with the title echoing the name of the institution mentioned in the first sentence),
PROXIMAL FIELDS
The Fields Institute was closed to the public for a long time. Yet, it has not been empty. Peculiar sounds and intriguing silences, the flows of the few individuals and the janitors occasional visiting the building made it surprisingly alive. Microorganisms, dust specs and other invisible guests populated undisturbed the space while the humans were away. The building is alive. We created site specific installations reflecting this condition: Elaine Whittaker and her poet collaborators take us to a journey of the microbes living in our proximal spaces. Joel Ong and his collaborators have recorded space data in the building: the result is an emergent digital organism. Roberta Buiani and Kavi interpret the venue as an organism which can be taken outside on a mobile gallery.
PROXIMAL FIELDS will be visible September 8-12 2021 at
With: Elaine Whittaker, Joel Ong, Nina Czegledy, Roberta Buiani, Sachin Karghie, Ryan Martin, Racelar Ho, Kavi. Poetry: Maureen Hynes, Sheila Stewart
Video: Natalie Plociennik
This event is one of many such events being held for Ars Electronica 2021 festival.
For anyone who remembers back to my May 3, 2021 posting (scroll down to the relevant subhead; a number of events were mentioned), I featured a show from the ArtSci Salon community called ‘Proximal Spaces’, a combined poetry reading and bioart experience.
Many of the same artists and poets seem to have continued working together to develop more work based on the ‘proximal’ for a larger international audience.
International and local scene details (e.g., same show? what is Ars Electronica? etc.)
As you may have noticed from the announcement, there are a lot of different institutions involved.
Local: Fields Institute and ArtSci Salon
The Fields Institute is properly known as The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences and is located at the University of Toronto. Here’s more from their About Us webpage,
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Founded in 1992, the Fields Institute was initially located at the University of Waterloo. Since 1995, it has occupied a purpose-built building on the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto.
The Institute is internationally renowned for strengthening collaboration, innovation, and learning in mathematics and across a broad range of disciplines. …
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The Fields Institute is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields (1863-1932). Fields was a pioneer and visionary who recognized the scientific, educational, and economic value of research in the mathematical sciences. Fields spent many of his early years in Berlin and, to a lesser extent, in Paris and Göttingen, the principal mathematical centres of Europe of that time. These experiences led him, after his return to Canada, to work for the public support of university research, which he did very successfully. He also organized and presided over the 1924 meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto. This quadrennial meeting was, and still is, the major meeting of the mathematics world.
There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and Fields felt strongly that there should be a comparable award to recognize the most outstanding current research in mathematics. With this in mind, he established the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, which, contrary to his personal directive, is now known as the Fields Medal. Information on Fields Medal winners can be found through the International Mathematical Union, which chooses the quadrennial recipients of the prize.
Fields’ name was given to the Institute in recognition of his seminal contributions to world mathematics and his work on behalf of high level mathematical scholarship in Canada. The Institute aims to carry on the work of Fields and to promote the wider use and understanding of mathematics in Canada.
The relationship between the Fields Institute and the ArtSci Salon is unclear to me. This can be found under Programs and Activities on the Fields Institute website,
2020-2021 ArtSci Salon
Description
ArtSci Salon consists of a series of semi-informal gatherings facilitating discussion and cross-pollination between science, technology, and the arts. ArtSci Salon started in 2010 as a spin-off of Subtle Technologies Festival to satisfy increasing demands by the audience attending the Festival to have a more frequent (monthly or bi-monthly) outlet for debate and information sharing across disciplines. In addition, it responds to the recent expansion in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] area of a community of scientists and artists increasingly seeking collaborations across disciplines to successfully accomplish their research projects and questions.
We are pleased to announce our upcoming March 2021 events (more details are in the schedule below):
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Ars Electronica
It started life as a Festival for Art, Technology and Society in 1979 in Linz, Austria. Here’s a little more from their About webpage,
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… Since September 18, 1979, our world has changed radically, and digitization has covered almost all areas of our lives. Ars Electronica’s philosophy has remained the same over the years. Our activities are always guided by the question of what new technologies mean for our lives. Together with artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists, we shed light on current developments in our digital society and speculate about their manifestations in the future. We never ask what technology can or will be able to do, but always what it should do for us. And we don’t try to adapt to technology, but we want the development of technology to be oriented towards us. Therefore, our artistic research always focuses on ourselves, our needs, our desires, our feelings.
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They have a number of initiatives in addition to the festival. The next festival, A New Digital Deal, runs from September 8 – 12, 2021 (Ars Electronica 2021). Here’s a little more from the festival webpage,
Ars Electronica 2021, the festival for art, technology and society, will take place from September 8 to 12. For the second time since 1979, it will be a hybrid event that includes exhibitions, concerts, talks, conferences, workshops and guided tours in Linz, Austria, and more than 80 other locations around the globe.
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Leonardo; The International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology
Ars Electronica and Leonardo; The International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) cooperate on projects but they are two different entities. Here’s more from the About LEONARDO webpage,
Fearlessly pioneering since 1968, Leonardo serves as THE community forging a transdisciplinary network to convene, research, collaborate, and disseminate best practices at the nexus of arts, science and technology worldwide. Leonardo’ serves a network of transdisciplinary scholars, artists, scientists, technologists and thinkers, who experiment with cutting-edge, new approaches, practices, systems and solutions to tackle the most complex challenges facing humanity today.
As a not-for-profit 501(c)3 enterprising think tank, Leonardo offers a global platform for creative exploration and collaboration reaching tens of thousands of people across 135 countries. Our flagship publication, Leonardo, the world’s leading scholarly journal on transdisciplinary art, anchors a robust publishing partnership with MIT Press; our partnership with ASU [Arizona State University] infuses educational innovation with digital art and media for lifelong learning; our creative programs span thought-provoking events, exhibits, residencies and fellowships, scholarship and social enterprise ventures.
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I have a description of Leonardo’s LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous), from my March 22, 2021 posting (the Garden comes up next),
“… a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of LASER is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building.”
To be specific it’s Ars Electronica Garden LEONARDO LASER and this is one of the series being held as part of the festival (A Digital New Deal). Here’s more from the [Anti]disciplinary Topographies ‘garden’ webpage,
Culturing transnational dialogue for creative hybridity
Leonardo LASER Garden gathers our global network of artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together in a series of hybrid formats addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Animated by the theme of a “new digital deal” and grounded in the UN Sustainability Goals, Leonardo LASER Garden cultivates our values of equity and inclusion by elevating underrepresented voices in a wide-ranging exploration of global challenges, digital communities and placemaking, space, networks and systems, the digital divide – and the impact of interdisciplinary art, science and technology discourse and collaboration.
Dovetailing with the launch of LASER Linz, this asynchronous multi-platform garden will highlight the best of the Leonardo Network (spanning 47 cities worldwide) and our transdisciplinary community. In “Extraordinary Times Call for Extraordinary Vision: Humanizing Digital Culture with the New Creativity Agenda & the UNSDGs [United Nations Sustainable Development Goals],” Leonardo/ISAST CEO Diana Ayton-Shenker presents our vision for shaping our global future. This will be followed by a Leonardo Community Lounge open to the general public, with the goal of encouraging contributions to the cultural environments of different regions through transnational exchange and community building.
Getting back to the beginning you can view Proximal Fields from September 8 – 12, 2021 as part of the Ars Electonica 2021 festival, specifically, the ‘garden’ series.
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.
Plans for last year’s FACTT (Festival of Art and Science) 2020 had to be revised at the last minute due to COVID-19. This year, organizers were prepared so no in person sessions have to be cancelled or turned into virtual events. Here’s more from the Jan. 25, 2021 announcement I received (via email) from one of the festival partners, the ArtSci Salon at the University of Toronto,
Join us! Opening of FACTT 20-21 Improbable Times!
Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 3:30 PM EST – 5:30 PM EST Public · Anyone on or off Facebook – link will be disseminated closer to the event.
The Arte Institute and the RHI Initiative, in partnership with Cultivamos Cultura, have the pleasure to present the FACTT 2021 – Festival Art & Science. The festival opens on January 28, at 8.30 PM (GMT), and will be exhibited online on RHI Stage.
This year we are reshaping FACTT! Come join us for the kick-off of this amazing project!
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, Arte+Ciência and Bioscenica (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!
FACTT 20/21 – Improbable Times presents a series of exceptional artworks jointly curated by Cultivamos Cultura and our partners. The challenge of a translation from the physical space that artworks occupy typically, into an exhibition that lives as a hybrid experience, involves rethinking the materiality of the work itself. It also questions whether we can live and interact with each other remotely and in person producing creative effective collaborative outcomes to immerse ourselves in. Improbable Times brings together a collection of works that reflect the times we live in, the constraints we are faced with, the drive to rethink what tomorrow may bring us, navigate it and build a better future, beyond borders.
January 28, 2021 | 8:30 PM (GMT)Program: – Introduction – Performance Toronto: void * ambience : Latency, with Joel Ong, Michael Palumbo and Kavi – Performance Mexico “El Tercero Cuerpo Sonoro” (Third Sonorous Body), by Arte+Ciência. – Q&A
The performance series void * ambience experiments with sound and video content that is developed through a focus on the topographies and networks through which these flow. Initiated during the time of COVID and social distancing, this project explores processes of information sharing, real-time performance and network communication protocols that contribute to the sustenance of our digital communities, shared experiences and telematic intimacies.
“El Tercero Cuerpo Sonoro” project is a digital drift that explores different relationships with the environment, nature, humans and non-humans from the formulation of an intersubjective body. Its main search is to generate resonances with and among the others.
In these complicated times in which it seems that our existence unfolds in front of the screen, confined to the space of the black mirror, it becomes urgent to challenge the limits and scopes of digital life. We need to rethink the way in which we inhabit the others as well as our own subjectivity.
Program: – Introduction – Performance Toronto: Proximal Spaces Artistic Directors: Joel Ong, Elaine Whittaker Graphic Designer: Natalie Plociennik Bhavesh Kakwani AR [augmented reality] development : Sachin Khargie, Ryan Martin Bioartists: Roberta Buiani, Nathalie Dubois Calero, Sarah Choukah, Nicole Clouston, Jess Holtz, Mick Lorusso, Maro Pebo, Felipe Shibuya – Performance Mexico Tercero Cuerpo Sonoro (Third Sonorous Body) by Arte+Ciência
FACTT team: Marta de Menezes, Suzanne Anker, Maria Antonia Gonzalez Valerio, Roberta Buiani, Jo Wei, Dalila Honorato, Joel Ong, Lena Lee and Minerva Ortiz.
For FACTT20/21 we propose to put together an exhibition where the virtual and the physical share space, a space that is hybrid from its conception, a space that desires to break the limits of access to culture, to collaboration, to the experience of art. A place where we can think deeply and creatively together about the adaptive moves we had and have to develop to the rapid and sudden changes our lives and environment are going through.
The ArtSci Salon is getting quite active these days. Here’s the latest from an Oct. 22, 2020 ArtSci Salon announcement (received via email), which can also be viewed on their Kaleidoscope event page,
Kaleidoscopic Imaginations
Performing togetherness in empty spaces
An experimental collaboration between the ArtSci Salon, the Digital Dramaturgy Lab_squared/ DDL2 and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
7:30 pm [EDT]
Join our evening of live-streamed, multi-media performances, following a kaleidoscopic dramaturgy of complexity discourses as inspired by computational complexity theory gatherings.
We are presenting installations, site-specific artistic interventions and media experiments, featuring networked audio and video, dance and performances as we repopulate spaces – The Fields Institute and surroundings – forced to lie empty due to the pandemic. Respecting physical distance and new sanitation and safety rules can be challenging, but it can also open up new ideas and opportunities.
NOTE: DDL2 contributions to this event are sourced or inspired by their recent kaleidoscopic performance “Rattling the the Curve – Paradoxical ECODATA performances of A/I (artistic intelligence), and facial recognition of humans and trees
Virtual space/live streaming concept and design: DDL2 Antje Budde, Karyn McCallum and Don Sinclair
Virtual space and streaming pilot: Don Sinclair
Here are specific programme details (from the announcement),
Signing the Virus – Video (2 min.) Collaborators: DDL2 Antje Budde, Felipe Cervera, Grace Whiskin
Niimi II – – Performance and outdoor video projection (15 min.) (Nimii means in Anishinaabemowin: s/he dances) Collaborators: DDL2 Candy Blair, Antje Budde, Jill Carter, Lars Crosby, Nina Czegledy, Dave Kemp
Oracle Jane (Scene 2) – A partial playreading on the politics of AI (30 min.) Playwright: DDL2 Oracle Collaborators: DDL2 Antje Budde, Frans Robinow, George Bwannika Seremba, Amy Wong and AI ethics consultant Vicki Zhang
Vriksha/Tree – Dance video and outdoor projection (8 min.) Collaborators: DDL2 Antje Budde, Lars Crosby, Astad Deboo, Dave Kemp, Amit Kumar
Facial Recognition – Performing a Plate Camera from a Distance (3 min.) Collaborators: DDL2 Antje Budde, Jill Carter, Felipe Cervera, Nina Czegledy, Karyn McCallum, Lars Crosby, Martin Kulinna, Montgomery C. Martin, George Bwanika Seremba, Don Sinclair, Heike Sommer
Cutting Edge – Growing Data (6 min.) DDL2 A performance by Antje Budde
“void * ambience” – Architectural and instrumental acoustics, projection mapping Concept: Sensorium: The Centre for Digital Art and Technology, York University Collaborators: Michael Palumbo, Ilze Briede [Kavi], Debashis Sinha, Joel Ong
This performance is part of a series (from the announcement),
These three performances are part of Boundary-Crossings: Multiscalar Entanglements in Art, Science and Society, a public Outreach program supported by the Fiends [sic] Institute for Research in Mathematical Science. Boundary Crossings is a series exploring how the notion of boundaries can be transcended and dissolved in the arts and the humanities, the biological and the mathematical sciences, as well as human geography and political economy. Boundaries are used to establish delimitations among disciplines; to discriminate between the human and the non-human (body and technologies, body and bacteria); and to indicate physical and/or artificial boundaries, separating geographical areas and nation states. Our goal is to cross these boundaries by proposing new narratives to show how the distinctions, and the barriers that science, technology, society and the state have created can in fact be re-interpreted as porous and woven together.
This event is curated and produced by ArtSci Salon; Digital Dramaturgy Lab_squared/ DDL2; Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, York University; and Ryerson University; it is supported by The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences
Finally, the announcement includes biographical information about all of the ‘boundary-crossers’,
Candy Blair (Tkaron:to/Toronto) Candy Blair/Otsίkh:èta (they/them) is a mixed First Nations/European, 2-spirit interdisciplinary visual and performing artist from Tio’tía:ke – where the group split (“Montreal”) in Québec.
While continuing their work as an artist they also finished their Creative Arts, Literature, and Languages program at Marianopolis College (cégep), their 1st year in the Theatre program at York University, and their 3rd year Acting Conservatory Program at the Centre For Indigenous Theatre in Tsí Tkaròn:to – Where the trees stand in water (Toronto”).
Some of Candy’s noteable performances are Jill Carter’s Encounters at the Edge of the Woods, exploring a range of issues with colonization; Ange Loft’s project Talking Treaties, discussing the treaties of the “Toronto” purchase; Cheri Maracle’s The Story of Six Nations, exploring Six Nation’s origin story through dance/combat choreography, and several other performances, exploring various topics around Indigenous language, land, and cultural restoration through various mediums such as dance, modelling, painting, theatre, directing, song, etc. As an activist and soon to be entrepreneur, Candy also enjoys teaching workshops around promoting Indigenous resurgence such as Indigenous hand drumming, food sovereignty, beading, medicine knowledge, etc..
Working with their collectives like Weave and Mend, they were responsible for the design, land purification, and installation process of the four medicine plots and a community space with their 3 other members. Candy aspires to continue exploring ways of decolonization through healthy traditional practices from their mixed background and the arts in the hopes of eventually supporting Indigenous relations worldwide.
Antje Budde Antje Budde is a conceptual, queer-feminist, interdisciplinary experimental scholar-artist and an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies, Cultural Communication and Modern Chinese Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. Antje has created multi-disciplinary artistic works in Germany, China and Canada and works tri-lingually in German, English and Mandarin. She is the founder of a number of queerly feminist performing art projects including most recently the (DDL)2 or (Digital Dramaturgy Lab)Squared – a platform for experimental explorations of digital culture, creative labor, integration of arts and science, and technology in performance. She is interested in the intersections of natural sciences, the arts, engineering and computer science.
Roberta Buiani Roberta Buiani (MA; PhD York University) is the Artistic Director of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto). Her artistic work has travelled to art festivals (Transmediale; Hemispheric Institute Encuentro; Brazil), community centres and galleries (the Free Gallery Toronto; Immigrant Movement International, Queens, Myseum of Toronto), and science institutions (RPI; the Fields Institute). Her writing has appeared on Space and Culture, Cultural Studies and The Canadian Journal of Communication_among others. With the ArtSci Salon she has launched a series of experiments in “squatting academia”, by re-populating abandoned spaces and cabinets across university campuses with SciArt installations.
Currently, she is a research associate at the Centre for Feminist Research and a Scholar in Residence at Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University [Toronto, Ontario, Canada].
Jill Carter (Tkaron:to/ Toronto) Jill (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) is a theatre practitioner and researcher, currently cross appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies; the Transitional Year Programme; and Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. She works with many members of Tkaron:to’s Indigenous theatre community to support the development of new works and to disseminate artistic objectives, process, and outcomes through community- driven research projects. Her scholarly research, creative projects, and activism are built upon ongoing relationships with Indigenous Elders, Artists and Activists, positioning her as witness to, participant in, and disseminator of oral histories that speak to the application of Indigenous aesthetic principles and traditional knowledge systems to contemporary performance.The research questions she pursues revolve around the mechanics of story creation, the processes of delivery and the manufacture of affect.
More recently, she has concentrated upon Indigenous pedagogical models for the rehearsal studio and the lecture hall; the application of Indigenous [insurgent] research methods within performance studies; the politics of land acknowledgements; and land – based dramaturgies/activations/interventions.
Jill also works as a researcher and tour guide with First Story Toronto; facilitates Land Acknowledgement, Devising, and Land-based Dramaturgy Workshops for theatre makers in this city; and performs with the Talking Treaties Collective (Jumblies Theatre, Toronto).
In September 2019, Jill directed Encounters at the Edge of the Woods. This was a devised show, featuring Indigenous and Settler voices, and it opened Hart House Theatre’s 100th season; it is the first instance of Indigenous presence on Hart House Theatre’s stage in its 100 years of existence as the cradle for Canadian theatre.
Nina Czegledy (Toronto) artist, curator, educator, works internationally on collaborative art, science & technology projects. The changing perception of the human body and its environment as well as paradigm shifts in the arts inform her projects. She has exhibited and published widely, won awards for her artwork and has initiated, lead and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide at international events.
Astad Deboo (Mumbai, India) Astad Deboo is a contemporary dancer and choreographer who employs his training in Indian classical dance forms of Kathak as well as Kathakali to create a dance form that is unique to him. He has become a pioneer of modern dance in India. Astad describes his style as “contemporary in vocabulary and traditional in restraints.” Throughout his long and illustrious career, he has worked with various prominent performers such as Pina Bausch, Alis on Becker Chase and Pink Floyd and performed in many parts of the world. He has been awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1996) and Padma Shri (2007), awarded by the Government of India. In January 2005 along with 12 young women with hearing impairment supported by the Astad Deboo Dance Foundation, he performed at the 20th Annual Deaf Olympics at Melbourne, Australia. Astad has a long record of working with disadvantaged youth.
Ilze Briede [Kavi] Ilze Briede [artist name: Kavi] is a Latvian/Canadian artist and researcher with broad and diverse interests. Her artistic practice, a hybrid of video, image and object making, investigates the phenomenon of perception and the constraints and boundaries between the senses and knowing. Kavi is currently pursuing a PhD degree in Digital Media at York University with a research focus on computational creativity and generative art. She sees computer-generated systems and algorithms as a potentiality for co-creation and collaboration between human and machine. Kavi has previously worked and exhibited with Fashion Art Toronto, Kensington Market Art Fair, Toronto Burlesque Festival, Nuit Blanche, Sidewalk Toronto and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Dave Kemp Dave Kemp is a visual artist whose practice looks at the intersections and interactions between art, science and technology: particularly at how these fields shape our perception and understanding of the world. His artworks have been exhibited widely at venues such as at the McIntosh Gallery, The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Mississauga, The Ontario Science Centre, York Quay Gallery, Interaccess, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, and as part of the Switch video festival in Nenagh, Ireland. His works are also included in the permanent collections of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Canada Council Art Bank.
Stephen Morris Stephen Morris is Professor of experimental non-linear Physics in the faculty of Physics at the University of Toronto. He is the scientific Director of the ArtSci salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. He often collaborates with artists and has himself performed and produced art involving his own scientific instruments and experiments in non-linear physics and pattern formation
Michael Palumbo Michael Palumbo (MA, BFA) is an electroacoustic music improviser, coder, and researcher. His PhD research spans distributed creativity and version control systems, and is expressed through “git show”, a distributed electroacoustic music composition and design experiment, and “Mischmasch”, a collaborative modular synthesizer in virtual reality. He studies with Dr. Doug Van Nort as a researcher in the Distributed Performance and Sensorial Immersion Lab, and Dr. Graham Wakefield at the Alice Lab for Computational Worldmaking. His works have been presented internationally, including at ISEA, AES, NIME, Expo ’74, TIES, and the Network Music Festival. He performs regularly with a modular synthesizer, runs the Exit Points electroacoustic improvisation series, and is an enthusiastic gardener and yoga practitioner.
Joel Ong (PhD. Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS, University of Washington) Joel Ong is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment, particularly with respect to sound and physical space. Professor Ong’s work explores the way objects and spaces can function as repositories of ‘frozen sound’, and in elucidating these, he is interested in creating what systems theorist Jack Burnham (1968) refers to as “art (that) does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment”.
A serial collaborator, Professor Ong is invested in the broader scope of Art-Science collaborations and is engaged constantly in the discourses and processes that facilitate viewing these two polemical disciplines on similar ground. His graduate interdisciplinary work in nanotechnology and sound was conducted at SymbioticA, the Center of Excellence for Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia and supervised by BioArt pioneers and TCA (The Tissue Culture and Art Project) artists Dr Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts.
George Bwanika Seremba George Bwanika Seremba,is an actor, playwright and scholar. He was born in Uganda. George holds an M. Phil, and a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies, from Trinity College Dublin. In 1980, having barely survived a botched execution by the Military Intelligence, he fled into exile, resettling in Canada (1983). He has performed in numerous plays including in his own, “Come Good Rain”, which was awarded a Dora award (1993). In addition, he published a number of edited play collections including “Beyond the pale: dramatic writing from First Nations writers & writers of colour” co-edited by Yvette Nolan, Betty Quan, George Bwanika Seremba. (1996).
George was nominated for the Irish Times’ Best Actor award in Dublin’s Calypso Theatre’s for his role in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold and the boys”. In addition to theatre he performed in several movies and on television. His doctoral thesis (2008) entitled “Robert Serumaga and the Golden Age of Uganda’s Theatre (1968-1978): (Solipsism, Activism, Innovation)” will be published as a monograph by CSP (U.K) in 2021.
Don Sinclair (Toronto) Don is Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Arts at York University. His creative research areas include interactive performance, projections for dance, sound art, web and data art, cycling art, sustainability, and choral singing most often using code and programming. Don is particularly interested in processes of artistic creation that integrate digital creative coding-based practices with performance in dance and theatre. As well, he is an enthusiastic cyclist.
Debashis Sinha Driven by a deep commitment to the primacy of sound in creative expression, Debashis Sinha has realized projects in radiophonic art, music, sound art, audiovisual performance, theatre, dance, and music across Canada and internationally. Sound design and composition credits include numerous works for Peggy Baker Dance Projects and productions with Canada’s premiere theatre companies including The Stratford Festival, Soulpepper, Volcano Theatre, Young People’s Theatre, Project Humanity, The Theatre Centre, Nightwood Theatre, Why Not Theatre, MTC Warehouse and Necessary Angel. His live sound practice on the concert stage has led to appearances at MUTEK Montreal, MUTEK Japan, the Guelph Jazz Festival, the Banff Centre, The Music Gallery, and other venues. Sinha teaches sound design at York University and the National Theatre School, and is currently working on a multi-part audio/performance work incorporating machine learning and AI funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Vicki (Jingjing) Zhang (Toronto) Vicki Zhang is a faculty member at University of Toronto’s statistics department. She is the author of Uncalculated Risks (Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2014). She is also a playwright, whose plays have been produced or stage read in various festivals and venues in Canada including Toronto’s New Ideas Festival, Winnipeg’s FemFest, Hamilton Fringe Festival, Ergo Pink Fest, InspiraTO festival, Toronto’s Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT), Asper Center for Theatre and Film, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO), and the Canadian Play Thing. She has also written essays and short fiction for Rookie Magazine and Thread.
If you can’t attend this Oct. 27, 2020 event, there’s still the Oct. 29, 2020 Boundary-Crossings event: Beauty Kit (see my Oct. 12, 2020 posting for more).
As for Kaleidoscopic Imaginations, you can access the Streaming Link On Oct. 27, 2020 at 7:30 pm EDT (4 pm PDT).
My reference point for date and time is almost always Pacific Time (PT). Depending on which time zone you live in, the day and date I’ve listed here may be incorrect. For anyone who has difficulty figuring out which day and time the event will take place where they live, a search for ‘time zone converter’ on one of the search engines should prove helpful.
May 20, 2020 at 7:30 pm (UK time): Complicité’s The Encounter
I received this May 19, 2020 announcement from The Space via email,
Over 80,000 people have watched Complicité’s award-winning production of The Encounter online and now the recording has been made available again – for one week only – in this revival, supported by The Space. You can watch online via the website or YouTube channel [from15 May until 22 May 2020.].
🎧 Enjoy the binaural sound – Make sure you wear headphones in order to experience the show’s impressive binaural sound design – any headphone will work, but playing out of computer speakers will not give the same effect.
Join in a live Q&A – 20 May [2020] – A live discussion event and public Q&A will take place on Wednesday 20 May at 7:30pm (11:30 am PT) with Simon McBurney and guests including filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro (via a link to the Xingu region of the Amazon). Register to join the discussion.
In The Encounter, Director-performer Simon McBurney brings Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming to life on stage.
The show follows the journey of Loren McIntyre, a photographer who got lost in Brazil’s remote Javari Valley in 1969.
It uses live and recorded 3D sound, video projections and loop pedals to recreate the intense atmosphere of the rainforest.
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In the first live-streamed production ever to use 3D sound, viewers got the chance to experience the atmosphere of one of the strangest and most beautiful places on Earth – all through their headphones.
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Complicité is a UK-based touring theatre company known for its imaginative original productions and adaptations of classic books and plays, and its groundbreaking use of technology. The Encounter is directed and performed by Simon McBurney, co-director is Kirsty Housley.
Saturday, May 23, 2020 from 12 pm – 1:30 pm ET: Pandemic Encounters ::: being [together] in the deep third space
This May 19, 2020 announcement was received via email from the ArtSci Salon, one of the participants in this ‘encounter’, Note: I have made some changes to the formatting,
LEONARDO/ISAST and The Third Space Network announce the first Global LASER: Pandemic Encounters ::: being [together] in the deep third space on Saturday, May 23, 12-1:30pm EDT. This online performance installation is a creation of pioneering telematic artist Paul Sermon in collaboration with Randall Packer, Gregory Kuhn and the Third Space Network. (Locate your time zone)
Pandemic Encounters explores the implications of the migratory transition to the virtual space we are all experiencing. Even when we return to the so-called normal, we will be changed: when social interaction, human engagement, and being together will have undergone a radical transformation. In this new work, Paul Sermon performs as a live chroma-figure in a deep third space audio-visual networked environment, encountering pandemic spaces & action-performers from around the world – artists, musicians, dancers, media practitioners & scientists – a collective response to a global pandemic that has triggered an unfolding metamorphosis of the human condition.
action-performers: Annie Abrahams (France), Clarissa Ribeiro (Brazil), Roberta Buiani (Canada), Andrew Denton (New Zealand), Bhavani Esapathi (UK), Tania Fraga (Brazil), Satinder Gill (US), Birgitta Hosea (UK), Charles Lane (US), Ng Wen Lei (Singapore), Marilene Oliver (Canada), Serena Pang (Singapore), Daniel Pinheiro (Portugal), Olga Remneva (Russia), Toni Sant (UK), Rejane Spitz (Brazil), Atau Tanaka (UK)
The Third Space Network, created by Randall Packer, is an artist-driven Internet platform for staging creative dialogue, live performance and uncategorizable activisms: social empowerment through the act of becoming our own broadcast media.
Global LASER is a new series of networked events that bring together artists, scientists, and technologists in the creation of experimental forms of live Internet performance and creative dialogue.
Because I love the poster image for this event,
[downloaded from https://thirdspacenetwork.com/pandemic-encounters/]
