All posts by ninab

Improvisational Environments

News

 

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15 February – 8 March 2014 Matthews Center iStage, Synthesis Center
School of Arts, Media + Engineering
Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA

Purpose

The main scientific goal of this Residency is to gain insight into (1) temporal texture via simple relational (vs ego-centered) productions of correlated patterns over time, and (2) transitions in continuous, multivalent states and embodied agency.

The artful (and artfully precise) conditioning of experience is a means but not the end of this particular Synthesis residency.

The practical goals are to
(1) bring together some ensembles* that have advanced techniques to share with other experts, and
(2) carry out an experiment in improvisation using your apparatus while resident in the AME iStage blackbox which is being renovated.

The strategic goal and value for the Synthesis Center and the School of Arts, Media + Engineering is to host the building of an apparatus, which means not only equipment and software, but also people — students + faculty + technical staff — knowing how to keep using it in creation research beyond the workshop. (Participants from the Topological Media Lab will bear the main practical responsibility for leaving behind a working apparatus as a sibling to the Ozone responsive environments apparatus at Concordia, in order to facilitate subsequent research collaborations.)

Experts in the art and science of responsive environments will teach each other how to use some of the essential parts of our systems.
* An ensemble is a set of technology, people, and techniques : e.g. software frameworks, instruments, devices, plus practitioners, makers, researchers, employing techniques and approaches, all co-refined together working over several projects under a family of related artistic expressions, conceptual questions or philosophical investigations.

More infos : http://improvisationalenvironments.weebly.com/

Play As Inquiry

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This fall the Topological Media Lab participated to the Play as Inquiry event hosted at the Gray Center for Arts of the University of Chicago.

Play as Inquiry asks how artists & scholars might construe their practices as play. This 3-day practicum hosted by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry featured distinct and experimental approached to research and production in various fields including game design, transmedia installation, public health, choreography, political science, experimental writing, and anthropology.

It was an experimental practicum organized by PATRICK JAGODA game design & theory, U of C & SHA XIN WEI experimental phenomenology, Montreal, and featuring:

TOPOLOGICAL MEDIA LAB research Atelier-Lab at Concordia University, Montreal

ALKEMIE ATELIER multidisciplinary creative collaborative, Montreal

– Michael Montanaro:choreographer/media artist, Montreal

– Navid Navab: Media Artist, Interactive Sound Installations

– Julian Stein: Media Artist, Sound and Light Installations

– Adam Basanta: Media Artist, Sound and Light Installations

SETH BRODSKY musicologist, UofC

MICHAEL DAWSON political scientist, UofC

KEN EKLUND game designer/writer, CA

MELISSA GILLIAM game changer chicago design lab, UofC Medicine

GEORGE LEWIScomposer/scholar, Columbia U, NY

MICHAEL TAUSSIG anthropologist, Columbia U, NY

SARA THACHER experience designer, CA

MCKENZIE WARK media/critical theorist, New School, NY

 

About Play as Inquiry

Play as Inquiry was organized by Patrick Jagoda (faculty member in the Department of English and co-founder of Game Changer Chicago Design Lab at the University of Chicago), and Sha Xin Wei (Canada Research Chair in New Media, Associate Professor of Design & Computation Arts, and Research Director of the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University, Montreal) in association with Alkemie Atelier, a Montreal-based multidisciplinary creative collaborative. It served as culmination of their year-long Mellon Fellowship for Arts Practice & Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.

 

Schedule

Frid Nov 1

7-10:30p / play as inquiry: welcome event w/ Patrick Jagoda, Dr. Melissa Gilliam and the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab

Performance Penthouse Rm 901, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Chicago

Sat Nov 2

10–11a / speed-ideating w/ Sara Thacher

Gray Center Lab, 929 E. 60th St. (in Midway Studios next door to Logan Center)

11a-12p / playing with the future: collaborative narrative in authentic fiction w/ Ken Eklund Gray Center Lab, 929 E. 60th St. (in Midway Studios next door to Logan Center)12:15-1:30p / experimental writing workshop w/ McKenzie WarkGray Center Lab, 929 E. 60th St. (in Midway Studios next door to Logan Center)1:30-2:30p / lunchcan be purchased at the Logan Center Cafe

2:30–4p / foundings: a constitution building game w/ Michael Dawson
Performance Hall Stage, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Chicago

4:15-5:30p / listening + collaborating = improvising w/ George Lewis featuring even in arcadia, there i am, a sound installation by Seth Brodsky
Performance Hall Stage & North Stairwell, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Chicago

5:30-7:30p / dinner break

7:30–8:30p / go slow party, a reading by and w/ Michael Taussig

Gray Center Lab, 929 E. 60th St. (in Midway Studios next door to Logan Center)

8:30–10p / ice time candle time water time tissue time time alkemie & music for lamps, a performance installation by Sha Xin Wei & Alkemie Atelier
Gray Center Lab, 929 E. 60th St. (in Midway Studios next door to Logan Center)

Sun Nov 3

12-3:30p / REPLAY: an afternoon of responses via planned and spontaneous revelations of play inside research & production practices w/ Michael Montanaro & dancers Madeleine Krenek & Melinda Myers, University of Chicago faculty, independent artists, & practitioners of all kinds
Gray Center Lab, 929 E. 60th St. (in Midway Studios next door to Logan Center)

Time Forms: The temporalities of aesthetic experience

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When : September 19-21, 2013
Where: McGill University

This three day research-creation workshop explores the “when” of art, forms in time, and the ways time forms experience. For this event, we plan to contribute a few installations designed to poetically transmute your sense of dynamic, change, rhythm: an Umbrella quivering under a block of ice, a Candle whose flicker modulates the electric lamps around it, and time-conditioning instruments.

For more info about the schedule : http://timefor.ms/2013/

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/85376816[/vimeo]

 

TML Weekly campfire

News

campfire

Starting September 11th, the TML will be holding campfire meetings every tuesday at 4:30 to recapitulate the ongoing projects and to talk about the future ones. If you are interested in being a part of any of this years projects, the weekly campfires are a good way to get involve and to meet TML people. Feel free join us any week !

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/40887674[/vimeo]

TML OPEN HOUSE 2013

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When : October 9th, 2013
Where: 1515 St. Catherine West EV 7.725

The Topological Media Lab would like to invite you and your departments to come to our Open House on October 9th from 3 to 6pm, where our responsive environment will offer a peek at new experiments and installations happening in the lab. We will also be celebrating the launch of a new academic year and welcoming new students and TML affiliates. Refreshments will be provided. All are welcome!

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INVITATION : Practices of everyday life / cooking

News

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Showing on :

Monday July 8th; 3PM and Tuesday July 9th; 4PM

Location: Dance Black Box, Concordia University MB Building, 1450 Guy St. MB 7.265, Montreal, QC, H3G 2W1

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Dear friends and collegues,

We would like to invite you to a private showing of “Practices of Everyday Life: Cooking”. It is an interactive musical performance containing live and synthesized audio and video. However instead of witnessing zombie artistss performing on laptops, you will encounter an augmented kitchen table around which a chef cooks a delicious meal and in effect performs a concert.

On Tuesday July 9th at 4PM and Monday July8th 3PM come and experience the full piece in it’s current state in an informal private showing and leave us your feedback. The piece runs for about 40 minutes.

We have included more information and details about the performance down below if you wish to explore more.

Looking forward to seeing you soon,
Navid Navab, Jerome Delapierre, Michael Montanaro,Tony Chong

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Practices of Everyday Life: Cooking
A performance choreographed around a chef and sonified objects: fruit, vegetables, meat, knives, pots and pans, cutting board and table.Cooking*, the most ancient art of transmutation, has become over a quarter of a million years an unremarkable, domestic practice. But in this everyday practice, things perish, transform, nourish other things. Enchanting the fibers, meats, wood and metal with sound and painterly light, we stage a performance made from the moves(gestures) of cooking, scripted from the recipes of cuisine both high and humble. The performance features a dancer (Tony Chong) who is also a virtuosic chef who weilds foods, knives, pans and spices transmuted by gesture-tracking techniques into musical instruments.
Within our responsive scenography system, every cooking process is transformed into an environment thick with aroma, light, video, sound, movement, and objects. Every process is experienced across many senses at once. The sizzling sound of hot oil, and the mouthwatering aroma of onion and garlic hit the audience within an audio-visual thunderstorm. At the very end, the audience is invited to taste a sample of the dish within the accumulated sonic environment.
“Cooking” is the first part in a series of performances exploring how everyday gestures/events could become charged with symbolic intensity.
Materials
Self contained responsive kitchen set embedded into a portable table, 8.2 speaker system, 2 computers, Projector
Technical and Conceptual Work
Computational Enchantment of Ordinary Gestures
We use responsive media to poetically charge everyday actions and objects in ways that combine sound and visual composition with the participant’s contingent nuance. As the participants grow accustomed to the instrument’s responsive quality, everyday gestures may become aesthetically invested or charged with emotion or social meaning. Participant’s gestures not only lead to unexpected musicality but to narratives about shaping relationships with the world. “Practices of everyday life” synthesizes state of art techniques in continuous gesture tracking and sonification in a paradigm of calligraphic gestural media developed at the Topological Media Lab. Technical methods include corpus-based concatenative synthesis, haptic-acoustic transcoding, granular processing, physical models, real-time machine-learning, and gesture following.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/51474504#[/vimeo]

Alternate Reality: A Pervasive Play Project

Media Choreography, Movement

Alternate Reality: A Pervasive Play Project

The Project

Over the course of 2012-13, Sha Xin Wei (Director of the Topological Media Lab, Canada Research Chair in Media Arts and Sciences, and Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science at Concordia University, Montreal) will be collaborating with Patrick Jagoda (Assistant Professor of English and Co-editor of Critical Inquiry) on an alternate reality gaming project. The fellowship will begin with a seminar that Sha and Jagoda are co-teaching in fall 2012, in which graduate and undergraduate students from a host of disciplines will collaborate on game design. During the winter of 2013, Sha, Jagoda and a team of collaborators will conclude game design and post-production. In the early spring of ’13, the transmedia game is slated to take place, to be followed by an international practicum on Play as a Mode of Inquiry Nov 1 – 3, ’13.

The interactive production created by Jagoda and Sha belongs to the emerging artistic form of ?Alternate Reality Games? or ?transmedia games.? Unlike conventional digital games, these creative productions use the real world as their platform and tell a single story across numerous media and technologies. Such transmedia games are distinctive for their tightly networked collaborative communities, player-driven narratives, performance-oriented events, and interpenetration of real and virtual spaces. This project is intended to explore the relations between digital media and space, the affordances of collective storytelling, the generation of new media theory through design, and the development of methodologies for studying the emergent art form of Alternate Reality Games.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/72283300[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/64941871[/vimeo]

The Course

Course Description: This course offered in Fall 2012 explores the emerging game genre of ?transmedia,? ?pervasive,? or ?alternate reality? gaming. Transmedia games are not bound by any single medium or hardware system. Conventionally, they use the real world as their primary platform while incorporating text, video, audio, live performance, phone calls, email, websites, and locative technologies. The stories that organize most of these games are nonlinear and broken into discrete pieces that audiences must discover and actively reassemble. The participants who play these games must generally collaborate to solve puzzles. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. For all of their novelty, these games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching narratives of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of videogames, and the team dynamics of sports contests. Moreover, their genealogical roots stretch back to a diverse series of gaming practices such as nineteenth-century English ?letterboxing,? the Polish tradition of ?podchody,? scavenger hunts, assassination games, and pervasive Live Action Role-Playing games. An understanding of these related forms will be critical to our analytical and creative work.

Course requirements include weekly blog entry responses to theoretical readings; an analytical midterm paper; avid engagement in discussion and design; and collaborative participation in a single narrative-based transmedia game project created by the class that will run on campus, in the city of Chicago, and/or online. No preexisting technical expertise is required. Since transmedia games draw on numerous skill sets, students will be able to contribute with a background in any of the following areas: creative writing, literary or media theory, web design, visual art, computer programming, music, and game design.

Project Inventory

a team-taught course (Fall 2012) entitled Transmedia Games: Theory and Design, for graduate and undergraduate students, run through the Department of English and cross-listed in Creative Writing, Cinema & Media Studies, Theater & Performance Studies, and the Department of Visual Arts;
co-presentation on fellowship project in tandem with student performance event (choreographed by Sha’s frequent collaborator Michael Montanaro) at the opening of the Logan Center for the Arts, October 12, 2012;
introductory and recruitng event on December 6, 2012;
residency visits in winter 2013 by Sha and colleagues from the Topological Media Lab to collaborate on game design and post-production with Jagoda and a team of students;
residency visits in spring 2013 by Sha and colleagues from the Topological Media Lab for the collaborative and transmedia game experience with university and non-university participants;
culminating event for The Project on April 25, 2013; and
an international practicum on Play as Mode of Inquiry, Nov 1 – 3, 2013.

CIRMMT

organizations

CIRMMT is a multi-disciplinary research group centred at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. It unites researchers and their students from three Quebec institutions – McGill University (Faculties of Music, Science, Engineering, Education and Medicine), l’Université de Montréal (Faculté de musique, Faculté des arts & des sciences), and l’Université de Sherbrooke (Faculté de génie). The CIRMMT community also includes administrative and technical staff, research associates, visiting scholars, musicians, and industrial associates. CIRMMT occupies a unique position on the international stage having developed intense research partnerships with other academic and research institutions, as well as diverse industry partners throughout the world.

The CIRMMT community is interested in interdisciplinary research related to the creation of music in the composer’s or performer’s mind, the performance of music, its recording and/or transmission, and the reception of music by the listener. It is also interested in the ways in which vision, haptics and touch interact with music and sound. CIRMMT seeks to develop innovative approaches to the scientific study of music media and technology, to promote the application of newer technologies in science and the creative arts, and to provide an advanced research training environment.

www.cirmmt.mcgill.ca

the Cognitive Sciences Institute of UQAM

organizations

Founded in 2003, the Cognitive Sciences Institute of UQAM constitutes a multifaculty unit under the faculties of Social sciences and of Sciences; it is also multidepartmental. It is intended to promote research and skills development in the field of cognitive sciences. The CSI is made up of researchers whose areas of expertise cover practically the entire field. It acts as a point of convergence for the activities of existing research teams and is also open to their external partners.

Four research clusters have been defined that create links between, and structure, the members’ research programs. Coordinating activities in dynamic clusters also favors the recruitment of students and ensures that they receive an integrated education in cognitive sciences.

http://www.isc.uqam.ca/