Depuis quelques années, j’ai orienté mes intérêts vers trois principales pistes. La première consiste en une intervention critique sur la phénoménologie herméneutique depuis Heidegger. J’ai interrogé le «tournant théologique» de la phénoménologie française des vingt-cinq dernières années en cherchant à déterminer la relation entre celui-ci et l’herméneutique de la rencontre avec autrui chez Levinas? Cette question en implique d’autres : Que signifie une lecture «séculière» de Levinas? Comment cette dernière se distingue-t-elle d’une lecture influencée par la pensée juive? Enfin, quel est la contribution de Levinas à la question de la sensibilité de la chair « intersubjective »? Je m’appuie sur les contributions récentes de commentateurs français, dont J.-M Salanskis, G. Bensussan, entre autres.

La seconde piste de mes recherches poursuit le «destin» de certains concepts philosophiques et psychologiques (Affektus , Leidenschaft , Seele) suite à la révolution kantienne et en considérant l’émergence de la neurologie et de la psychiatrie matérialistes en Europe, surtout en France et en Allemagne. Ce questionnement fait partie d’un travail de longue haleine sur la sensibilité considérée à partir de 1813 (cf. Hegel, La philosophie de l’esprit ).

La troisième piste approfondit mes recherches en psychanalyse freudienne et, avant tout, sa réception française (Lacan, Pontalis, Laplanche). Il s’agit d’un domaine comportant de multiples influences et ressorts. Un des intérêts majeurs de la psychologie française se situe dans ses tentatives, partagés ou contestés, de traiter avec le matérialisme hérité du XVIIIe siècle (cf. J-M. Charcot, P. Janet). Mais l’intérêt principal de cette psychologie tient dans son effort de perpétuer un questionnement philosophique au sein du discours psychologique lui-même (cf. M. Pradines et M. Merleau-Ponty).

Full Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Université de Montréal
Psychologist (College of Psychologists of Quebec)
Director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory

Research Interests:
Effect of REM sleep deprivation on dreaming. Psychophysiology and treatment of patients with nightmares and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Parasomnias among children and new mothers. Effects of virtual reality immersion on dreaming. Population studies of dreaming and nightmares.

Methodologies:
Polysomnography, selective REM sleep deprivation, spectral analysis of the EEG and ECG, sensory stimulation during sleep, virtual reality exposure, sampling and analysis of lab and home dreams, internet-based dream collection.

Sabine Bergler is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Concordia University. Her Ph.D. is from the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University, her MS from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and her undergraduate education from Institut fur Informatik at the University of Stuttgart.

She is a member of the CLAC Laboratory conducting computational linguistics research at Concordia, the BioIT Laboratory for bioinformatics technology, and CENPARMI, the Center for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence.

Computer Science and Software Engineering

RESEARCH AREAS :

– Evolutionary programming
– Programming languages
WEBSITE Please visit Dr. Peter Grogono’s website.

Mark Sussman is a theatre artist and scholar working on the animation of public space and the integration of old and new technologies in live performance. He earned his PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, where he received the Michael Kirby Memorial Award for his doctoral dissertation on 18th and 19th Century stagings of the new technology of electricity. He joined Concordia’s faculty and moved to Montreal in 2005. He is currently Associate Professor and Acting Chair of the Department of Theatre.

Sussman is a founder and co-artistic director of Great Small Works, an OBIE and UNIMA/Jim Henson Award-winning theatre collective based in New York City. Since 1995, Great Small Works has been producing new theatre works on a variety of scales, from miniature toy theatre pieces using two-dimensional cutouts and live montage, to giant parades, community processions, and circuses. The company specializes in the reinvention of ancient, popular, and avant-garde performance techniques in contemporary contexts, creating variety evenings, international festivals, and community-based projects in addition to discrete performance works. With Great Small Works, he was artistic director for Bienvenue à Tourne-York, a large-scale outdoor Carnival commissioned by the town of Tournefeuille (near Toulouse), France in Spring, 2009. In 2010, he was co-designer for theatres and exhibition spaces for the 9th International Toy Theater Festival, produced at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, NY. He also co-designed a retrospective exhibition of The Toy Theater of Terror As Usual, a series of news-based paper theatre shows, produced by Great Small Works between 1990-2002. The exhibition, which included a new episode, was part of “The Curse of Bigness,” an exhibit curated by Larissa Harris at the Queens Museum of Art, NYC (May to October 2010).

As part of his ongoing research based at Concordia, Sussman is continuing work on Soil Desire People Dance, a tabletop object theatre performance using live and pre-recorded video, inspired by the writings of W.G. Sebald.

Apart from Great Small Works, Sussman continues a ten-year collaboration with writer/director Allen S. Weiss, with whom he has created two incarnations of Danse Macabre, an installation-performance using dolls created by Paris-based artist Michel Nedjar, most recently at the In Transit 09 Festival in Berlin. In Montreal, he is the principal organizer of Café Concret, an occasional cabaret of experimental puppetry and object-based performance, a forum for new works in a variety of media.

Sussman’s writing has appeared in The Drama Review, (ai) performance for the planet, Connect, Stagebill, Cabinet, Radical Street Performance (Routledge, 1999), and Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT, 2001). He is currently preparing an anthology (edited with Susan Simpson at CalArts) provisionally titled Automaton to Zombie: a Dictionary of Performing Objects. He is an artist/researcher at the Hexagram Institute, and the recipient of a research-creation grant from the FQRSC for 2008-2011.

Lynn Hughes founded the Interstices research group (with Prof. Jean Dubois – UQAM) in 2000. Interstices focused on producing new media works that explore the aesthetic and poetic potential of interaction with the screen and sound, with a particular emphasis on the development of innovative physical and gestural interfaces. More recently, she and Prof.
Bart Simon (Sociology, Concordia) founded TAG (Technoculture Art and Games).

TAG is a radically interdisciplinary, inter-Faculty Research Center that brings together researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to work on thinking about games and producing innovative prototypes. TAG leads a multi-university project group in the GRAND Network of Centers of Excellence and frequently collaborates with Kokoromi, an internationally known collective that curates and produces independent games.
Lynn’s productions include:

• Propinquity: a full body game for two players wearing sensors. Players gain points by staying as close as possible to active sensors on the others participant’s body, but lose if they touch. This performance/game explores very physical, electronically enhanced games as well as the ambiguous territory between fighting and dancing.

• Fabulous / Fabuleux: another interactive game using a custom physical interface in which the real space of the room is activated as much as the virtual space on the large projected screen. The game also uses spatialized sound to direct the players movements in the room.

• CUBID: a large scale play /game environment in which two players collaborate in real space to move through the levels of the virtual game. The players use custom wireless physical interfaces to control the visuals and the sound in real time.