Category Archives: Affiliates

Sense Lab

The Sense Lab is a laboratory for thought in motion

The Sense Lab is composed of artists, academics, researchers, dancers, writers. We work together to explore the active passage between research and creation. We consider research to be creation in germ, and creation to produce its own concepts for thought.

Erin Manning founded the Sense Lab in 2004 in an effort to conceive a working and thinking environment for the creation of new modes of encounter. Since then, we’ve held monthly reading groups as well as a bi-monthly speaker-series entitled Bodies-Bits///Corps-Données which is a platform for the exploration of work in progress both local and international.

We host a series of international events under the rubric Technologies of Lived Abstraction. This event series was conceived as a vehicle for the exploration of modes of participation that take thought as their laboratory for creative practice and creative practice as a platform for thought. Our first event, Dancing the Virtual (2005), focused on the movements of thought through the prism of relational movement and philosophy. Housing the Body, Dressing the Environment (2007) was composed around platforms for relation that activated the constellation architecture-body-environment-thought. Society of Molecules (2009) invites participants to plan local micropolitical “molecules” engaging in aesthetico-political interventions in a distributive participatory model.

Since 2008, we have started hosting residencies. We welcome approaches to research-creation that seek to open thought.

Our online multi-media journal is entitled Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.

Everyone is welcome. We are located at Concordia University (Hexagram) in EV 11-625, 11-655.

Technoculture, Art and Games

Technoculture, Art and Games

Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) is an interdisciplinary centre for research/creation in game studies and design, digital culture and interactive art based at Concordia University in Montréal. TAG brings together scholars, artists, designers, engineers and students from all departments at Concordia and we welcome participants from other universities, the game and media arts industries and community based groups. See our members page.

At the heart of TAG is a shared interest and concern with digital games as exemplary objects for cultural research, artistic creation, technical innovation and social mediation, all in the context of an expanding information society and the changing fabric of everyday life.

TAG has a triple mandate to:

  • » Initiate and support collaborative research/creation of projects in digital game studies and design, both at the student and faculty levels.
  • » Build bridges and establish partnerships with games related industries, independent game developers and international researchers and artists.
  • » Actively explore and develop viable models of interdisciplinary research collaboration.

http://tag.hexagram.ca/

Bettina Bergo

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).

Tore Nielsen

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

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.

Mark Sussman

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

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.

Concordia University

– Vice Provost Research and Graduate Studies

– Vice Provost Teaching and Learning

– Faculty of Fine Arts

– Faculty of Engineering & Computer Science

– Office of Research

Concordia is a large, urban university, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university has two campuses, set approximately 7 km apart: Sir George Williams Campus is in the downtown core of Montreal, and Loyola Campus is in the residential west-end of Montreal. They are connected by a free shuttle-bus service for students, faculty and staff.

Although founded in 1974, the university traces its academic roots back to the early 20th century, with the development of the Jesuit-run Loyola College and the YMCA-based Sir George Williams University. (Read more about our history.)

Concordia is proud of its tradition of accessibility and concern for the individual. We value inter-disciplinary approaches to learning, and we are dedicated to offering the best possible scholarship, research and training for the real world.

Concordia’s more than 180 undergraduate programs are divided into four Faculties: Arts and Science, Engineering and Computer Science, Fine Arts, and the John Molson School of Business. Students are enrolled in one of these Faculties, but they may take courses from any of the others as part of their studies. Many programs also offer a “co-operative” component, whereby students get work experience while they study.

In addition, the School of Graduate Studies offers more than 70 programs leading to Master’s and doctoral degrees, as well as a variety of graduate diplomas and certificates for professionals seeking to upgrade their knowledge and skills.

Students enter the university in September, or in some cases, in January or May. An undergraduate degree normally takes three or four years to complete, a Master’s takes from a year-and-a-half to three, and a PhD is at least four years long. Certificates and diplomas usually take no longer than a year-and-a-half to complete.

http://www.concordia.ca

Canada Foundation for Innovation, CFI

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) is an independent corporation created by the Government of Canada to fund research infrastructure. The CFI’s mandate is to strengthen the capacity of Canadian universities, colleges, research hospitals, and non-profit research institutions to carry out world-class research and technology development that benefits Canadians.

http://www.innovation.ca/