Category Archives: Affiliates

Laura Farabo

Research associates

sponge, San Francisco, California

Laura Farabo has created experimental performance and theater for 30 years in Mexico, Japan, Switzerland, Germany and the United States. As co-artistic director of beggars and of snake performance companies, Laura pioneered constructions of site-specific performance and video performance. Laura founded the non-profit arts organization nightfire in 1981, which produced in the subsequent 15 years works such as “Obedience School” (LA to NYC) and “Bodily Concessions” (San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle).

Laura has won awards and grants from numerous foundations including the Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, The Hewlett Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, and the California Arts Council.

Currently, as a co-founder of sponge, Laura is conducting experiments in the form of responsive spaces — TGarden — and public urban installations — Sauna.

Kavita Philip

Affiliate Faculty

University of California Irvine

Kavita Philip is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She works in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her current research areas are environmental history; postcolonial and feminist science studies; globalization;
new media technologies.

Her articles in environmental history, globalization, and new media studies have appeared in the journals Cultural Studies, Postmodern Culture, NMediaC, and Environment and History. She has recently published a monograph on the history of colonial science in south India: Civilizing Natures, Rutgers University Press. She is working on a new manuscript, co-authored with Terry Harpold, entitled Going Native: Cyberculture and the Millennial Fantasies of Globalization (forthcoming, Routledge).

In her capacity as Affiliate Scholar, Prof. Philip is interested in the creation of metaphors for thinking in technoscientific contexts. Historians of science have long known that metaphors are indispensable parts of investigation and explanation, and that the richness and squishiness of metaphors have long challenged simple correspondence theories of truth. Her research constructs tools, ideas, and contexts which we can use to investigate, modify, and sharpen key concepts in the history of science.

 

 

Jeremy Cooperstock

Affiliate Faculty

Jeremy Cooperstock (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1996) is an associate professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a member of the Centre for Intelligent Machines, and a founding member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology at McGill University. He directs the Shared Reality Lab, which focuses on computer mediation to facilitate high-fidelity human communication and the synthesis of perceptually engaging, multimodal, immersive environments, and also leads the theme of Enabling Technologies for a Networks of Centres of Excellence on Graphics, Animation, and New Media (GRAND). Cooperstock’s accomplishments include theIntelligent Classroom, the world’s first Internet streaming demonstrations of Dolby Digital 5.1, uncompressed 12-channel 96kHz/24bit, multichannel DSD audio, and multiple simultaneous streams of uncompressed high-definition video, and a simulation environment that renders graphic, audio, and vibrotactile effects in response to footsteps. His work on the Ultra-Videoconferencing system was recognized by an award for Most Innovative Use of New Technology from ACM/IEEE Supercomputing and a Distinction Award from the Audio Engineering Society. Cooperstock has worked with IBM at the Haifa Research Center, Israel, and the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan, and was a visiting professor at Bang & Olufsen, Denmark, where he conducted research on telepresence technologies as part of the World Opera Project. He chaired the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems from 2001 to 2009 and is currently an associate editor of the Journal of the AES.

Affiliation:

Link: http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~jer/

Helga Wild

Research associates

Helga Wild was educated in the continental tradition of experimental psychology with heavy emphasis on quantitative methods, experimental design, statistics, and test theory. After her Ph.D. in Psychology/ Physiology at K. Franzens-University, Austria, Helga has been invited as research fellow to the Institute for Systems Theory, J. Kepler-University, Austria; Stanford University and Xerox PARC. At the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) she acquired in addition qualitative, i.e. ethnographic, techniques. She has since combined qualitative and quantitative techniques in the service of attaining a better grasp of the multiple layers of social and organizational reality.

 

Over the course of eight years Helga Wild managed a large number of increasingly complex projects, carried out ethnographic research and social design, and developed tools to help embed new practices in the existing social fabric. She extended the IRL approach by using her skills in conceptual design to engage the client in an interactive design process whereby the results from the ethnographic research were re-embedded in the organization as new tools and/ or new practices, an approach which the institute adopted in 1998 under the term “Interactive Research and Design.”

 

In 2000, Helga Wild joined WestEd’s staff as a Research Associate within the Action Learning Group. Her work takes the form of: Ethnographic research: identifying unique work practices and knowledge through observation, interviews, video analysis, protocol analysis
Facilitation and Participatory Design: helping stakeholders and experts co-construct solutions to address existing problems and leverage inherent potential
Qualitative and/ or Quantitative Evaluation
Design and Development of visualizations, tools, and processes to help make visible and embed new practices
Assisting an organization or community in developing the internal competency to support their objectives and the way they work.

 

 

Affiliation: Principal, Water-cooler Logic

David Gauthier

Research associates

David is a scientist. His work and teachings explore innovative use of technologies as a mean to probe and create future scenarios involving humans and machines. He has artistic and scientific research expertise in domains ranging from actuated textiles to viral communications. Gauthier worked in various institutions, notably the MIT Media Laboratory, the Banff New Media Institute, the Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies, the Danmarks Designskole.

He holds a Master of Science degree in Media Arts and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the Université du Québec à Montréal. His scientific research and collaborative artistic experiments have been published and exhibited internationally in conferences such as ICMC, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, ACE, CHI, and venues such as the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), Žižkov Television Tower (Prague), Museum of Science (Boston), Beall Center for Art and Technology (Irvine), Science Gallery (Dublin), MFRU (Maribor), Kulturværftet (Helsingør) and FOFA Gallery (Montréal).

TML projects: WYSIWIG and Dance Move (with Michael Fortin).

Christoph Brunner

Research associates

Christoph Brunner is a researcher at the Institute for Critical Theory at Zurich University of the Arts. He is also completing his PhD, “Ecologies of Relation: Aesthetic Practices as Research-Creation” at Concordia’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. His work focuses on aesthetic politics and research-creation. He is particularly interested in the notion of the collective as a transductive force in so-called media ecologies. For him the TML provides a vital environment to pursue questions of collectives between humans and more-than-humans. His most recent publications include: “Immediation as Practice of Signaletic Mattering,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 4 (June 2012), “Rhythm, Consolidation, Transduction: On Francis Alÿs Railings“, On Curating 15 (forthcoming 2012), Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today (2012), co-edited book.

Jennifer Spiegel

Research associates

Jennifer Spiegel is a post-doctoral fellow in the department of Art History and Communications at McGill and teaches in the Department of the Theatre at both Concordia and McGill. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research focuses on performance and theatricality in environmental communication and social activism, and the politics of aesthetics across media. She is also interested in practice-based research concerning collective processes of creation in physical theatre, social circus and the possibilities afforded by experiments in the collective movement of human and non-human bodies.

Areas of interest include: Contemporary social and political theory; radical theatre and
performance; community-based performance; critical theories of performance and media; ecological thought; social movements; grass roots media

Zohar Kfir

Alumni

Zohar Kfir is a Montréal-based artist working with video and interactive installation. She is a graduate of NYU’s ITP program (2002) and Concordia’s MFA program (2011). Her artistic practice focuses on the dynamic between growth and decay and the paradox of creating digital representations of natural phenomena. Zohar has shown her work internationally in galleries and video festivals; at the TML she has worked on prototyping electronics, documentation and assisting on various research projects.

In the past 3 years Zohar has worked mostly with the Memory-place group- meetings, assisting in research, prototyping electronics and documentation of the various experiments. She will be working on Tirtza Even’s project Failing.

JoDee Allen

Research associates

JoDee Allen (BFA Contemporary Dance) is a SIP Masters student researching street dance,video games and real-time video. She is a part-time professor in the Contemporary Dance faculty and is the co-artistic director and founding member of the dance company, Solid State Breakdance (2000 – 2011). JoDee is currently involved in movement-based research at the TML, specifically the Gesture Bending project.