Category Archives: Affiliates

Lauren Osmond

Artist, students, researchers 2014-15

From a background in fashion design, and with a keen eye for the theatrical and figurative qualities of garments and textiles, I experiment with traditional garment construction. The pieces that result from this interdisciplinary repurposing engage with the investigation of the body both aesthetically and spatially. I look at the body and its relations while in motion, and how its movements inform continuous adaptations of identity. A narrative of future forms of living and of decay ensues from my work, which often materialize as installations consisting of garments, weavings, performance, and video.

http://www.laurenosmond.com/

Evan Montpellier

Artist, students, researchers 2014-15

Technical Coordinator of the Topological Media Lab

Evan Montpellier is a media artist, researcher and educator. He builds video and sound instruments, and is interested in the new forms of expressive fluency that emerge from them. Within the resulting aesthetics, he works to find a balance between ornamentation and narrative. Recently, he has been engaged at the Topological Media Lab developing video components of the Ozone media choreography system. He holds a BA in Religious Studies from McGill University and a BFA in Media Art from Concordia University.

Nina Bouchard

Artist, students, researchers 2014-15

Communication Coordination
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Nina Bouchard is a graduate from Concordia University‘s Computation Arts program. By creating different immersive and interactive installations, through use of sensors and new technology, she has concentrated her studies on the exploration of the relationship shared between analog and digital art. By combining digital and non-digital mediums, such as hidden sensors and layered visuals, she seeks to preserve a sense of nuance within her work that nurtures a spectator or participant’s sense of wonder. This is essential to her practice as this allows her to drawn her audience’s attention back to the subtle perceptual fluctuations in their own inherent perspectives.

Contact: communication@topologicalmedialab.net

Travis McEwen

Artist, students, researchers 2014-15

Administrative Coordinator
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Travis McEwen was born in Red Deer and was raised in Edmonton where he obtained a Diploma of Fine Arts from Grant MacEwan College and a BFA from the University of Alberta. Currently residing in Montreal where he has just completed an MFA from Concordia University. McEwen has shown work throughout Canada, including Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal and Sackville. Primarily working with the medium of painting, his practice is concerned with the emotional and psychological experiences of being othered as well as themes of queerness, and gender, and how different marginalized communities employ strategies such as re-appropriation within the visual arts as forms of world-making.

Webiste: http://cargocollective.com/travismcewen

Contact: admin@topologicalmedialab.net

Shauna Janssen

Associate Researcher in Performance Design, People

Shauna is a Montreal based urban curator with a background in professional theatre practice and interdisciplinary studies. Her curatorial work involves long-term documentary and site-responsive urban research projects. Within the context of urban change, in her curatorial practice she works with artists to create site responsive performances, interventions, installations, and collaborative community engaged projects. In her practice she asks how critical curation can be a mode of intervention in the urban realm, and how urban spaces in transition might be active collaborators, with artists, in the surfacing of significant pasts, sublimated political positions, and forms of cultural agency, including the agencies of the built environment itself. Shauna works with oral history, critical post humanist thought, performance, feminist and queer theory to rethink sites, discourses, and themes such as spatial agency, the public sphere, gender, class, race, gentrification and the right to the city. Her ongoing research addresses the cultural politics of postindustrial urban spaces, and the role of art/ists in creating politically engaged communities in these spaces. She is currently undertaking research on the role of digital and new media in the public sphere in relation to expanded scenographic practices and concepts such as spatial dramaturgy and performative urbanism.

Shauna received her PhD in Humanities (2014), Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, where she has also taught in the Departments of Theatre and Art History. In 2010, she founded Urban Occupations Urbaines, a curatorial platform for artists, communities and the public to creatively and critically engage with cities and urban change. In Montreal, she has collaborated with La Fonderie Darling, Heritage Montréal, Centaur Theatre, Montréal Arts Interculturel, Le Corridor culturel de Griffintown, Parks Canada, and the Centre d’histoire de Montréal. She is a founding member and formerly co-director of Points de vue, a Montreal based community-engaged art, research, and urban activist platform. She has given public lectures and presentations at cultural institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Ephemeral City, 2010), Articule (“Would you be my curator?” 2012), and The McCord Museum (City Talks, 2013). In 2014 she was the associate producer for international bi-annual event Encuentro IX. Shauna is an affiliate member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling Concordia University. Since 2006, she has been a guest instructor at the National Theatre School of Canada.

www.shaunajanssen.ca

Sha Xin Wei

Founder

Canada Research Chair, Media Arts and Sciences

Associate Professor // Fine Arts and Computer Science // Concordia University

Sha Xin Wei, Ph.D., is Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, and Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. He directs the Topological Media Lab, a studio-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. Sha’s art research works include the TGarden responsive environments, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic video, Softwear gestural sound instruments, the WYSIWYG sounding tapestry.

Sha Xin Wei was trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and worked more than 12 years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling and the visualization of scientific data and geometric structures.

In 1995, he extended his work to network media authoring systems and media theory coordinating a 3 year long workshop on interaction and computational media at Stanford. In 1997, he co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, dedicated to designing technologies that people and organizations can robustly reshape to meet evolving socio-economic needs.

In 1998, Sha also co-founded the Sponge art group in San Francisco, to build public experiments in phenomenology of performance. With Sponge and other artists, Sha Xin Wei directed event /installations in prominent experimental art venues including Ars Electronica Austria, V2 The Netherlands, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical United Kingdom, and Elektra Montréal. He has also exhibited media installations at Postmasters Gallery New York and Suntrust Gallery Atlanta. These works have been recognized by awards from major cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology; the LEF Foundation; the Canada Fund for Innovation; the Creative Work Fund in New York; and the Rockefeller Foundation.

After obtaining an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2001 at Stanford on differential geometric performance and the technologies of writing in Mathematics, Computer Science, and History & Philosophy of Science, Sha joined the faculty of the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and the research faculty in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center in the College of Computing, where he founded the Topological Media Lab.

In 2004-2005, Dr. Sha was Visiting Scholar in History of Science at Harvard University, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, writing about agency, materiality, performance, and topological media. In 2005, Dr. Sha became director of Hexagram’s Active Textiles and Wearable Computers Axis.

Dr. Sha is a co-editor of the journal, Artificial Intelligence and Society. Publications include the essays “Resistance is Fertile: Gesture and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media,” Configurations 2003, “Demonstrations of Expressive Softwear and Ambient Media,” Ubicomp 2003, and to appear in 2005-2006: “Whitehead’s Poetical Mathematics,” in Configurations, “TGarden As Experimental Performance,” in Modern Drama, and “A Poetics of Performative Space,” in Poetics Today. He is now writing a book on poiesis and enchantment in topological matter.

Synthesis Center

organizations

The Synthesis Mission

The Synthesis Center at Arizona State University asks: How can we create environments that are richer, but not more complicated, and how can we create environments in which we would want to live?

How: Building an ecology of practices for re-imagining and re-making the spaces we inhabit

 Synthesis Center researchers draw from diverse disciplines in the humanities, engineering and the arts to blend knowledge and know-how to find meaningful ways of using the arts and technology to animate the worlds in which we live and play. In particular, we use techniques from responsive environments, time-based media, phenomenology, non-anthropocentric design and theory.

Rather than throwing disciplines together, we give our collaborators time to respect and meld distinct, even incommensurate values and ways of thinking and making into an ecology of practices.

http://synthesis.ame.asu.edu/

Cynthia Hammond

Affiliate Faculty, People

Dr. Cynthia Hammond
Associate Professor at Concordia University
Chair of the Department of Art History

Hammond graduated from Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in 2002. Her dissertation won the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for a doctoral dissertation. From 2003-05, Hammond held a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Architecture, McGill University. She taught for several departments of art history and schools of architecture in Canada before returning to Concordia in 2006. A practising artist, Hammond’s work is often founded upon interdisciplinary practices of archival research, artistic production and community engagement.

www.cynthiahammond.com
www.pouf.ca
http://cityaspalimpsest.concordia.ca/

pk Langshaw

Affiliate Faculty, People

pk langshaw
Professor at Concordia University
Directrice of d_verse Lab

pk langshaw is the directrice of the d_verse lab at hexagram/concordia institute for research/creation in media arts and technologies. In the lab we investigate where poetic introspection intersects with a hybrid prax- is that of verse- diverse, reverse, inversion, transversal, and reversible. The research/creation works are informed by design/art and science and situated as sociological projects. The content is mediated by forms of sensor controlled environments, garments, video, photography, real time interfaces and adaptive screen projections.

Sustainability including the three main tenets: ecological, socio-cultural and economic is studied and utilized in specific technological contexts, material form, as a unified strategy for nomadic performance environments. The internet as social media, network and/ or democratic site of communication, interaction and display is of particular interest.

http://www.pklangshaw.com 
http://d_verse.hexagram.ca/index.html 
http://design.concordia.ca/publicart

Ricardo Dal Farra

Affiliate Faculty, People

Associate Professor im Music at Concordia University

Dr. Ricardo Dal Farra has been conducting activities in the merging fields of arts, sciences and new technologies as a composer and multimedia artist, researcher, educator, performer and curator focusing mainly on electroacoustic music and new media arts for more than 25 years. Dr. Dal Farra holds a PhD inEtudes et pratiques des arts from Université du Québec à Montréal.