Category Archives: News

TML Weekly campfire

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

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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]

Einstein’s Dreams Time Conditioning Open Studio-Lab

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/77089477[/vimeo]

Einstein Dreams Time Conditioning Open Studio-Lab

The Topological Media Lab invite’s you to visit Einstein’s Dreams, time-conditioning installations, at the Concordia Hexagram-Blackbox. For 4 weeks, the Hexagram Blackbox will be transformed into a sandboxfor altering senses of time. Over the course of the month, visitors are invited to encounter this studio-workshop as a prototype for atelier process as a mode of knowledge creation, and knowledge creation as play.

Einstein’s Dreams is a research workshop that brings to bear ten years of media magic with realtime video, sound, lighting that evolve in concert with people’s movement.

In this workshop, inspired by vignettes from Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams, we will culminate environments that condition temporality. In one, time slows to a halt as you approach a particular place; in another there is no future; in third, time sticks and slips; in a fourth age reverses and what is rotten becomes fresh as time passes.

Director and choreographer Michael Montanaro, Chair of Contemporary Dance, Canada Research Chair New Media Sha Xin Wei, team with media artists and researchers in the Topological Media Lab — a lab for making new kinds of hybrid mediamatter,

Join us for the Open Studios April 3,4,5!

This studio-workshop is free and open for visit to the Concordia community.

You’re welcome to visit us upon RSVP for our afternoon Tastings and Debriefings, Mondays through Fridays at the end of the afternoon, around 4:00 PM, March 18 through April 2, 2013. Please sign up by emailing Katerina Lagassé, katerina.lagasse@concordia.ca.

For more details and to follow the project: http://einsteindreams.weebly.com

Contact

Visitors should check via email with the event information officer:

Katerina Lagassé, katerina.lagasse@concordia.ca

cc. michael.montanaro@concordia.ca, xinwei.sha@concordia.ca

Scenarios :

– Scatter / gather : Your shadow splits. The shadows run way from you. The shadows quiver with tension & intention.

– Freeze :Deposit snapshots of yourself. Use “flash” timing: charging increase in tension. Snap!

– Sutures : The world is fissured, and sutured: as you walk you see/hear into discontinuous parts of the room.

– Motion, oil slick, molasses : Every action is weighted down, slooooooowwwweeedd asymptotically but never quite stilling. Every action causes all the pieces of the world to slide as if on air hockey table, but powered so they accelerate like crazy.

– Blur wind : Fray actions, images, sounds into noise

– Vortex, dizzy: Spin the world — every linear movement or “line” of sound becomes drawn into a giant vortex, that sucks into the earth. or reverse.

– Brittle, crack: Need to step carefully. If not, hear and see pending catastrophe: cracking ice underfoot …Or sometimes pure acoustic in darkness or whiteout strobe.

– Stasis ( hot or cold ): Sitting in the bowl of the desert (Sahara or Himalayas)

– Repetition: Visual — take video from a given location, but send to multiple locations

– Infection / Dark Light: Use video, e.g. use particles — thickened as necessary — as sources of light. Cluster around movement or around bodies presence as source of light.

T.I : VOL.1 : A/V QUARTET ++1

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T.I : VOL.1 : A/V QUARTET ++1

Immersive sound and video, featuring solo/duo/quartet/quintet configurations drawn from: If, Bwana (electronics, objects) / Doug Van Nort (voice, electronics) / Katherine Liberovskaya (live video) / Éric Létourneau (synths, gamelan, wind instruments) / Akunniq (the dog)

WHEN :FEBRUARY 20TH, 2014
WHERE: 1515 ST. CATHERINE WEST EV 7.725
TIME: 7:30 PM, PWYC

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ÉRIC LÉTOURNEAU

André Éric Létourneau est actif dans le milieu radiophonique, les mondes des arts électroniques, audios et de l’art-action depuis la fin des années 1980. Il s’intéresse particulièrement à l’usage des médias par les groupes marginalisés, à la sphère publique comme contexte d’intervention, aux pratiques artistiques furtives et à une approche sociologique et sociopolitique de l’art et des médias. Réalisateur, animateur et concepteur d’émissions, il a régulièrement travaillé pour Radio-Canada et pour différentes radios publiques, communautaires et Web. Artiste en création radiophonique et en médias électroniques, ses oeuvres furent diffusées par Radio-France, KunstRadio (Radio nationale autrichienne), Radio Heklsinki, Radio Métropole (Haïti) et à la Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff Centre). Il a réalisé de nombreux projets à l’étranger et dans le cadre de résidences d’artistes, particulièrement en Indonésie où il a intensivement étudié le théâtre d’ombre balinais et la médiatisation de la tradition orale, ainsi qu’à l’ArtEZ Hogeschool Voor de Kunsten où il a poursuivi, sur une période intensive de 8 mois, une série d’interventions radios et vidéographiques à travers les Pays-Bas. Ses projets artistiques furent présentés dans une cinquantaine de festivals et d’événements internationaux, plus récemment à la Biennale d’Afrique de l’est (EASTAFAB-BURUNDI), Grace Exhibition Space (New York), Steirischer Herbs (Autriche), la Biennale de Paris, au Centre canadien d’architecture et par la Electronic Music Foundation. Ces dernières années, il a donné des workshops à l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris (SciencesPo.), l’Union des artistes, l’École des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Brieuc, au RAIQ et à la Chaire de recherche en dramaturgie sonore au théâtre de l’UQAC. Actif au sein du centre Dare-Dare et du Regroupement des arts Interdisciplinaires du Québec, il est membre d’Hexagram UQAM et de l’unité de recherche CNRS Art & Flux.

DOUG VAN NORT

Doug Van Nort is an experimental musician and sound-focused artist who explores deep listening, viscerally immersive experiences and the radical sculpting of sonic materials in dialogue with his acoustic environment. He has been highly active in the performance of improvised electroacoustic music in recent years at venues such as the Stone, Roulette, Issue Project Room, the New Museum, Experimental Intermedia, the Red Room, Studio Soto, Casa del Popolo, the Guelph Jazz festival, Xfest, EMPAC, and numerous other venues/festivals in the north american region and in the world at large; he often performs solo as well as with a wide array of artists across musical styles and artistic media. He collaborates regularly with Pauline Oliveros, Al Margolis and the Composers Inside Electronics, and in recent years he has performed and recorded with dozens of artists including Francisco López, Stuart Dempster, Chris Chafe, Kathy Kennedy, Ben Miller, Alessandra Eramo, David Arner, Anne Bourne, Eric Leonardson, Judy Dunaway, Katherine Liberovskaya, Carver Audain, André Éric Létourneau, Jefferson Pitcher, Jonathan Chen, and in Sarah Weaver-led ensembles alongside the likes of Gerry Hemingway, Min Xiao-Fen, Franz Hackl, Mark Helias and Dave Taylor. His music appears on several labels including Deep Listening, Pogus and Zeromoon and his writings on sound/performance/technology have been published in a variety of sources such as the Leonardo Music Journal and Organised Sound.

KATHERINE LIBEROVSKAYA

www.liberovskaya.net.

Katherine Liberovskaya is a video and media artist based in Montreal, Canada, and New York City. Involved in experimental video since the 80s, she has produced many single-channel videos, video installation works and video performances which have been presented at a wide variety of artistic venues and events around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on collaborations with composers and sound artists notably in live video+sound performance where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes. Frequent collaborators include Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If,Bwana, Zanana, Kristin Norderval, Hitoshi Kojo, David Watson, David First and o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi). Since 2003 she has explored improvised video with numerous artists including: Margarida Garcia, Anthony Coleman, Barry Weisblat, Mazen Kerbaj, murmer, André Gonçalves, Monique Buzzarté, Giuseppe Ielasi, Renato Rinaldi, Alessandro Bossetti, Andre Eric Letourneau, Jason Khan, Jim Bell, among many others. Recent projects have involved: Shelley Hirsch, Chantal Dumas, Leslie Ross, Richard Garet, Dorit Chrysler, Emilie Mouchous, Erin Sexton, Corinne René and Philippe Lauzier. Concurrently she curates and organizes the Screen Compositions evenings at Experimental Intermedia, NYC, since 2005 and the OptoSonic Tea series at Diapason, NYC, and in various locations in Europe and elsewhere with OptoSonic Tea On the Road.

IF, BWANA

Al Margolis has performed and recorded under the name If, Bwana since 1984, making music that has swung between fairly spontaneous studio constructions and more process-oriented composition. He is known as an activist of the 1980s American cassette underground through his cassette label Sound of Pig Music, and is the co-founder of experimental music label Pogus Productions <http://www.pogus.com>. Margolis is label manager for Deep Listening and XI Records; plays bass guitar in the legendary punk/post-punk band Styrenes; and continues his work as If, Bwana. He has recorded and/or performed with Pauline Oliveros, Ione, Joan Osborne, Monique Buzzarté, Adam Bohman, Ellen Christi, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jane Scarpantoni, Ulrich Krieger, David First, and Dave Prescott, among others. Recent projects include: a duo with Tom Hamilton (electronics and objects), a laptop duo with Doug Van Nort, and a violin/bass duo with James Ilgenfritz, and an ongoing collaboration with video artist Katherine Liberovskaya.

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Patrick Jagoda – “Fabulously Procedural: Braid, Temporality, and the Videogame Sensorium”

Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago)

“Fabulously Procedural: Braid, Temporality, and the Videogame Sensorium”

Friday 23 November 2012, 4:00 PM

Hexagram Resource Center, EV 11th floor

Abstract

If we are to make sense of the type of art form that digital games are and could someday become, it is critical to understand the new sensorium — the experiences of temporality, speed, space, protocols, and history — that they open up. This talk turns to the independently produced 2008 platformer videogame Braid. The central mechanic that Braid adds to the usual platformer repertoire is the manipulation of time. Each “world” in the game is subject to a different set of temporal rules that affect the player’s ability to solve puzzles. By intertwining narrative, visual, audio, and algorithmic components, this game interrogates the impulses that drive videogames and the historical subjects that they produce. Through strategic complicity with the activity-oriented attitude that has characterized both Cold War politics and videogames, Braid encourages a powerful form of self-reflexivity in the player. By exploring Braid’s commentary on the history of videogames, I suggest that the procedural operations of the form provide an aesthetic horizon for the experience of our information-oriented, postindustrial society. If cultural works are fields through which the dynamics of different media and modes of production can be apprehended then Braid is, ultimately, a multi-layered exposure (or indeed a “braiding”) of the logics that underlie the contemporary military-industrial-entertainment complex.

Patrick Jagoda Bio

Patrick Jagoda is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is also a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. He specializes in new media studies, twentieth century American literature, and digital game theory and design. Specifically, his scholarship examines how contemporary American fiction, film, television, and digital media aestheticize global networks (including terrorist networks, economic systems, and computer webs). His publications appear in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Post45, and Neo-Victorian Studies, as well as edited volumes such as The American Novel 1870-1940 and Cyberspace and National Security.

Jagoda has also worked on several projects related to digital storytelling, transmedia game design, and new media learning. He is the co-founder (with Melissa Gilliam) of the ongoing Game Changer Chicago initiative, a project that uses transmedia game production to promote participatory and systems-oriented forms of health learning aimed at adolescents. This initiative has received support from several organizations, including the MacArthur Foundation and the Wohlford Foundation. In 2012-2013, Jagoda will pair with digital media artist Sha Xin Wei for a narrative-oriented transmedia game project supported by the Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Jagoda received his PhD in English from Duke University in 2010 and was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago from 2010-2012.

Co-sponsored by the Canada Research Chair New Media, Topological Media Lab, Hexagram, TAG, and the Mellon Foundation