A few news stories on the new Bricolab space from this Fall. Université de Montréal, UdeMnouvelles, October 1, 2019: Université de Montréal, Quartier Libre (student paper), November 9, 2019: Hexagram, REC (research-creation podcast series), Episode 3, July 2019:
Presenting a paper next week on “Speech Portraits and the Audio/Visual Self” at a conference at Goldsmith’s. Here is the programme in PDF with full abstracts. From the CFP: We’re drowning in an ocean of data, or so the saying goes. Data’s “big”: there’s not only lots of it, but its volume has allowed for the development of new, large-scale processing techniques. Our relationship with governments, medical organisations, technology companies, the education sector, and so on are increasingly informed by the data we overtly or inadvertently provide when we use particular services. The proverbial data deluge is large-scale—but it’s also personal. Data promises to personalise services to better meet our individual needs. Data is often construed as a threat to our person(s). Not every person predicated by data is predicted the same. The intersection between data and person isn’t fixed: it has to be figured. This conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to explore how the person—or persons, plural—are figured in/out of data. Figuration might encompass any or all of processes of representation, calculation, analogisation, …
This week, I participated in a day-long workshop at Concordia, organized by the Machines Agencies working group, to think about what an AI commons might look like. Here are is an excerpt from the original call: How can artificial intelligence be oriented toward the common good? The belief in AI for good has widespread acceptance in the industry and among governments. Declarations from around the globe—Canada, China, South Korea, France, and more—call for the development of AI to have a social purpose. But what is that purpose? … This workshop seeks to develop a commons-based vision for the future of AI as an intervention to understand transformations in citizen engagement as part of a larger research project to explore practices of citizenship in a skeptical world. The afternoon had a really interesting format: we separated into groups to write positions statements to the following pre-determined questions: What should an AI Commons be? How could the development of AI today—including the infrastructure and knowledge at its foundation—become a commons? Could AI reshape how we think about …
For the past few years I have been working with artists and scientists to explore optics and substrates at the nano scale. The project is called Nano-Verses. Working with with web designers in Montreal, we then produced an accompanying website that brings it all together. There are a few elements to fix here and there, but for the most part it’s ready for show. Works best on Chrome, a desktop, and with the sound on 🙂 >> https://nano-verses.com/ Here is a longer blurb on the partnership and the web project: Nano-Verses is an ongoing project working across disciplines to explore optics and substrates at the nano scale. The team of researchers and artists has been working together since 2015 to produce nano-optical objects based on the principles of structural colour to display unprecedented interactions between light and matter. Originally inspired by the nano scale structures that produce the iridescent blue of morpho butterfly wings, nano-optical devices have been primarily developed and used as an authenticating feature by the black-boxed security industry. Working from a desire …
Ma présentation : Mythes et limites de l’obsolescence Résumé : Cette présentation offrira des exemples de projets personnels et étudiants, passant par la photographie et l’impression, pour compliquer les distinctions entre le numérique et l’analogique, et entre ce qui est « vieux » et « nouveaux » médias, afin de réfléchir les médias « rétro » comme technologies du présent.
The Bricolab is a space for creation and making of all kinds located in the Department of Communication at the UdeM that aims to encourage a variety of research-creation approaches. It equally supports activities using digital fabrication (e.g. Arduinos), experimentation with new forms of storytelling (e.g. VR), or more traditional crafts like sewing, for example. It renforces practices of active pedagogy, prototyping and l spéculation, critical making, and DIY projects. We had an open house is on Thursday September 26, 1pm – 5pm. bricolab.org Facebook (/bricolabmtl) Some of the equipment available: 2 3D printers (Ultimaker 2 & Zortrax) 3D scanning machine Vinyl cutter Sewing maching Embroidery machine Oculus Rift GoPro Fusion iMacs, Macbook, large computer screens Arduino, Raspberry Pi MakeyMakey Various electronic tools (soldering, etc.) Arts & crafts supplies Projector and TV screen
Heading off to New Orleans next week to attend my first 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) conference. I’m excited to be on a panel on “Technicalities of Trust and Technologies of Sensing.” Here is my abstract: “Verifying Paper Money: Quality-Control and the Materialization of Trust” This paper explores sensory moments of quality-control, specifically through the case of the bank note as a trustworthy paper. Of interest are the ways that trust becomes produced, transmitted and known by security printers, so that certain bits of paper come to be objectively perceived and circulated as authentic and valuable. Trust is explored here as intimately tied to the sensory assessment of expertise and quality. Counterfeits and forgeries are often recognized as such because they are judged as technically inaccurate or imprecise. Part of this evaluation process lies in the education of the senses and learning to discern material characteristics that are legitimate, whether through sight, touch, smell or sound. Trust is thus inscribed or embedded in a paper through specialized and recognizable techniques and materials. This …
Ce novembre, je participerai aux Entretiens Jacques Cartier durant une journée de présentations sur le thème: Art-Science : La frontière est un lieu en soi ! Les infos ici et sur le site. Comment organiser une rencontre art-science qui soit féconde en même temps que mutuellement bénéfique ? Il s’agit d’éviter l’instrumentalisation : lorsque le scientifique utilise l’artiste ou inversement. Quel rapport entre pratique artistique et pratique scientifique ? Il s’agit de mettre en évidence la profonde similarité des gestes et des pensées des artistes et des scientifiques, au-delà des apparences. Quel parcours pour un étudiant qui se formerait à la frontière entre art et science ? Il s’agit de trouver la manière la plus juste d’inscrire un parcours transdisciplinaire dans un monde encore profondément disciplinaire. Notre réflexion distinguera la variété des expériences correspondant aux différentes modalités de l’art et de la science. C’est ainsi que nous accueillerons tous les duplets art-science possibles : musique-mathématiques, danse-technologie, performance-biologie, poésie et mathématiques… 8h15 – Accueil 8h30 – Mot accueil (intervenants à définir) 8h45 – T1 : Comment …
Abstract Printing is not a new media technology, but it is continuously being renewed. In this sense, it is an example of novelty going largely unnoticed, woven into the quotidian and ordinary in unassuming ways. One reason for this is the incomplete way we tell the story of printed paper, which privileges narratives of readings, access, and dissemination. To complicate the way media scholars think printing, this article turns to the case of security printing, which produces objects like banknotes and passports that circulate with trust and authority. Here, printing emerges through the specific need to print securely, offering a narrative based on the need for order and protection. The work of security printing, always straddling between art and science, produces artefacts understood as authentic copies. Such a transformation of paper into valuable object relies on the technical artistry of the security printer, who sets the aesthetic and material standards of authenticity through physical features like watermarks, engravings, holographs, special substrates, threads, or inks. Drawing on a close reading of informational materials produced by the …
Le 23 mai 2019, de 14h à 17h, aura lieu la Table ronde « Art, web et féminismes » au local N-7050, à l’UQAM. Co-organisée par le RéQEF et Julie Ravary-Pilon(Boursière postdoctorante du RéQEF 2018), cette activité sera précédée par la deuxième version des Ateliers méthodologiques du RéQEF. J’animerai la table ronde « Art, web et féminismes » sur l’histoire des activismes et des arts féministes sur le web. Cette activité réunira les professeures Joanne Lalonde (histoire de l’art, UQAM), Krista Lynes (communications, Concordia), Rosanna Maule (cinéma, Concordia) ainsi que l’artiste de performance et sculpture Algonquine Anishinaabe mixte et bispirituelle Faye Mullen pour une conférence-performance. Cette activité bilingue, ouverte et accessible se veut un lieu de partages et de réflexions sur l’histoire de l’art cyberféministe, les potentiels du web pour la création artistique des femmes, les esthétiques des contestations (dissent) LGBTQI+ en ligne et hors ligne ainsi que la création numérique féministe en écrans. Les questions du public pourront être traduites sur place si nécessaire. Conférencières : Faye Mullen Murs trans-spatiaux, cérémonie et résistances Résumé …
Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage brings together over 25 co-investigators, a dozen collaborators, and a network of Partners from across Canada to research and remediate audiovisual archives created by women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBTQ2+ community, and immigrant communities. I’m a co-applicant (SSHRC Partnership Grant) and part of the Education and Outreach working group. Political, resistant, and community-based, A/CA creatively engages with archives through its dynamic network of Canadian archives, artist-run centers, community organizations, and Universities. Together, the goal is to create best practices and lay the foundation for innovative cultural policy. You can visit the website to sign up for the newsletter or to follow the activities on social media.
Paper presentation (with Rafico Ruiz) on the Bowater Papers archive, as part of the Materials and Media of Infrastructure panels: The Bowater Papers is a trade magazine that was published periodically by the Bowater Paper Corporation, based in London, running from 1950 to 1958. As the magazine’s inaugural editorial, “Thoughts on Paper,” begins: “Paper is the raw material of human communication; it binds together continents; history would be lost without it; [sic] for it is the link between the past and the future. But paper, the commodity, is not only for the chronicler.” This “large paper-manufacturing organization,” in the mid-1950s the largest producer of newsprint in the world, launched the magazine with a view to both creating and cataloguing its enterprise as a consolidating infrastructural network of paper producers and consumers. The series of four issues were intended to embody and materially contain the entire array of papers, paper products, and paper derivatives that the Bowater Paper Corporation’s global manufacturing system produced and promoted. Each issue is an “exposition of paper in use,” with inserts …
Rafico Ruiz and I are co-chairing a double-panel at the Canadian Communication Association this year called Materials and Media of Infrastructure: Infrastructures are increasingly at the forefront of critical communication studies. Rather than remaining in the operational background that subtends our contemporary digital landscape, these infrastructures establish “the rules governing the space of everyday life” (Easterling 2014), emerging as integral “chokepoints” (see Limn issue 10, 2018) that reveal the varied materials that both make up and travel across them. Whether oil pipelines or the infrastructures of the newsprint industry, examining the materials, materialities, and media of infrastructural arrangements allows for a better understanding of the social, political and cultural configurations that they make possible. Functioning in this way as logistical media (eg. Durham Peters), these visible and invisible infrastructures ultimately shape the movements and mediations of data and information. This double panel seeks to explore the relationships between materials and logistical politics by examining the ways in which infrastructures enact particular forms of mediation that are enabled and constrained by their varied material properties and …
My graduate seminar Bricoler les médias continues to surprise every year. Here are are few pics from our “maker faire”:
Very happy to be part of issue 32 of Intermédialités/Intermediality, edited by Nathalie Casemajor and Sophie Toupin, on the topic of Cacher/Concealing. I contributed a paper on security devices used in passports/banknotes called Storing Authenticity at the Surface and Into the Depths: Securing Paper with Human- and Machine-Readable Devices. Here is the abstract: This article examines the media technologies that mark paper as authentic. Using the examples of passports and paper banknotes, it considers the security features (e.g. graphic marks, holographs, chips) that do the work of reliably storing, protecting, and communicating authenticity across both space and time. These overt and covert authentication devices are examined in two interconnected ways: 1) as technologies with specific temporal conditions, constrained both by technical longevity and functional lifespan; and 2) as technologies that must be continuously reinvented to outpace counterfeiters and forgers. Together, these attributes have led to strategies of concealment that shift authentication from a human-legible activity at the perceptible surface to one that is concealed in the depths of machine readability. While this adds a level …
Aleksandra Kaminska 