Where Are They Now? A Milieux Alumni Reunion Chat

As part of our 10th anniversary extravaganza, we are bringing together former Milieux members for an informal roundtable discussion to chat about life after Milieux and how their time at the Institute shaped their professional paths.

Join us on November 6 as Allison Moore, Sandra Huber, Ida Toft, Ceyda Yolgörmez*, Gina Hara, and Will Robinson share stories from their time at Milieux and discuss their current endeavors.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Allison Moore is new media artist working with immersive and expanded cinema based in Montréal. She studied interdisciplinary arts and film production at Concordia University. For the past years, she has crafted an independent practice participating in residencies, workshops, and exhibitions internationally. Her work has been programmed at Tokyo Arts and Space (Japan), 39art (Japan), OBORO Gallery (Montreal), Traverse Video (France), Museu de Arte de Belem (Brazil), Festival of Nouveau Cinéma (Montréal), FIFA Experimental (Montréal), and the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides. Her series of multi-screen video panoramas depict improbable landscapes referencing scenic dioramas. Her latest work Wunderkammer, a 35-screen video wall can be seen in Place-Des-Arts (Québec). Moore works as a freelance editor, compositor and animator as well as teaching workshops in New Media practices.

Sandra Huber is a writer, researcher, and educator based on unceded Indigenous land in Tio’tia:ke / Mooniyang (currently called Monteal, Quebec). She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University and is a Lecturer and Area Head of Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices in Fine Arts at Concordia.

In her work, Sandra Huber approaches questions concerning esoteric, occulted, or underrepresented ways of knowing and being through embodied research in the areas of interdisciplinary (in)humanities, feminist material culture, witchy pedagogies, ritual and performance, occult media studies, disability studies, and poetics.

She works especially with theories and practices of night knowledge (including witchcraft, sleep, dreams, scent, spirit worlds), alter-abilities (including spellcasting, divination, ritual practice), and wild writing (including sleep writing, spirit writing, spider writing, collective writing, new media writing).

Ida Toft is an organizer, curator, cultural worker, and researcher based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. They hold a PhD from Concordia University, researching digital art and experimental games. Since 2010, their curatorial practice has focused on digital art, with a particular interest in video games and sculptural forms. Before moving into curating and organizing full-time, they developed experimental video games that were presented in galleries, festivals, and game events across Europe and North America. They are currently Curator and Production Director at ELEKTRA, where they develop exhibitions and professional initiatives. Their work also includes developing the ELEKTRA Virtual Museum (EVM), curating professional programming—including talks and panel discussions—and developing international collaborations between artists, institutions, and cultural partners.

Ceyda Yolgörmez is a postdoctoral researcher at the Indigenous Futures Research Centre at Concordia University, working in the Abundant Intelligences Research Program. Her PhD work brought together social theory and interactive technologies to create a framework for considering how our conceptions of the social are changing through human-machine relations. She works with quirky robots, old machines, broken technologies, and others that do not conform to common sense, to form a rich conception of agency and play. Often thinking through the art and technology intersection, Yolgörmez hopes to create more vocabulary around the kinds of machinic relations that contemporary moment potentiates.

Gina Hara is a Hungarian-Canadian filmmaker and artist. She holds an MA in intermedia, an MFA in film production and has worked in different media with regard to film, video, new media, gaming and design. Her research focuses on marginalized narratives in the context of technology, specifically social media and games culture. Hara’s artworks have been featured by different institutions including the New Museum in New York, Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montréal. Waning (2011), her first fiction film, was nominated for Best Canadian Short at the Toronto International Film Festival. Your Place or Minecraft? (2016) is her machinima docu web series about game studies and is available on YouTube. Hara’s feature length documentary, Geek Girls (2017), explores nerd culture from women’s perspective and was in theatres in Canada and Australia in 2018. Geek Girls is currently available on the website of the National Film Board of Canada, while it is distributed by Women Make Movies in the USA and South-America. Her most recent work, Sidings of the Afternoon won the Critics’ Choice Award at the Milan Machinima Film Festival 2021. Hara lives in Montréal, where she is the creative director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.

Will Robinson is Partner and Head of Capital Formation at Alliance, a crypto and fintech accelerator. He completed his PhD in Humanities at Concordia University in 2018, studying how game rules communicate ideas and produce unexpected meanings. At Milieux and TAG, he combined research with game-making, including Cabinet Shuffle, a card game about political representation developed with David Waddington. Before joining Alliance, he worked in blockchain risk management at Grant Thornton. His career connects game design, emerging technologies, and the people and institutions building around them.