Filmmakers? Engineers? Transportation experts? Hexagram has it all
The Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research-Creation in Media Art and Technology sits at the intersection of art, research and technology: its team of collaborators includes filmmakers, engineers, sound artists, historians and even a transportation expert.
To heighten this already-considerable interdisciplinary scope, the centre is launching a varied four-part 2013-14 Distinguished Speakers Series, along with nine related workshops and seminars.
According to Christopher Salter, Hexagram’s director and an associate professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, the aim is “to try to contextualize art and design within the other disciplines.”
Designed around the theme “Speculative Futures,” the series will address the fact that humans are more and more immersed in technology every day, Salter says. He believes this has a profound impact on how we imagine the future will turn out.
Artist Renée Green will deliver the first lecture. Photo courtesy of Green
The series’ first guest is artist and educator Renée Green, director of the Program in Art, Technology and Culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Renée has been dealing with a lot of the similar kinds of questions that people here are dealing with about research-creation,” Salter says. “What does it mean to work within an academic research framework, and at the same time as a creator and artist? How do you train people in other ways of thinking about research in relationship to creative practice?”
Green’s talk is co-sponsored by the new Feminist Media Studio, which will open soon at Concordia under the direction of Krista Geneviève Lynes, Canada Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies and an affiliated researcher with Hexagram.
“Renée Green’s work — in film and video, text, critical writing and site-specific installations— exemplifies the weaving of critical, creative and politically engaged practices,” Lynes says. “She is an important interlocutor for the Feminist Media Studio, where we examine how politically engaged art might render historical and contemporary conditions of political struggle in the globalized present.”
Salter says it’s important for Hexagram to collaborate with other labs at Concordia that are working to define the place of research-creation. “We’re not just in the Faculty of Fine Arts; we’re actually inter-faculty, and inter-university as well. It’s no longer someone saying, ‘Well, I’m going to make something and you’re going to write about it.’”
He points out that the Distinguished Lecture Series is an essential component of research-creation collaborations, linking Hexagram research to other universities, art spaces and labs around the world.
For a complete schedule of Hexagram’s year-long program of talks, workshops and seminars, visit the centre’s website.
What: “Other Planes of There,” a talk by artist Renée Green, professor and director of the Program in Art, Technology and Culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
When: Friday, September 27, at 4 p.m.
Where: Hexagram Resource Centre, Room EV-11.455, Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex, 1515 Ste-Catherine St. W., Sir George Williams Campus