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School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design

Sensorium
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Past Events

Conferences + Symposia

Imagining Differently Conference — This year's conference theme considers the identification and application of research-creation as a method in theatre and performance studies in order to address the sense that urgent action must be taken in response to events that are currently emerging and shaping our worlds.

Disruptive Design and Digital Fabrication Symposium — The Disruptive Design and Digital Fabrication symposium explores the relationship between digital fabrication processes and social design that increasingly revolve around prototyping and iterative testing. Digital tools are today ubiquitous in academic and community settings, yet engaging with these goes beyond any particular technologically enhanced capacity.

Mixed Reality Performance Symposium — The Mixed Reality Performance Symposium: York is the first of six symposiums hosted by mixed reality producers Toasterlab, and will explore extended and mixed reality performance.

Resisting Extractivism, Performing Opposition — This interdisciplinary symposium invites activists, scholars, artists, community organizers, and cultural workers to explore collective strategies of embodied and performed resistance to extractivism. While extractivism commonly refers the logic of reducing nature to commodities, and the resultant hyper-exploitation of the mining, oil, and gas industries, we can also think of extractivism as an ideology fundamental to colonialism and capitalism at their most endemic.

Intermedial Narrative Symposium — Intermedial Narrative & Performance: New Approaches will focus on new modes of storytelling at the intersection of performance, technology, art and design, and the ways in which they are producing alternative kinds of knowledge in and outside of the academy. Specifically, how do emerging multimedia performances and artworks use augmented and mixed reality tools, network archaeology, and new information infrastructures to generate creative opportunities and alternative modes of transmitting self, culture, and memory?

Media Architecture Summit 2016 — In September 2016, Sensorium Director Michael Longford (with Dave Colangelo, Portland University) organized the Media Architecture Summit 2016 (MAS 2016) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, presented by Sensorium and AMPD. The symposium brought together over 200 attendees, comprised of scholars, artists and designers, architects, urban planners, representatives from the cultural sector and industry.

Talks + Lectures

Gudskul — Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) Gudskul: Knowledge Garden Festival (October 22 – December 12, 2021) A Sensorium curatorial talk - 28 Oct @ 3pm (in-person; capacity limited)

Regenerations Loretta Sarah Todd — Loretta Sarah Todd: Indigenous Storytelling Across Platforms and Into the Future! A talk hosted by the Regeneration: All Our Relations series - 23 Nov 2021 @ 2:30pm

Julia Polyck-O'Neill — Dept. of Art History Guest Speaker Series: Julia Polyck-O'Neill 26 Oct 2021 @ 3:15pm (in-person; capacity limited)

Squid Game, Netflix, & Viral Storytelling — Squid Game, Netflix & Viral Storytelling Public talk with Dr. Suk-Young Kim (UCLA) - 21 Oct 2021 @ 4pm Archive available here

Unhomed: Orphan Images and Diasporic Kinships — Thy Phu and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn in Conversation - May 5th 2021 @ 2:00pm

The Fugitive Photograph and Archival Escape in Jamaica — Public Talk with Dr. Krista Thompson - May 6 @ 5:00pm

Design Justice: Practices for Reshaping the Future — An open roundtable discussion with members of the Design Justice Network, an organization at the forefront of design justice, work aimed at community-led design for social justice. This event features a conversation with Sasha Costanza-Chock, Denise Shanté Brown, and Wesley Taylor, with remarks from Professor Alison Harvey and responses from York graduate students Mina Momeni, Brianna I. Wiens, and Dayna Jeffrey.

Art, Design, and Climate Justice — This public dialogue will bring together a dynamic group of artist-scholars from different international sites to reflect on the vital role that artists can play in designing for climate and environmental justice. It is the first event in the 2021 Design Justice Speaker Series, which explores how design can challenge social inequities, empower marginalized communities, and engage in worldbuilding that supports cultural and ecological survival.

Venus Envy: Artist as HERstorical Recorder – Public Talk with Karen Finley — During this time of the pandemic, and recent political turbulence, Karen Finley’s lecture will inquire into art as an experimental forum for research and scholarship. She will share some examples of her artworks and performances as intentional interventions for social change.

Skawennati Public Talk — The Department of Cinema and Media Arts, Sensorium, imagineNATIVE and V-Tape are delighted to present a talk by Skawennati. Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. She is Co-Director of the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace at Concordia University in Montreal.

Curatorial Lab @ Sensorium

Places where sounds turn to dreams... — Places where sounds turn to dreams... An exhibition curated by Sensorium Graduate Associate Dhvani Ramanujam 5-24 November 2021; Hearth Gallery

Life, A Sensorium - ISEA 2020 Exhibition — The ISEA 2020 Exhibition - Life, A Sensorium unfolds at the nexus of art, science and technology through the works of artists affiliated with Sensorium, who collectively explore the entangled ecologies of the post-natural world. Through multi-sensory experiences these artists explore the different ways that contemporary sensorial relations stage complex articulations and expansions of the real.

Four Faces of the Moon and Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) - Digital Exhibition — Four Faces of the Moon and Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) by Amanda Strong will be on display in the Sensorium Research Loft Monday – Thursday, 10:00am – 3:00pm from March 25th to April 4th. Amanda Strong is an award-winning interdisciplinary Michif artist with a focus on filmmaking, stop motion animations, and media art. She is currently based on unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver. Strong is the owner/director/producer of Spotted Fawn Productions Inc. (SFP). Under her direction SFP utilizes a multi-layered approach and unconventional methods that are centred in collaboration on all aspects of their work.

Curatorial Lab @ Sensorium - Chief Lady Bird — Be sure to swing by the Sensorium Research Loft to see two incredible works of art by Chippewa and Potawatomi interdisciplinary artist Chief Lady Bird for this year’s final Curatorial Lab installation, organized by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan. You can see Self Portrait as the Moon and Kinship with the Sky from November 14th to December 5th.

Biidaaban: First Light — Rooted in the realm of Indigenous futurism, Biidaaban: First Light is an interactive VR time-jump into a highly realistic—and radically different—Toronto of tomorrow. As users explore this altered city now reclaimed by nature, they must think about their place in history and ultimately their role in the future. The VR environment was created using to-scale architectural models of Toronto’s Osgoode subway station and the buildings surrounding Nathan Phillips Square.

Workshops + Seminars

Sensorium Hive Reading Group #2 — Sensorium HIVE Reading Group #2: Return to the Sensorium: Sonic Sensibilities Virtual Discussion 26 Nov 2021 - 1:30-3pm EST (Zoom) IRL Soundwalk 9 Dec 2021 - 1-3pm EST (Keele campus walk)

Designing for Sovereign Nations - Workshop and Public Talk with Sadie Red Wing — Sadie Red Wing is a Lakota graphic designer and advocate from the Spirit Lake Nation of Fort Totten, North Dakota. Workshop participants can opt to receive a physical package by post (the Anti-Anxiety Delivery Service), aimed at re-thinking physical space and engaging the senses commonly detached in digital realms. During the workshop individuals will discuss these experiences through the lens of indigenous material culture and visual sovereignty.

Creative Shifts – AMPD Graduate Research Creation Workshop — Creative Shifts – AMPD Graduate Research Creation Workshop will focus on strategies that graduate researchers are using to devise research-creation within the current pandemic context, as well as opportunities and challenges they are discovering in this process. The workshop will also provide an opportunity for students from across AMPD and within Sensorium to meet one another in breakout rooms, share research strategies and resources, and forge interdisciplinary connections.

Sensorium Seminar Series featuring Associate Professor Ingrid Veninger and Jorge de Oliveira — Sensorium Seminar Series featuring Associate Professor Ingrid Veninger and Jorge de Oliveira - The virtual seminar will include a presentation by Professor Veninger and collaborator Jorge de Oliveira who will discuss the newest phase of ONE(NINE). The presentation will be followed by a question and answer period moderated by Sensorium Director Joel Ong.

Talk and Workshop: Suzanne Kite and Devin Ronneberg — Digital Media and the Department of Computational Arts at York University presents our December 2020 Online exhibition: Invisibility :: Complexity :: Resistance :: Intentionality. As part of this exhibition, we will be hosting a series of events that include an exhibition launch, guest speakers, a workshop, and performances from students and faculty.

Graduate Seminar featuring Wafaa Bilal — Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal is known internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international and interpersonal politics. Bilal’s work explores tensions between the cultural spaces he occupies —his home in the comfort zone of the U.S. and his consciousness in the conflict zone in Iraq.

Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series featuring Graduate VR Artists — Join us for our first Sensorium Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series event of March, featuring a panel discussion with VR artists David Han, Michaela Pňačeková and Michael Trommer.

Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series featuring Alison Humphrey — Alison Humphrey plays with story across drama, digital media, and education. As a Vanier Scholar in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, her research-creation doctoral dissertation explores how a participatory science fiction storyworld, Shadowpox, can help young people build scientific, civic and media literacy by exploring immunization and vaccine hesitancy through a superhero metaphor.

Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series featuring Professor Brandon Vickerd — Brandon Vickerd is a sculptor whose site-specific interventions, public performances and object-based sculptures act as a catalyst for critical thought and engagement with the physical world. Purposely diverse, his studio work straddles the line between high and low culture, acting as a catalyst for critical thought and addressing the failed promise of a modernist future predicated on boundless scientific advancement.

Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series Featuring Associate Professor Graham Wakefield — The Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series is a weekly event which aims to foster interconnectivity between faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars and artists within the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design.

Salons

Sensorium Fall Social 2021 — Sensorium Fall Social 2021 10 December 2021 from 4-5:30pm; Virtual meeting on Gather.Town

Virtual Fall Mixer — Virtual Fall Mixer - This event is an opportunity for new and existing community members to connect and share ongoing work/initiatives. The evening will begin with a short introduction and update on centre activities before moving into casual breakout conversations.

Virtual Salon: Hybrid — In this virtual salon, we will continue to hear from faculty and students about their research and stories around these questions, and through a virtual medium that continual challenges us to perform such hybridities between technology and the self.

Virtual Salon: Shaping the Future through Stories of the Now — More than ever, we rely on stories to inform us about the world around us, but we also need them to speculate and to create a new scenography for the future. In this virtual salon, let's share stories from our families and homes around the world, and discuss through informal presentations of interdisciplinary research, performance-creation, field work etc. our experiences and thoughts when "life takes control".

Sensorium Virtual Salon — Though current circumstances prevent us from gathering in person, we remain committed to facilitating a space for members of Sensorium to socialize and connect with community. Please join us Thursday, April 30, 2020 from 2:00-4:00pm via Zoom for our Sensorium Virtual Salon! All members of the Sensorium and AMPD community are welcome to attend. The event will start off with a quick intro and update from the Centre, attendee introductions, followed by discussion.

Taien Ng-Chan in conversation with Signy Lynch — Please join us Tuesday, May 7th for the next Sensorium Salon, featuring York University Cinema and Media Arts Professor Taien Ng-Chan.

Claudia Sicondolfo in Conversation with Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum — An evening of conversation between Sensorium Graduate Student Caucus member Claudia Sicondolfo (PhD student, Cinema & Media Arts) and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (Visual Art & Art History faculty member) at the home of Sensorium Director, Laura Levin. Following a screening of a short introductory video-documentary created by Pamela and her collaborator, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Claudia and Pamela will be discussing THE DISRUPTER X PROJECT.

Sensorium Salon: Janine Marchessault in conversation with Melanie Wilmink — Join us at the home of Sensorium Director Michael Longford for an evening of conversation between Sensorium Graduate Student Caucus member Melanie Wilmink (PhD Student, Art History & Visual Culture) and Dr. Janine Marchessault (Cinema & Media Arts). They will be discussing Janine’s new book, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies, published by MIT Press.

Exhibitions and Other Events

Re[new]All — Re[new]All A Sensorium exhibition for The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) A virtual exhibition on Mozilla Hubs - project launched 28 September 2021

Gudskul — Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) Gudskul: Knowledge Garden Festival (October 22 – December 12, 2021) A Sensorium curatorial talk - 28 Oct @ 3pm (in-person; capacity limited)

Life, A Sensorium — Life, A Sensorium An exhibition for the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) Virtual Exhibition - launched 13 October 2020

Proximal Spaces — ‘Proximal Spaces’ is a multi-modal exhibition that explores the environment at multiple scales in concentric circles of proximity to the body. Inspired by Edward Hall’s 1961 notation of intimate (1.5ft), personal (4ft), social (12ft) and public (25ft) spaces in his “Proxemics” diagrams, the artworks are a interpretation for this current time -this time of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Kaleidoscopic Imaginings — Join our evening of live-streamed, multi-media performances, following a kaleidoscopic dramaturgy of complexity discourses as inspired by computational complexity theory gatherings. An experimental collaboration between the ArtSci Salon, the Digital Dramaturgy Lab_squared/ DDL2 and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology.

FACTT 2020: FESTIVAL of ART AND SCIENCE Exhibition — (BE) COMING is an exhibition about change, the impossibility of not changing, the perpetual impermanence and the process of becoming. As we become aware of the need to change in our world, in our planet and our lives, it feels necessary to remember that life is a dynamic process.

Games Night — You are invited to the inaugural Games Night co-organized by the York Popular Culture Working Group, Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and the Department of Computational Arts! This recurring event aims to encourage discussions of digital practices in popular culture by engaging faculty and students in the experience of play.

Sensorium Fall Social — We invite all graduate students, faculty and staff to join us for an evening of conversation and research exchange in the Sensorium Research Loft. Refreshments will be served!

Sensorium Loft Launch — We are throwing a launch party to celebrate the opening of the Sensorium Research Loft, a new space dedicated to supporting intermedial research in the arts. The Sensorium Loft will serve as a research lounge for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as a bookable space for faculty, postdocs, and students for research-related meetings and events.

ICECUBE LED Display [ILDm^3] — Join Sensorium members Mark-David Hosale and Rob Allison, and James Madsen (University of Wisconsin River Falls) for the premiere of their new piece and a lecture at Propeller Gallery in Toronto!

York University