In the exhibition , Czegledy explains, science, technology and art are brought together by artists who share a deep, contemporary sensitivity to nature.��

The exhibition, featured in Kitchener, Ontario, included Aotearoa/New Zealand artists Caro McCaw and Vicki Smith’s collaborative work “Sounding”, which is concerned with the noise pollution that is increasingly disrupting the sonic environment of marine mammals. McCaw and Smith seek to draw attention to spaces of communication for whales and dolphins that we cannot see, in a blue, underwatery light where viewers listen to echolocation by whales and dolphins recorded in the Tasmanian Sea.

In her work “Spontaneous Generation”, Toronto-based artist Elaine Miller makes links between the melting of the polar ice caps and the emergence of viruses, including Ebola, but with obvious resonance for the current covid-19 pandemic. For her part, Kristine Diekman, creating from California, presents “Behold the Tilapia”, in a stop-motion image of the fish, which is known for its resiliency but that is now facing extinction in polluted waters, exacerbated by the stresses of increasing temperatures due to climate change. Both use mixed media, as Tingley describes, while Maayke Schurer, an artist from Victoria, British Columbia, plays with the idea of the sublime in “Spirits of Wasteland” which creates beautiful yet horrific imagery with plastic and other waste that pollutes our environment.��

Along with other featured women artists from across Canada and around the world, Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene, seeks to “critically and poetically investigate our present, unpack the social and cultural impacts of environmental change, speculate about future realities, and suggest solutions for how we might approach life in the Anthropocene.” This demands that we acknowledge the ways that environmental change, including rising oceans and heat waves, affects all of us, both human and other animals and insects. 

In her work, Liz Miller’s project begins with the Lake Ontario shoreline, its histories and ecologies. Half of the world’s population lives by the coasts, which are densely populated and continue to develop, as Miller explains. Climate change means rising seas and storms that are increasingly affecting coastal areas. Miller’s work brings together engineers, educators, biologists, artists, and youth activists working across disciplines and across species. Through shared data sets, soundscapes, and more than forty short portraits of coastal communities from nine countries, this collaborative project considers the challenge of our collective survival.��

In their different ways, each of these women artists invites us to consider the realities of living in the Anthropocene, an era in which human beings have irrevocably shaped the natural world, with devastating consequences for many species including our own. But these artists ask us to do more than witness. They invite us to engage with urgent ecological questions and to develop new relationships  -- and deep love -- for the ecoystems that sustain all of us. 

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“Creating Space: Precarious Status Women Leading Local Pandemic Responses” is a collaborative, two-year project that brings together five organized research units (ORUs) and six researchers representing five 91��ɫ Faculties, as well as 10 partners, working on issues of equity, diversity and inclusion to advance a feminist response to the impacts of COVID-19 through systemic change.

The project was awarded $667,609 and aims to centre precarious status women’s experiences to support self-determination and accelerate systemic change to reduce gender-based violence, promote workplace health and safety and increase economic security.

Associate Vice-President Research Jennifer Hyndman says the successful application was made possible through a groundbreaking collaborative effort. “Such collaboration across Faculties, schools, and disciplinary boundaries is unprecedented among the ORUs at 91��ɫ,” she said.

The community-based project will be led by Professor Luann Good Gingrich (director, Global Labour Research Centre; Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies) and Professor Heidi Matthews (Osgoode Hall Law School), the project's co-principal investigators, along with four research directors: Professor Elaine Coburn (director, Centre for Feminist Research; International Studies at Glendon Campus); Professor Deborah McGregor (Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice; Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change/Osgoode Hall Law School); Professor Gertrude Mianda (director, Harriet Tubman Institute; Gender & Women's Studies at Glendon Campus); and Professor Yu-Zhi Joel Ong (director, Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art & Technology; School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design).

“Our project will take advantage of this unprecedented moment of significant appetite for new ways of thinking and living together that are more just and sustainable,” said Matthews. “As devastating as the pandemic has been for women and gender-diverse individuals, particularly those from Indigenous nations and racialized communities, it has also pried open space to dismantle the otherwise rigid status quo structures that work to marginalize these groups.”

“Creating Space” involves five 91��ɫ ORUs – the Centre for Feminist Research, the , the , the , and  – and nine community partners representing female temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers, Indigenous women and undocumented frontline workers: ; .; ; Black Creek Community Health Centre; ; ; ; ; and . The project will also be supported by its international human rights law collaborator, the .

The multidisciplinary team brings together expertise in labour, digital arts, international law and human rights, Indigenous legal traditions and knowledges, feminist and Indigenous methodologies, and migration and Black diaspora studies.

“We are committed to a collaborative approach that emphasizes relationships and mutual learning, and opening space for creativity and innovation to reimagine the legal and economic systems that create status insecurity for many women in Canada,” said Good Gingrich.

Funding for this project highlights 91��ɫ's efforts in working to support gender equality during the COVID-19 recovery. Sara Slinn, associate dean research and institutional relations at Osgoode Hall Law School, said "Osgoode is very proud to be involved in this timely and important project."

LA&PS associate dean research and graduate studies, Ravi de Costa, said the grant is a testament to the strength of social science and humanities research at 91��ɫ – not only in LA&PS, but across the University. He commended Good Gingrich and Matthews for putting together a "superb" group of researchers from five faculties.

"The research they will do in this project will provide a critical and largely missing understanding of the effects of the pandemic on some of the most marginalized members of society.”

The project will:

• design collective, autonomy-focused, and locally rooted strategies to address economic insecurity, frontline workplace safety and systemic gender-based violence
• launch a new human rights initiative to devise innovative legal arguments that disrupt dominant legal paradigms by supporting Indigenous-led self-determination
• create a participatory, experimental multimedia digital framework to shift the public conversation and accelerate systemic change around gender and status precarity.

Good Gingrich and Matthews say they anticipate cross-Canada impact. Researchers and graduate students contributing to the project will work with partner organizations to build capacity and support mutual knowledge exchange. This work will shape transformative policy, innovative and critical strategies for legal intervention, and change the conversation on a national level.

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Humans often introduce toxic elements into the environment; researchers then try to mitigate the damage. A refreshing and highly original project from the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD) introduces a new paradigm altogether by offering something prolific or life affirming.

Terra Et Venti,��by AMPD professor and interim director of Sensorium Joel Ong, infuses plant microbial DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, the molecule that contains the genetic code of organisms) with poetry and thereby engenders this literary art form into the plant’s genome. Curiously, this venture is borne of the fusion of two seemingly disparate fields: science and art or, more specifically, plant biology and poetry.

Ong is a media artist and serial collaborator whose work connects scientific and artistic approaches to the environment. He sits down with�����������Բ��ٴǰ�����to discuss the evolution of his bioart and��Terra Et Venti.

��:��How did you first become interested in bioart?

A:��I was a budding ecologist. A lot of my notable memories were outdoors and sensorially oriented – visual, tactile or sound-based. These set the framework for a more creative way of thinking about the sciences.

Bioart is typically hard to define but it’s a creative strategy for making living art, and a speculative practice that presents views of a biotechnological future that may be considered controversial, chipping away at the essence of what we know or recognize as life. Bioart creates an aesthetic language for us.

Q: One of the tenets of bioart is that the environment is active.

A:��Through my graduate work in nanotechology and sound, it became apparent how active the environment is. I was inspired by early visions of the atmosphere as an infinite and everlasting repository of our actions and utterances. This is something computing pioneer Charles Babbage (1791-1871) spoke of.

I wondered about encoding information into the wind or listening to what is airborne. Following some experiments in sonification and poetic impressions of the wind, I began focusing on the genetic materials of airborne particles.

Q: Tell us about your first work that looked at ecological cycles in this way.

A:��We flew weather balloons holding petri dishes and aerial monitoring equipment to observe bacteria in the air. We found highly mobile bacteria Pseudomonas syringae (P.syringae) that are best known as plant pathogens, but they also ride the water cycle to transition between soil, plants and air.

We learned that��P.syringae��also catalyzes ice formation. And so, it is implicated in the next frontier of climate change action as one particle that could be used in solar geoengineering.

There are related, controversial experiments, backed by investors like Bill Gates, which aim to reflect the sun’s radiation away from the earth through increasing cloud cover in the stratosphere. Naturally, there are ethical considerations because the atmosphere has less obvious boundaries and such actions may cause profound changes in weather patterns.

Q: What is the��Terra Et Venti���������𳦳�?

A:��Terra Et Venti��is a research-creation project that aims to develop a multi-species empathy towards the organisms in the air. My work with��P.syringae, and the common weed��Arabidopsis Thaliana, is conducted at the Guttman Laboratory (University of Toronto).

I introduced poetry into its genome, imagining the bacteria would ride on the plant’s respiration cycles into the atmosphere and form clouds. The clouds would make rain, which would contain the bacteria. So, we would get poetry embedded in rain.

Q: On a microbiological level, describe the process of creating genetic poetry.

A:��Through standard lab techniques, you can customize what strand of DNA you want, have it made and inserted into the bacteria.

In this case, a list of possible phrases was generated by a machine-learning algorithm trained on the works of Argentinian writer/poet/philosopher Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) who conceptualized the universe as a vast library.

I used a cipher to re-code each letter of the text into DNA bases, then these were run through a lab program to determine which DNA fragments would be least obstructive for the bacteria.

I ended up with “Terra et Venti,” which means “between the air and wind.”

Q: What is the message you would like to convey?

A:��Existing avenues of research in climate geoengineering are dominated by a desire for control. This underlying philosophy concerns me. I am interested in ways to soften this approach. I’m currently working on theoretical ideas around queering the atmosphere, and how computational creativity can promote a “strangeness” in this new cultural frontier of the atmosphere. Working with microorganisms is an important backdrop to discuss how we can be better stewards of our environment.

Q: Where has��Terra Et Venti��been exhibited?

A:��It has been shown at the Kittredge Gallery in Washington’s University of Puget Sound (2018). It is currently in the exhibition “Art’s work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping our Genetic Futures” at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design at the North Carolina Museum of Art.��Terra Et Venti��will also be featured in “Life Studies” at OCAD University in October 2020.

To learn more about Sensorium, visit the��. For more about Ong, visit his��.

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at��; watch our new��, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the��, a glimpse of the year’s successes.

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ,��muellerm@yorku.ca

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The School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD) at 91��ɫ has launched two important ventures in the span of four short years ��̶ ��Sensorium and the AMPD Motion Media Studio @ Cinespace – both of which embody the leading edge of creative practice at the intersection of the arts and technology. This remarkable and comprehensive Faculty envelops and embraces technology. It is unique in that it both creates devices and the content for new and existing devices, incorporating partnerships that are facilitated by a genuine and highly imaginative kind of engagement.

It’s not just the arts talking to the arts, it’s an interdisciplinary endeavour where projects are immersed in legal, medical, urban planning, business and many other realms.

“We stand on the threshold of a dramatically new, radically different kind of arts future – a world in which the communication of our ideas and their physical and virtual expression have extraordinary value and are becoming the new currency of the creative economy,” explains Professor Shawn Brixey, AMPD dean.

Sensorium fosters collaborative research and encourages partnerships

Sensorium, an ambitious research centre that opened in 2013, is based around one central and compelling idea: the impact of digital technologies on the creative knowledge industries. As a result, one would be hard-pressed to find a more all-encompassing idea of art. This new environment supports cross-disciplinary work in application and content creation, artistic and scientific inquiry, policy development and critical discourse in digital media arts.

“Sensorium serves as a catalyst for new ideas and experimentation, linking creative expertise and labs in AMPD, fostering collaborative research, and encouraging community and industry partnerships,” says Professor Doug Van Nort, interim director of Sensorium, Canada Research Chair in Digital Performance and the founding director of the DisPerSion (DIStributed PERformance and Sensorial ImmersION) Lab.

The eight key research areas in Sensorium, which effectively marry digital technologies with human factors, are as follows:

• Future Cinema: 3D and interactive cinema, ubiquitous screens and architectural projections;
• Advanced Digital Imaging and Form Finding: animation, motion graphics, and 3D modelling;
• Sustainability for Theatre and the Expanded Stage: lighting and sustainable technologies and motion tracking;
• Art/Science: bio art, collaborative methodologies between artists and scientists, and new scientific innovation and understanding;
• Mobile and Augmented Media: digital storytelling and virtual environments;
• Interactive Environments and Games: human-computer interface, computer graphics, avatars and game engines, and data visualization;
• The Digital Commons and Social Media: digital archives, e-citizenship and activist media; and
• Informatics and Data Visualization: data mining, signal processing and information aesthetics.

Lab bridges technology and art to tell enriched stories

AMPD Professor Caitlin Fisher’s Augmented Reality (AR) Lab is a perfect example of the groundbreaking work undertaken at Sensorium, and the interface between technology and art.

AR refers to adding a digital layer to what we see and experience. Fisher’s state-of-the-art lab offers some of the most advanced technology available anywhere in the world. Here, she investigates the idea of storytelling through AR hardware development, software creation and content development. She invents, designs, builds and deploys sophisticated AR technology that, when worn by the viewer as headgear, effectively creates the illusion of having something else in the visual space. AR Glass, for example, is a pair of glasses that provides digital information about what the viewer is seeing.

“This is an important point in time for Canadian innovation in AR research, with practical application,” emphasizes Fisher, a former Fulbright Research Chair and Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture. “We are on the cusp of what is predicted to become a $200 billion industry.”

This lab, facilitated through an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, is also a prime example of partnerships, as students here are often involved in international partnerships. The AR Lab itself is part of the Ontario Augmented Reality Network and has collaborated with Georgia Tech, the Ontario Science Centre, TIFF/Nexus and Millenium3 Engineering among others.

AMPD Motion Media Studio builds strong connections between industry and education

In May 2016, AMPD got another huge boost: a $2.5 million gift from Cinespace Film Studios and the Mirkopoulos family to create a new 91��ɫ AMPD Motion Media Studio @ Cinespace. The new facility opened to students in fall 2016.

Located next to professional sound stages being used for major television and film productions, the Motion Media Studio offers students unique experiential learning opportunities, hands-on training in new media technologies and direct exposure to industry.

More specifically, it enables AMPD students to explore the creation, convergence and application of next-generation arts and entertainment media technologies, with a focus on moving image production, including 3D stereoscopic cinema; virtual, augmented and mixed reality; interactive performance; gaming; interactive data visualization; and more.

Professor Michael Longford, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design

“These state-of-the-art facilities support the creation of powerful and innovative technologies, and build strong connections between industry and education that are key to supporting our emerging cultural leaders,” says Michael Longford, associate professor in computational arts, who played a key role in getting the AMPD Motion Media Studio @ Cinespace up and running.

One example is particularly captivating: This new facility comes equipped with Organic Motion’s markerless motion capture technology OpenStage2, eliminating the need for the bodysuits and markers currently used in film animation. With this technology, 91��ɫ students will be able to create 3D animations, design interactive games and simulations, and integrate virtual performers for dance and theatre productions, without complicated setups.

“The Motion Media Studio @ Cinespace will electrify the imagination of a new generation of artists and prepare our students to be front runners in tomorrow’s creative digital sphere,” adds Brixey.

For more information, visit the����or read past��YFile��articles about����and the��.

By Megan Mueller, manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

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