Friday, March 11, 2016

Contributing Artist - 100 McCaul Lobby

Ana Jofre

In this interactive data visualization, members of the audience will have access to a keyboard on which they can enter a search term. The script will first scrape Twitter for recent tweets containing the search term entered by the user. These tweets will be displayed onscreen in a streaming format. If the user does not enter a new term in that time, this is where it gets interesting. The script will then identify the most common term in the initial scraped tweets and will do a second twitter scrape to output all tweets that share this new second term. This process will reiterate with subsequent terms until a new term is entered into the keyboard. I am curious about where each initial search term will go conceptually as the code iterates.

The experience of this work is intended to simulate important facets of the experience of linking through articles online —sometimes one will end up in a very unrelated place after a few iterations, whereas other searches take us into more detail on our original topic. The project interrogates our intuitions about the internet’s connection to distractibility, short attention spans, roving curiosity, and even the open-minded receptivity to new information. It also speaks to the rapidity of the evolution of information.

Ana Jofre received her PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto, did Post-doctoral work at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg MD, and taught at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte for six years before transitioning her career towards the arts. She has recently completed her MFA at OCAD University in Toronto. Her publications and conference presentations cover a wide range of intellectual interests, from physics to cultural studies, and she has exhibited her artwork extensively. Her current creative and research interests include figurative sculpture, the uncanny, puppetry, robotics, embodiment, and data visualization. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at OCAD University in the visual analytics lab.


For more information or to contact the artist: http://onewomancaravan.net/index.html

Monday, February 22, 2016

Opening Reception: #nature Artwork by featured artist Sean Martindale


March 12, 7 - 10 Opening Reception: #nature
Artwork by featured artist Sean Martindale
OCADU Graduate Gallery at 205 Richmond

Sean Martindale is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Toronto, Canada. His interventions activate public and semi-public spaces to encourage engagement, often focused on ecological and social issues. His playful works question and suggest alternate possibilities for existing spaces, infrastructures and materials found in urban environments. Frequently, Martindale uses salvaged goods and live plants in unexpected ways that prompt conversations and interaction.


Martindale’s projects have been featured on countless prominent sites online, as well as in traditional media such as print, radio, broadcast television and film. His practice has a global following and has been written about in countries all around the world, and in multiple languages. Martindale was profiled for the first episode of the CBC’s Great Minds of Design, one of his lectures was filmed by TVO for their Big Ideas series, and his work was also included in the feature-length documentary This Space Available, released in 2011.



The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts (TFVA) awarded Martindale their prestigious Artist Prize for 2012, and thee Ontario Arts Council granted him a Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2013. He holds an MFA from the Interdisciplinary Master’s of Art, Media and Design program at OCAD University in Toronto, and a Bachelor of Design from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. He was the Decennial Hancock Lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Hart House where his work was on view in 2011. Martindale has taken part in multiple solo and group exhibitions, and his projects have been shown in cities such as Montreal, Madrid, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenszhen, Victoria, Vancouver, Venice, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Oxford, London England, Las Vegas, Charlottetown, St John’s, Minneapolis, Paris, Angers, Brussels, Berlin and Doha. 2012 marked the opening of NOW, Martindale’s major two-person show with Pascal Paquette at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of the AGO’s Toronto Now contemporary project series, and he has since exhibited work multiple times at the gallery. His work has also been seen in such places as The Royal Ontario Museum for Hot Docs, at Toronto’s City Hall for Asian Heritage Month, in Montreal for Art Souterrain / Nuit Blanche 2013, and in St John’s Newfoundland for the Art Marathon Festival 2013. Also in 2013, he was the lead artist on the tallest mural in the world, the result of a community project in St James Town, Toronto, with local youth, STEPS and the Toronto Muralists. Sean has continued to lead other notable community arts projects, and has also taken part in a number of residencies. Among recent projects was Martindale’s major installation outside City Hall for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2015, including integrated video collaborations with JP King.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

PDF Schedule #trending


#trending: mobilizing art & culture 


Schedule: Saturday, March 12

6 - 7:30 pm Keynote Speaker: Janaya Khan 
Janaya Khan, known as Future in the Black Lives Matter movement, is a black, queer, gender-nonconforming activist, staunch Afrofuturist, social-justice educator and boxer based in Toronto. As the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, they are committed to black liberation, transformative justice and indigenous sovereignty and operate through a black transfeminist lens. They have previously been featured in the Feminist Wire and RaceBaitR and can be found shutting it down at an action near you.
Tickets are free with registration: eventbrite
Location: 100 McCaul, Auditorium 190
OCAD University

8 - 9 am Free registration at 100 McCaul

9 - 9:30 Opening Remarks
Conference Organizer Treva Pullen (CADN)
Dr. Robert Diaz (FoLAS/SIS)

9:30 - 11 am Conscious Fringes: Trends from Ends to Edges
Moderated by Treva Pullen
Mark Dudiak
Marc de Pape
John-Patrick Ayson
Geographical, ideological and cultural ‘fringes’ having shaped much of the twenty-first century’s speculative imaginary and its imagery. Philosophy, art and design have experienced a bursting open of ontological parameters and a surge towards hybridized methodologies. The digitized space of the Internet, which has powerfully influenced these trends is also considered to be a space without border or periphery, where the ‘fringe,’ practices and ideologies of the analog world are able to blossom. This panel looks at such peripheral philosophies and art forms: flickering post-human ontologies, new-media sound art, and tomb design.
11am - 12:30 pm Selfies, Self-Care, Socializing: Constructing and Deconstructing the Online Self
Moderated by Andrea Pelletier
Sophie Bishop
Estelle Wathieu
Lauren Fournier
Margeaux Feldman
Jenna-Lee Forde
Social media provides many tools for constructing digitized yet fully formed online selves. With an influx of self-photographing, self-documenting and self-surveillence technologies, to what extent are our digital avatars both genuine and constructed? How are these identities formed and what are the implications of this online performativity?  Responding to questions of age, gender, privacy and beauty through examining artists such as Petra Collins, YouTube make-up tutorials and the discursive trend towards ‘self care,’ this panel looks at how these new considerations of the ‘self’ are affecting visual culture.
12:30 - 1:30 pm Lunch

1:45 - 2 pm Performance: First Things First 
Christopher Lacroix
afallenhorse

2 - 3:30 pm The Word Made Digital
Moderated by Katie Connell
Fan Wu
Mary C. Baumstark
Merray Gerges
As communication via devices becomes ubiquitous, the notion that ‘words are sacred’ is increasingly both a cliché and an untruth. This panel is designed to trouble this notion through interrogating the influence of new media on writing and speaking. With a publishing industry in upheaval, as well as online dissemination of philosophy and viral sharing, writing can be metareflective of these shifts. Words, and our ability to choose the right ones, are extremely important to us when expressing and asserting ourselves in moments of both marginalization and empowerment.
3:45 - 5:15 pm Performance and Solidarity
Moderated by Dr. Robert Diaz
Barbora Racevičiūtė
Victor Arroyo
Lina El-Shamy
Alina Tigountsova 
News spreads rapidly and in myriad forms of new media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs are but a few deterritorialized news sources. Additionally, these online forums have become critical sites for the proliferation and explosion of both grass roots activism and international movements. #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNoMore, #KillBillC51 and the Syrian refugee crisis have taken shape on social media, organizing and inspiring pivotal protests amongst bodies in public spaces. Yet social media has also resulted in both corporatized activism and what has been popularly decried as ‘slacktivism’ – an online attendance to politically charged protests, marches and gartherings that is not physically carried out. This panel interrogates the digital sides of activism, hegemony and the popular media responding to it: surveillance technologies, television and hashtags.
6 - 7:30 Keynote Speaker: Janaya Khan
Opening remarks from Dr. Andrea Fatona (CADN)

7 - 10 pm Opening Reception: #nature
Artwork by featured artist Sean Martindale
OCADU Graduate Gallery at 205 Richmond

The 2016 CADN Graduate Conference at OCAD U is dedicated to the perspectives of emerging scholars. The interdisciplinary all-ages conference will promote an open space for dialogue about the art historical, socio-cultural and political trends of the contemporary moment. We hope to foster a welcoming atmosphere that takes into account accessibility, privilege and sustainability thereby encouraging not only inventive and radical conversations during the conference but future collaborations continuing the trend of giving voice to new and exciting ideas.  

About Me

My photo
Jenn Snider, Co.Project Manager
Marsya Maharani, Co.Project Manager
Marianne Fenton
Melanie Girdwood
Brittany Higgens
Melanie Schnidrig
Sam Strong
Theresa Slater, Volunteer Coordinator