When my initial interviewee (someone with a large amount of involvement and a fairly high position in anti-oppression education) had to back out part way through, my immediate reaction was to panic. Then, I remembered that, actually, even if they didn’t have particular titles, there were many people around me who had been engaged in this Read More
Joanna Berzowska founded XS Labs in 2002 at Concordia, where they focus on “the development and design of electronic textiles, responsive clothing, wearable technologies, reactive materials, and squishy interfaces.” Previous to XS Labs, Berzowska studied and worked at the MIT Media Lab, and she co-founded International Fashion Machines with Maggie Orth. She holds a BA Read More
Studies of the environment have a history of being characterized by a deep division between scientific research and humanities scholarship. In the same way, literary ecocriticism has been engrained within a critical lineage associated with an American wilderness ethic and Jeffersonian logic of “culture” in opposition to “the environment.” In conversation with anti-making discourses, that Read More
The Webster Library Transformation is underway and in the University’s postings about the work being done, the word ‘renovation’ is conspicuously absent possibly because it carries connotations of disrepair, age and maintenance of an old system. Maybe that’s also why it’s being touted as a “next-generation” library, which makes a kind of avowal of the Read More
The Village, a Gay Titanic Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, grounded as it is in our course in the idea of the media lab, made me think of a major concern I have when it comes to my scholarship on city space. Specifically, it made me think of the gay village, and Montreal’s Gay Village Read More
“…There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places — places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society — which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the Read More
“The content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” — Marshall McLuhan In 2001, while doing a residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canadian sound artist Janet Cardiff recorded “Forest Walk,” an audio walk that takes listeners on a twelve-minute Read More
In an effort to unpack the notion of the Chinese typewriter as emblematic of an unassailably perverse difference in ontological positioning, it is essential to consider the manner in which the threat that the typewriter represents is situated (where, in other words, the discourse machine-gun is pointing). Rather than simply limit the Chinese typewriter’s cultural Read More