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
On the day of July 23, 1926, a strange case passed before Judge Harry Trelawney Eve. On the surface, it seemed like a pretty straightforward matter of copyright in which one Geraldine Cummins was contesting the rights of one Frederick Bligh Bond to a work called The Chronicle of Cleophas. The thing is: Geraldine Cummins Read More
Most of the world today runs on ‘fixed-term contracts’ (Barbrook, 1995, p. 2). Long gone is the notion of staying in one job or company for an entire career. When I began my career as a historian, Mulroney had decimated the history staff at Parks Canada, and many of the community museums in Nova Scotia Read More
For the last few weeks we’ve been talking about assemblage, objects, infrastructures and articulations. But we’ve also been talking about bodies. It seems impossible to escape perceiving, feeling and thinking about the world from our subjective, human position, even when we employ object oriented ontology to level the playing field between humans and things, as we did this Read More
Approaches to AI in virtual systems and Minecraft Yesterday, while wandering around the mLab and procrastinating between deciding to go to bed at a reasonable hour or stay up and work on midterms, I came across something I have seen many times in my Minecraft play. A small non-agressive mob was stuck between the ocean and a Read More
Flaubert: 20 rutas consists of a series of performances made by Alejandra Jiménez in Colombia, where she delivered speeches based on texts by Gustave Flaubert to random users of the Bogotan public transport system. It is an intervention in the sense that it gets to an audience without it knowing or even wanting to experience Read More
This week, instead of a weeknote focused on #BigFriedChickenCompany and the work my comrades Marie Christine, Sean and Saeed have been contributing to, I’d like to devote some thought to a greater picture with regards to Minecraft. Minecraft is somewhat singular. It’s a computer program which can be run individually by one person, or on a Read More
Since the obsession with the Orient began, western civilization has created many misconceptions about the culture it has worked so hard to imitate. Edward Said describes the Orient as “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (2), as it not only expresses but also represents a cultural and ideological mode of discourse. Said’s Read More
Analog or digital? Fingers or digits? When NEO rings a bell, do you RETURN or ENTER? Is the Final Frontier, or the Pen-Ultimate? Writing with-out a page? Will this save autonomy from automation, belt chastity from rhythmic autofeedback excess? Or…did you not see this as the impetus for a radicalized aesthetic practice? Predating the release Read More