RUBIX 10

Named after the Ukrainian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Canadian feminist Decameron Collective’s Memory Eternal (Вічная Пам'ять) is a single user a Virtual Reality work designed for Quest 2 that features seventeen distinct storytelling works which include 360 video, interactive and spatialized sound, AI generated images and video, film, as well as text. Set in a surreal and watery landscape, the works investigate our shared experiences of grief and loss at personal, societal, and planetary scales. The design of the world and the works in it center around a question: In the wake of crises, what do and should we remember, and how? Interactants’ journey through the world takes them through experiences of mourning, sitting with, and awakening to new futures.

Members of the Decameron Collective: Jolene Armstrong Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O’Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, and Monique Tschofen. Coding: Hendrick deHaan

Marionettes are widely considered the most sophisticated, nuanced, aesthetically powerful but very difficult to learn type of performance puppetry. The marionette artist has to rehearse endlessly before one develops the sufficient level of technique of marionette’s manipulation. Usually artists practice in front of a mirror, which does not provide a very comfortable angle of sightline and creates the mirrored / reverse effect, or in front of a camera and has to take into consideration possible distortions, and limitations of the zoom ration. In both cases, the view is 2D not really 3D. 

RUBIX is a peer-reviewed journal that strives to cultivate ongoing, multi-directional conversations beyond traditional publication boundaries. RUBIX serves as a platform for sharing various creative research and emerging scholarly dialogues, encompassing both text and practice-based approaches, while facilitating the exchange of knowledge among different communities of practice.

Using publicly available data from the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority, this project translates measurements of wind, water, temperature and precipitation from TRCA Gauging Station 19 into a soundscape. The piece is around 24 minutes long and covers the period from Jan 1 to Dec 31 2023. 

A discussion about the meanings we hold about how one moves around in the city. Glideology resembles a graphic novel yet isn't a traditional novel but rather a stroll through ideas about public space and how our movement choices are tied to many considerations.

As an absurd gesture, myself and two of my colleagues (Risa Horowitz, and Alex Kurina) canoed the Black Creek in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Starting from a location near Jane Street and the 401, where the concrete embankments begin, we traversed this very urban waterway until the point where it merges with the Humber River (near Dundas Street and Royal York Road). Black Creek, like many other “lost” waterways in the Greater Toronto Area, has been drastically altered by humans: transformed from a natural watershed to a utilitarian and polluted concrete runoff basin.

Fashion Studies is an open-access academic journal dedicated to diverse ways of knowing and sharing knowledge in fashion. Published by The Creative School’s Centre for Fashion & Systemic Change, the journal welcomes innovative scholarship and creative work across disciplines, including the social sciences, humanities, and creative fields. Fashion Studies engages critically with fashion’s systems while imagining new possibilities, challenging existing structures, and envisioning a more equitable, just, and inclusive world.

Scorch is a music programming language designed to be straightforward for those not experienced in traditional programming languages. Designed by the author, initially for algorithmic composition as a MIDI generating VST plugin, Scorch is ultimately intended to be used for live coding and a variety of media computing applications. Scorch has various AI implementations including an AI collaborator similar to the Autopia project which allows for collaboration with AI and human performers. 

Along with Scorch’s AI implementations as briefly described above, this talk considers the wider possibilities for using large language models such as ChatGPT in the context of  a human-computer performance environments and how they can assist the Scorch user’s learning process and possibly act as a virtual/AI collaborator for both music production and performance using Scorch. This talk will also explore the wider ethical implications of using generative AI systems such as ChatGPT within new creative computing languages such as Scorch. 

This project expands on earlier work 'GCM Graduates and their Social Construct Relationships within Graphic Communications-related Industries' to identify trends related to compensation in and between graphics affiliated industries; advertising and marketing, commercial print, publishing and consumer goods packaging. This includes analysis by graduation cohorts, length of tenure, organizational level, and gender.

I will present on behalf of the XJO team regarding our survey of a representative sample of 1,042 Canadian news consumers, most of whom accessed news daily. The survey focuses on their perspectives on how they want AI to be used in journalism. In short, the survey results highlight (1) AI and transparency, (2) audience trust, and (3) accuracy as major concerns among the participants. 

This presentation describes Worry Lines, a wearable textile art piece and performance by Stephen Severn in New York City in the winter of 2024. The project endeavoured to make visible the anxiety-producing experience of living within systems of power that conflict one’s identity. This tension was explored through the material process of rope coil technique, guerrilla performance, and the manifestations of “worry” as an embodied state and a political tactic. Over time, the repetition of certain facial expressions results in worry lines. The wearable piece emphasized these physical bearings of emotion while its wearing/performance was an activation; it was an agitation designed to worry-back the ongoing mechanics of Postcolonial oppression enforced through the built environment. Queer Textile Performance as Spatial Disruption will focus on Worry Lines’ exploration of the intersections of materiality, costume, performance, identity, and the body as tools that activated queer phenomenological (dis)orientations and a research-creation methodology to confront and transform space.