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LAUNCH OF HEXAGRAM INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAMMING OF 2021-2022 EMERGENCE/Y @ ARS ELECTRONICA 2021 - Sept 8 to 12

In 2021, Hexagram celebrates its 20th anniversary. The network was created in 2001 to support collaborative research-creation projects amongst its members from eight Québec research institutions, as well as with local and international partners from academic, cultural and creative sectors. Over the last 20 years, Hexagram has played a seminal role in the recognition of practice-based art and design research in Canada and abroad, as well as in promoting knowledge-sharing activities between artistic and scientific disciplines. Today, Hexagram comprises 46 co-investigators, nearly 50 collaborators and over 200 students from various disciplines including the live arts, design, and media arts, while also connecting to disciplines in the social sciences and humanities as well as natural sciences and engineering.

In 2020, Hexagram’s mandate was renewed by the Québec Government for an additional 7 years, based on a proposed programme aiming to catalyze collective, interdisciplinary knowledge and to engage publics with cultures and practices that address current urgent and global scientific and technological challenges. In the first year of this new cycle we also saw the arrival of the global pandemic. This context emphasized the necessity to collaboratively propose new knowledge, new imaginaries, and to harness desirable futures in a period that is characterised by profound change and a constant state of emergence/y.

About the theme EMERGENCE/Y - Arts and Sciences for Troubled Times

“We are all living within a world where it is now easier to imagine the collapse of all life than imagine reinventing the right ways to live.” Jay Jordan

In 2021, it is now a cliche to say that we have lived through an “unprecedented year” - particularly when the state of the pre-COVID world was in many ways unprecedented. Yet, the combination of the global pandemic and its resulting political-economic fallout, the continuing ecological crises, and the social-cultural explosion of long simmering systemic injustice and inequality have made the entangling of human, machine and natural orders ever more apparent, with radical consequences for all forms of life on this planet. The future appears uncertain, unstable, unsettling and unknown.

How do we respond? Métis and University of Toronto STS scholar Michelle Murphy writes that “assemblies of technical practices have generated not just facts but also speculative phenomena that are a felt part of the world, even if intangible. How do speculative social science [or research-creation] practices produce a world where undecided futures are brought into the present?” Murphy refers to this as “technoscience dreaming.” In other words, in an increasingly uncertain world, how can RC enable us to dream and trial new possible futures? In order to respond with reflection and action to the wicked problems of our global situation, Hexagram will develop a thematic programme of activities that will run from September 2021 to June 2022. We explore the role that research-creation can play, at the broader intersection of the arts and sciences, in tackling these troubled times in order to offer new possibilities, hopes and visions of a more just, equitable and open future.

Exploring hybrid modalities of presentation, discussion, and outreach, this year’s ongoing activities will bring together Hexagram members and current and prospective partners whose approaches are equally dedicated to addressing the current complex challenges through research situated at the intersections of the arts and sciences. Through concepts, ideas and projects we will develop a series of public experiments consisting of hybrid gatherings and discussions, roundtables, reading groups, calls for written and collaborative projects, and a large public facing summit in the spring of 2022.

Rencontres Interdisciplinaires : Launch at Ars Electronica 2021 - September 8 to 12.

Hexagram’s 2021-2022 Interdisciplinary season programming on the theme EMERGENCE/Y will launch the week of September 8-12, in the framework of the 2021 edition of the Ars Electronica Festival. Hexagram will present a series of synchronous and asynchronous streaming-based events specifically curated and produced for the Festival. The events and projects were selected by an ad-hoc jury following a call which was open to Hexagram members. Over 50 co-investigator members, student members and Hexagram collaborators, as well as their own collaborators, will contribute their work, research and insightful live discussions to the four-day programme.

Project Manager: Marc-André Cossette
Programming coordinator: Isabelle Boucher
Communications: Marine Theunissen (Hexagram) and Stephanie Creaghan (Milieux Institute)
Contact: Manuelle Freire, General Coordinator - Hexagram

Sensitive membranes

Authors

Brice Ammar-Khodja

Brice Ammar-Khodja est designer graphique, artiste-plasticien et doctorant. Son travail se situe à l’intersection des arts numériques, de la science des matériaux et des études sensorielles. Il poursuit actuellement une thèse dirigée en cotutelle entre l’Université Concordia à Montréal (Individualized Program) et EnsadLab (Reflective Interaction, programme SACRe).

This video presents three research-creation projects that explore the concept of screen-membranes through different dispositifs: Breath.am, Fossilation, and Blob Detection. Not only connected with their environment and the public but also sensitive with the latter, these works engage relations pertaining to material science, data physicalization, and sensory studies directly bonded with socio-political and environmental problematics. By investigating different materialities in motion linked with the discrete signals of their surroundings, this presentation aims to discuss new ways to rebuild interconnections between the milieux, the human and more-than-human agents and the build environment.

A video by Brice Ammar-Khodja narrated by Jean-Louis Cassarino.

Breath.am (2019)
A performative installation by Brice Ammar-Khodja and VH SOUND.

Synopsis
Immersed into the heart of the restaurant-gallery Dalan Art Gallery in Erevan (Armenia), Breath.am is an interactive installation composed of three happenings and an exhibition. Inspired by the “legendary Armenian hospitality”, this installation invites the public in an improvised dialogue. Whereas the participants drink, eat and debate about the Armenian “art of living”, wired electronic sensors crawling all over the table monitor and collect in real-time related to breathing (alcohol concentrations in the air, voice pitch) and movements (agitation, vibration). The environment seems to answer to each participant’s actions: light distortions arise on the table, different soundscapes emergent from acoustic membranes and the table’s artifacts slowly propel all along the diner. Not only observer but also participant, the table seems like it wants to communicate with the public and intervein in the debate, sometimes disturbing and sometimes stimulating one’s speech.

The exhibition space turns into an experimental laboratory activated by the merge of both the public and the artists. The performance seeks to collect, produce, and archive different aspects of the Armenian culture, which transmission remains through a traditional orality.

Creation and Production team
Coordination: Brice Ammar-Khodja
Design, production and computing: Brice Ammar-Khodja
Interactive sound design: VH SOUND
Performative music: Alexander Hakobyan & VH SOUND

Aknowledgment
Breath.am has receive the support of Atelier Mondial (CH) and Kulturdialog Armenien (AR).
The performative installation was exhibited at Dalan Art Gallery in the frame of the Second International Print Biennale Yerevan 2019.

Fossilation (2021)
A collective project carried out by Brice Ammar-Khodja, Alexandra Bachmayer, Samuel Bianchini, Marie-Pier Boucher, Didier Bouchon, Maria Chekhanovich, Matthew Halpenny, Alice Jarry, Raphaëlle Kerbrat, Annie Leuridan, Vanessa Mardirossian, Asa Perlman, Philippe Vandal, Lucile Vareilles.

Synopsis
A large bioplastic membrane hovers above the ground like a film strip. Its colour is animated by the fluctuating lights and cables stretching out towards the ceiling. Rather than being the result of shooting an image, these motifs result from a slow form-taking process: the imprint of an actual electronic display device. Like a fossil from our own era, the components printed onto matter slowly disapear. The membrane and its sensors are connected to the pipes of Centre Pompidou and convert the fluxes of the building into electricity. The unstable light thus reacts to interferences originating from the capturing of the space's residual energies and enhance an ecosystem in which the image is composed with the space. Alice Jarry : Design and Computation Arts, dir. Milieux Speculative Life Biolab Samuel Bianchini : EnsadLab, dir. Reflective Interaction et Chaire arts et sciences Marie-Pier Boucher : iSchool de l’Université de Toronto Missauga.

Creation and Production team
Coordination: Alice Jarry, Samuel Bianchini, Marie-Pier Boucher
Experimenting and making the bioplastic membrane: Alexandra Bachmayer, Maria Chekhanovich, Vanessa Mardirossian with the collaboration of Brice Ammar-Khodja
Capturing the residual energy: Brice Ammar-Khodja, Didier Bouchon, Matthew Halpenny, Raphaëlle Kerbrat, Asa Perlman, Philippe Vandal
Light design: Annie Leuridan with the collaboration of Louise Rustan
Computer programming: Didier Bouchon
Overseeing the production of the work and its spatial installation: Lucile Vareilles
Technical support for production and/or editing: Théo Chauvirey, Corentin Loubet, Joséphine Mas, Simon Paugoy.

Documentation team
Images : Brice Ammar-Khodja, Pierre Bouchilloux, Alain Declercq, Thomas Vauthier
Sound : Arnaud Pichon
Editing : Alain Declercq

Aknowledgment
This project, combining design, art, techno sciences, and media studies, is co-developed as part of an international collaboration between three research-creation teams (Concordia University, Montreal; EnsadLab - the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs laboratory – Université PSL; University of Toronto Mississauga). The project, co-directed by Alice Jarry (Concordia University), Marie-Pier Boucher (University of Toronto Mississauga), and Samuel Bianchini (EnsadLab / Reflective Interaction and Chair in Arts and Sciences), received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Chair in Arts and Sciences of the École polytechnique, the École des Arts Décoratifs - PSL, the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, Hexagram – international network of research-creation in art, culture, and technology, and Concordia University's Milieux Institute for art, culture, and technology. The project was developped for the “Matières d'image” exhibit as part of the 2021 Hors Pistes Festival, curated by Géraldine Gomez.

Blob Detection (2020)
Artwork and experimentations by Brice Ammar-Khodja

Presented as part of the Hexagram Network Garden at the Ars Electronica Festival 2021
Launch of EMERGENCE/Y : Rencontres interdisciplinaire Hexagram 2021-2022

Discover | Découvrez
Les Rencontres Interdisciplinaires Hexagram

À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y

Sensitive membranes

Discover | Découvrez
Les Rencontres Interdisciplinaires Hexagram

BALANCE UNBALANCE: THE FUTURE STARTED NOW

Cyclical Matters - Biocomposite en coquilles d’œufs

Les trois frères

2022
EMERGENCE/Y

2020
SYMPOIÉTIQUES

HEXAGRAM
WEBSITE

ARS ELECTRONICA
FESTIVAL

À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y À Propos | ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y

LAUNCH OF HEXAGRAM INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAMMING OF 2021-2022 EMERGENCE/Y @ ARS ELECTRONICA 2021 - Sept 8 to 12

About the theme EMERGENCE/Y - Arts and Sciences for Troubled Times

Rencontres Interdisciplinaires : Launch at Ars Electronica 2021 - September 8 to 12.

Sensitive membranes

Discover | DécouvrezLes Rencontres Interdisciplinaires Hexagram

BALANCE UNBALANCE: THE FUTURE STARTED NOW

Cyclical Matters - Biocomposite en coquilles d’œufs

Les trois frères

2022EMERGENCE/Y

2020SYMPOIÉTIQUES

HEXAGRAMWEBSITE

ARS ELECTRONICAFESTIVAL

Discover | Découvrez
Les Rencontres Interdisciplinaires Hexagram

2022
EMERGENCE/Y

2020
SYMPOIÉTIQUES

HEXAGRAM
WEBSITE

ARS ELECTRONICA
FESTIVAL