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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

Outer Space and the City: Provocations for the Urbanization of Space Technology

Authors

Marie-Pier Boucher

Marie-Pier Boucher works on the artistic exploration of science and technology, with a specific focus on the design of environments built to sustain life in extreme conditions. She is co-editor of Being Material (MIT Press, 2019), Heteropolis (2013), and Adaptive Actions Madrid (2010). She is the lead convener of the Space Media research group at the McLuhan Center. Her recent work has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Communication, Épistemoctritique and has been presented at the Centre Pompidou. Her research residencies include NASA, Johnson Space Center; Banff Center; Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and; SymbioticA. She is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Alice Jarry

Alice Jarry is an artist-researcher who specializes in site-specific responsive works, art-sci practices and sustainable design. She engages with the transformative potential of bio, smart and residual materials to examine socio-environmental issues pertaining to materiality and urban infrastructure. She holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality, is director of the Milieux Institute Biolab (Concordia), member of the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Next Generation Cities (Concordia) and Hexagram. Her recent work has been presented at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), at Vox Centre de l’image contemporaine (Montreal) and at the Biennale Nemo (Paris).

Emiliano Gandolfi

Emiliano Gandolfi (Italy / Rotterdam, Netherlands) is an urbanist and independent curator with specific interest in cultural strategies as agencies of urban development. He is cofounder of Cohabitation Strategies, a non-profit cooperative for socio-spatial development. He is also co-founder of Urban Front, an international consulting group that supports progressive governments implement sustainable planning and development in connection with grassroots knowledge. He was co-curator of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition – Biennale di Venezia, and curator at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. Gandolfi’s work has been exhibited in international venues including the Biennale di Venezia, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bernard Foing

Bernard Foing is a space astrophysicist, Director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group and of the ArtMoonMars and MoonGallery Foundation. Foing served as the Principal Project Scientist for SMART-1, the first European mission to the Moon. He has also led studies of lunar orbiters and landers. Foing has paved the way for the democratization of space technology by facilitating the access of space centers and conferences to researchers and artists. Foing is Professor of Earth and Planetary Science at VU Amsterdam.

Guillaume Pascale

Guillaume Pascale is a PhD student in Études et pratiques des arts at Université du Québec à Montréal. He develops the concept of “Vertical Geography” to examine how satellite imagery and data can translate in speculative visuals and narrative that interrogate the uncertainty and precarity of Earth’s based activities.

Lee Wilkins

Lee Wilkins is an artist, cyborg, and educator working with wearable technology. Wilkins is a PhD candidate at the iSchool at the University of Toronto, where they are researching the material politics of space suits. Wilkins is an occasional part time faculty member at OCAD University, Ryerson University, and Sheridan College where they teach electronics, and co executive director of Little Dada.

Philippe Vandal

Philippe Vandal is an undergraduate student in Intermedia CyberArts at Concordia University. At the intersection of technological, ecological, and artistic preoccupations, his practice bridges bio-inspired speculative design, environmental chemistry, and site-specific tangible media interventions to examine the artistic potentials and practical limits of bioremediating contaminated sites in Montreal's urban settings. He is currently interested in relocating ecological systems into smaller-scale experimental and controllable settings, facilitating the reproducibility of affected milieus while addressing their waste issues.

Isabelle Boucher

Isabelle Boucher (MA in Philosophy, UdeM) is a PhD student in Communication Studies (Concordia), working across philosophy, media studies and waste studies to address the normative underpinnings and noxious implications of sustainability politics relating to extractive economies. She is currently interested in the potential of forensic and site-sensitive art projects to rethink bioremediation through speculative and marginalized forms of knowledge, in the hope of fostering a different kind of belonging among living and non-living processes.

The interactions between urban environments, technology, and communities are increasingly dependent upon space telecommunication infrastructures. However, these infrastructures are both out of sight and out of reach. What techniques can be deployed to assess, and subvert, their materiality and socio-environmental impact? What kind of cohabitation strategies between citizens, artists, researchers, scientists, corporations, architects, and urbanists can initiate new forms of collective engagement and provoke new relations with the built environment? Departing from the premise that the right to the city is a fundamental human right, this roundtable aims to offer strategies to best exercise it in the context of the urbanization of space technology. By engaging with the impact of planetary thinking at the urban level, it seeks to invent possibilities of aesthetic, ecological, and civic engagement that challenge the urban impact of space telecommunication infrastructures. It also seeks to develop modes of assessing and subverting such impact by engaging with what the materialities of these infrastructures enable and foreclose. Through site-specific urban interventions, case-studies, and visual provocations, students and researchers will engage with the material forms that space technology takes in the city. Participants will discuss artistic, urban, and scientific projects to reflect on alien modes of aesthetic engagement and creative adaptation of the urban environment.

Speakers
Marie-Pier Boucher
Alice Jarry
Emiliano Gandolfi
Bernard Foing
Guillaume Pascale
Lee Wilkins
Philippe Vandal
Isabelle Boucher

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

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Outer Space and the City: Provocations for the Urbanization of Space Technology

Discover | Découvrez
Les Rencontres Interdisciplinaires Hexagram

Cyclical Matters - Eggshell Biocomposite

Les trois frères

Beyond human art: creation and the posthuman

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.

Outer Space and the City: Provocations for the Urbanization of Space Technology

Discover | DécouvrezLes Rencontres Interdisciplinaires Hexagram

Cyclical Matters - Eggshell Biocomposite

Les trois frères

Beyond human art: creation and the posthuman

2022EMERGENCE/Y

2020SYMPOIÉTIQUES

HEXAGRAMWEBSITE

ARS ELECTRONICAFESTIVAL

Discover | Découvrez
Les Rencontres Interdisciplinaires Hexagram

2022
EMERGENCE/Y

2020
SYMPOIÉTIQUES

HEXAGRAM
WEBSITE

ARS ELECTRONICA
FESTIVAL