*ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:
Friday, March 4th, 2016:
5:00pm // Performative Talk with Gisèle Trudel
HEXAGRAM BLACKBOX // EV Building // 1515 St. Catherine West, Concordia Downtown SGW Campus // EV S03-844-845 (Sub basement 3 – take the stairs just across from the FOFA Gallery and Atrium)
Introduction by Dr. David Howes, Professor and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University
SENSATE WASTE
Between 2008 and 2015, Trudel’s artist research unit Ælab created a series of major artworks informed by waste operations and processual philosophies. Waste water treatments, atmospheric and electromagnetic pollution and the waste landfill have produced blocs of sensations with residual matter which delve experientially into what waste can do to and with a technological art practice. In this talk/performance, a remix of the artworks’ documents will become another plane of composition, along with music, text, voice and drawing. A guided discussion with Pamela Tudge and Gisèle Trudel will follow.
Bio: Gisèle Trudel is an artist. In 1996, she cofounded Ælab, an artistic research unit with Stéphane Claude, who is an electronic and electroacoustic composer and audio engineer. Ælab’s commitment to collaboration and creative dissemination are ways of thinking and doing that try to bridge different methods of inquiry. Their process-oriented investigations creatively engage art and technology as intertwined with philosophy in an ecology of practices. Their work has been presented in Canada, Europe and Asia, produced with support from the CAC, CALQ, FRQSC and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.
Trudel is a professor at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques, UQAM, and co-founder of Grupmuv, the research group for drawing and the moving image. Until recently, she was also director of Hexagram-UQAM (2011-13) and co-director of the Hexagram Network (2012-15). aelab.com ; grupmuv.ca ; eavm.uqam.ca ; hexagram.uqam.ca ; hexagram.ca
6:00-8:00pm // Reception at Kafein
Kafein’s Lower Level, 1429a rue Bishop, Montréal, QC H3G 2E4 // Food and Non-alcohol drinks provided.
Schedule for Saturday, March 5th, 2016
ALL EVENTS John Molson School of Business Building (MB) // 1450 Guy Street, Concordia Downtown SGW Campus // MB Floating Box 2.130 (second floor)
9:00am Morning Refreshments
9:30am Welcome Remarks
Dr. Bina Friewald, Professor and Graduate Program Director of the HUMA PhD Program, Concordia University
9:35-10:45am PANEL 1 // Stories of Deconstruction and Detritus
- Emilie Flöge: Gesamtkunstwerk Embodied , Kat Buckley, The School at the Art Institute of Chicago
- Remixing via Destruction – Video Pistoletto, Oli Sorenson, Concordia University
- Copy/Paste/Repeat: Fragmented Bodies and Commodified Labour in Ming Hon’s “The Exhibitionist”, Hilary Bergen, Concordia University
11:00-11:50am WORKSHOP 1 // Encounters between Matters of Food and Waste
Pamela Tudge, Concordia University
Jane Bennett asks in Vibrant Matter, “How would patterns of consumption change if we faced not…[garbage] but an accumulating pile of lively….matter?” In this workshop, we are going to explore our relationship between food and food waste. Employing Bennett’s, vital materialist approach, we are going to play with, make with and think with materials of food waste. The objective is that through different actions, the attention to everyday encounters with things we eat, things we waste and the things between, will offer a particular kind of rupture to our sensibilities and thus an attention to the vital materiality of our waste. *Bring a sample of food waste with you!
12:00-1:15pm PANEL 2 // Stories of Reconstruction and Consumption
- Three coffee cups, a pot, filter and maple tray: Forming the Self and Habit through Material Consumption, Treva Michelle Pullen, OCAD
- Consumption, Commodification and Change in Irish Traditional Music, Kate Bevan-Baker, Concordia University
- Attraction and the Spectator in the Digital Era, David Hollands, Trent University
1:15-2:30pm LUNCH BREAK
2:30-3:20pm WORKSHOP 2 // Consume Knowledge // Digest it // Metabolize & Defecate // Repeat
Aaron Finbloom, Concordia University
How does knowledge move through stages of decay and recycle? Is this process of discarding manifolds of thoughts, while only harnessing and focusing on a few ideas, necessary for knowledge production?
This interactive workshop explores these questions through enacting this cycle upon our knowledge of detritus and consumption. We will begin with your beautiful composed questions related to the conference theme. We will move these questions through heavy wash cycles of demands for definitions and clarifications. We will collect the best definitions into a glorious pile upon which I will perform a hermeneutic cleansing, during which, you will be culling thoughts, notions, feelings. This will set the stage for a final discussion (a rapid exchange of thoughts which momentarily live, then quickly die, only leaving a small trace for further consumption) to ensue.
3:30-4:45pm PANEL 3 // Stories of Cycles
- Architecture: Alive or Detritus, Cecile Martin, Concordia University
- Dire is the New Straight: Picturing the Ruins of Detroit, Jessica Cappucitti, Western University
- Settler Colonialism in Nunavik: consumption and reconstruction, Bettina Koschade, Concordia University
4:45-5:10 BREAK
5:20-6:00pm Presentation and Tasting // Eating with (dis)gusto: Rethinking edible insects
Laura Shine, Concordia University
Can insects feed the world? With 9 billion humans chomping they way into the 2050s, our foodways will have to undergo drastic changes. 2 billion people already consume bugs, a sustainable source of crucial nutrients, yet most members of European-derived cultures not only overlook the rich potential of insects as food, but wage a war on what they consider pests. Why are we so disgusted by insects? What are some of the consequences of this aversion, both on our own food supply and on peoples’ diets around the world? Could tapping into this ignored bounty alleviate some of the contemporary issues of food sustainability, water use and food waste?
Laura Shine is a student in the Humanities program. Her interest in emerging food practices and the evolution of tastes led her to explore entomophagy, the consumption of insects. An eager bug eater, she grows insects in her basement farm and samples ants large and small during her forest walks. Her own relationship to tiny creatures evolved from mild disgust to deep curiosity, a shift she investigates within the larger context of European-derived cultures.
6:15pm Closing Remarks
Dr. Bina Friewald, Professor and Graduate Program Director of the HUMA PhD Program, Concordia University
6:15-8:30pm Wine & Food Reception
CONCORDIA DOWNTOWN CAMPUS BUILDING LOCATIONS: The conference will take place at Concordia University’s SGW downtown campus in the EV building (1515 St. Catherine West) and the MB building (1450 Guy Street). The closest metro stop is Guy/Concordia on the Green Line.
THE HUMA PROGRAM’S ANNUAL CONFERENCE IS GENEROUSLY SPONSORED BY CONCORDIA’S CISSC CENTER and the HUMA GRADUATE STUDENT ASSOCIATION
Interdisciplinary PhD in the Humanities 