The waste cycle of planetary vision infrastructures: Demos and round table

Within the context of Earth Day, the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality (dir. Alice Jarry) invites the Concordia community to join us for an afternoon of demos and roundtable conversations entitled The Waste Cycle of Planetary Vision Infrastructures at the Planétarium de Montréal.

The built environment supports human activity. Infrastructures and cities have long been designed, territorialized and experienced on a horizontal plane parallel to the earth's crust. However, the 92.8 billion tons (Gt) of material goods produced each year on a planetary scale can also be considered according to a dynamic of vertical circulation which connects — from the extraction of natural resources to the end of useful life of these goods — submarine cables, under- grounds, cities, skies, Earth's orbit and even interstellar space.

Presented from April 22 to June 13, 2022, at the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium in Montreal, the exhibition Inertia intersects the disappearance of the Earth in the eye of the Voyager probes with the environmental situation in the neighbourhood of Montréal-Est.

As Voyager's scientific instruments are gradually being shut down due to a lack of available electrical energy, this public activity organized within the context of Earth Day 2022 proposes, from a vertical perspective, to compare the issues related to space debris with those generated by our ways of life on Earth.

Drawing on engagement in their practice with residual, geo-inspired, reactive, intelligent or sustainable materials, the invited artists, designers, media theorists and scientists will take an interdisciplinary look at how these artifacts allow us to envision new scenarios and relationships for the waste – material and technological – produced on Earth, but also left adrift in space.

Demos 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

• Biointerface Lab (McGill University, with Marta Cerruti, Gabriele Capilli, Yiwen Chen and Nima Zakeri)
• Suzanne Landry (Arts visuels et médiatiques, UQAM)
• Juliette Lusven (Études et pratiques des arts, UQAM)
• Milieux Speculative Life Biolab (Concordia University, with Alice Jarry, Brice Ammar-Khodja, Jacqui Beaumont and Philippe Vandal)
• Guillaume Pascale (Études et pratiques des arts, UQAM)
• Smart Materials and Adaptive Structures Lab (Concordia University, with Alireza Moezi and Hossein Vatandoost)
• Space Media Working Group (University of Toronto, with Marie-Pier Boucher, Réka Patrícia Gál and Yuxing Zhang (Yolanda))
• Topological Media Lab (Concordia University, with Navid Navab)

Round Table 2:30 p.m. to 4 p.m.

• Marta Cerruti (McGill University)
• Yuxing Zhang (Yolanda) (University of Toronto)Brice Ammar-Khodja, Alireza Moezi, Navid Navab and Hossein Vatandoost (Concordia University)
• Réka Patrícia Gál (University of Toronto)
• Olivier Hernandez (dir. Planétarium Rio Tinto Alcan de Montréal)
• Moderation by Alice Jarry, Marie-Pier Boucher and Guillaume Pascale