Join us for the second event in Fire and Light, a series of public conversations that brings together artists to discuss their creative practices in performance, sculpture, bio art, video, social practice and visual art, as well as their crucial work as producers of major international festivals, conferences and performances. Concordia faculty will join the visiting speakers in conversation to offer a unique opportunity for the Concordia community to be in dialogue with the international artist/producers with roots in or relationships to Latvia, Germany and greater Europe.

For this event, artist Rasa Smite will be in conversation with Alice Jarry to discuss various disciplinary perspectives on creative process, professional practices, and conceptual concerns when engaging with performance, music, material, and other forms. 

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube. 

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca  

Rasa Smite

Rasa Smite is an artist, researcher and cultural innovator, working in the intersection of art, science and emerging media since the mid-1990s, she is co-founder of RIXC Art and Science Center in Riga (Latvia). She also is actively lecturing in various universities; currently she is a professor in Liepaja University’s New Media Art program, and a visiting lecturer at ACT at MIT, Boston. She is author of the books – “Creative Networks. In the Rear-View Mirror of Eastern European History”, published by Amsterdam Institute for Network Culture (2012), and “Talk to Me. Exploring Human-Plant Communication” (Published by RIXC, 2014). She is also author of numerous articles and co-editor of the Acoustic Space series issues. She has co-curated large scale exhibitions WAVES (Riga, 2006 / Dortmund 2008, together with Armin Medosch, Inke Arns) and FIELDS (Riga, 2014, together with Raitis Smits, Armin Medosch), as well as more recent exhibitions: Transformative Ecologies (Mons and Riga, 2015) and Data Drift (Riga, 2015, together with Raitis Smits, Lev Manovich).

Rasa Smite also has been active in building Baltic-Nordic and European collaboration platforms: she has co-founded Renewable Network (2009) and Renewable Futures – traveling art and science conference series (2015). She is lecturing extensively on creative networks and sustainability, ecology and contemporary media art, contemporaneity and networked/post-media art.

Alice Jarry

Alice Jarry is an artist, researcher and educator who specializes in site-specific responsive works, socio-environmental design, digital arts, tangible media, and community-oriented projects. Her research brings concerns about sustainability, aesthetics, and politics to bear critically upon materiality, material production, and contemporary matters-of-concern regarding urban communities and infrastructures.

With matter inseparable from both form and practice, her installation works examines how materiality - engaged in constant processes of transformation and circulation with site, technology, and communities - can provoke the emergence of adaptive forms and resilient socio-environmental relations. She is a member of Kheops - International Research Consortium on the Governance and Management of Large Infrastructure Projects -; Hexagram - International Network Dedicated to Research-Creation in Media Arts, Design, Technology and Digital Culture; The Living Architecture Systems Group (U. Waterloo), and the Topological Media Lab (U. Concordia).