Assistant professor Carmela Cucuzzella (Design and Computation Arts) launched a new book on May 27 at the Maison de l'architecture in Paris. Co-edited with Jean-Pierre Chupin, Architecture Competitions and the Production of Culture, Quality and Knowledge, explores the impact of international competitions. The book’s publication was celebrated with a public debate, in partnership with the Ordre des architectes d’Île-de-France. Participants included Chupin (Professor, Université de Montréal), Jean-Michel Daquin (President, Ordre des architectes d'Île-de-France), Françoise Fromonot (Professor, ENSA of Paris-Belleville) and Jean-Louis Violeau (Professor, ENSA of Paris-Malaquais).
Associate professor Ricardo Dal Farra (Music) and three electroaoustics studies students – Tyler Lewis, Reginald Kachanoski and Peter van Haaften – presented pieces at the IIII Rencontres Internationales de Musique Électroacoustique (RIME). Dal Farra premiered his new visual-music work ORGANIC for algorithmically-generated images and 24 audio channels. The III RIME was held in Monaco from May 28 to 30.
Professor Loren Lerner (Art History) chaired a panel at the Sustainable Israel conference entitled "The Ethics of Sustainability in Israeli Art and Architecture" on June 1. Featured panelists included Itai Peleg-Pilozof, independent scholar and Carol Zemel, York University. Lerner also gave a lecture about Knafo Klimor Architects’ “The Fields of Tomorrow” Israel Pavilion at Milano Expo, 2015: The Challenges of Embodying Agricultural Sustainability in an Architectural Concept”.
Associate professor Josée Leclerc and professor Stephen Snow (Creative Arts Therapies) participated as guest faculty members at the Advanced Study Institute of McGill University’s Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry conference on June 1. Leclerc presented her work on “Response-Art as a Reflective Inquiry: Raising Awareness of Racism” and Snow presented "Ethnodramatherapy: Performance Ethnography Combined with Drama Therapy in the Framework of Theatrical Performance.”
An essay by part-time professor Laura Endacott (Studio Arts) that looks at the mother image in contemporary art was included in a new anthology entitled Performing Motherhood. Artistic, Activist and Everyday Enactments (Demeter Press, 2014). Endacott presented her via a narrated visual presentation at the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences' congress event, May 30 to June 5.
Blue Signal, a film by assistant professor Michael Yaroshevsky (Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema) screened at the 31st Hamburg International Short Film Film Festival, June 9 to 15. Blue Signal is an 8-minute film that explores what occurs when a satellite that monitors one's pulse mistakes a telephone book for an ocean.
Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Characters and Toys in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), a book by associate professor Marc Steinberg (Cinema), as well as the substantially expanded and revised Japanese edition, Why is Japan a “Media Mixing Nation”? / Naze Nihon wa “media mikkusu suru kuni” nanoka (trans. Nakagawa Yuzuru, supervised Ōtsuka Eiji) (KADOKAWA, 2015), was awarded the Japan Society for Animation Studies Book Prize, at the Society’s annual conference in Yokohama on June 13. The Japan Society for Animation Studies is the country’s most important professional organization for the study of animation, and the award is a significant achievement, recognizing a contribution to the study of animation. In the words of the award committee: “This research should be highly praised as setting a benchmark for animation research henceforth, exhibiting, among other things, a wide purview, an ever keen sense of the contemporary media situation, a deep concern for primary source material, as well as a critical spirit towards previous research in the field.”
A film by professor Louise Lamarre (Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema) called BEYOND SIGHT was shown as part of the Canadian Indigenous/Native Studies Association conference at Concordia University on June 13. A round table featuring guests Piita Irniq, Ernest Bernhardt, Suzanne Lalonde and moderator Jules Lamarre follows the screening.
Jason Butler (Creative Arts Therapies) wrote a chapter in the book Playing in the Mirrors (Sense Publishers), edited by Elinor Vettraino and Warren Linds. The paper, titled "Playing with Reflection", examines damatherapeutic and psychodramatherapeutic narratives in aesthetic and therapeutic spaces.
Associate professor Jeri Brown (Music) presented a paper of her ongoing research in vocal improvisation entitled "How Can a Jazz Singer Improvise Through Vocalecosystems" at the Canada International Conference on Education on June 23 at the University of Toronto. The is part of Brown's ongoing research on vocal improvisation. Brown also chaired a session on the subject of learning and teaching methodologies and assessment at the conference.