Speaking the senses
Starting on January 19 the Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery will be hosting Open Lab Wednesdays, a series of experimental discussions and workshops, in conjunction with their current five-week sensorial exhibition, Atmosphere.
The exhibition is presented by LabXModal, a collective of artists and researchers, and focuses on the subject of perception in relation to environment. Both the exhibition and the associated discussion series are framed by questions concerning the ways new technologies radically alter our human perception.
Featuring internationally prominent experts in philosophy, media art and anthropology, among others, the Atmosphere Open Lab Wednesdays discussion series offers the broader public the unique opportunity to peer into a wide range of cutting edge research-creation ideas spanning the domains of sensory ethnography and the "spectral sensorium". These talks and discussions will take place each Wednesday at 7 p.m. from January 19 until February 9, 2011.
FOFA Gallery Director jake moore is excited by the connections between academic practice and art production shown in this project. “Atmosphere presents academic investigation, philosophical implications, and discussion as not only equivalent to the situations and iterations within the gallery, but inseparable from them,” she says.
In addition to the main Atmosphere installation in the gallery, LabXModal will turn the FOFA Gallery black box space into an experimental laboratory of the senses with an investigation into the thresholds of visual, auditory and tactile perception, featuring an ever-morphing version of Chris Salter's most recent touring sensorial installation JND (Just Noticeable Difference)
“As the exhibition per se is not about the objects, images, sounds or technical expertise so much as the experience of them, there is nothing lost in their interruption or reveal, when speakers enter the space and change its activity to discourse,” says moore. “The function of the gallery site remains the same – it is a site for exchange.”
Moore stresses the importance of interaction in all FOFA Gallery programming. “It is important to consider that making public is the basic premise of publication which is the result and goal of the labours we undertake at a university.”
The LabXModal research-creation project collective includes Chris Salter + Elio Bidinost, Marije Baalman, Shannon Collis, Fernando Leppe, Harry Smoak, Robert Tomes, Matthieu Tremblay and Tobias Ziegler.
Atmosphere Open Lab Wednesdays
Wednesday, January 19, 7 p.m.
David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University
A public seminar titled, "Public seminar on Atmospheric anthropology and art"
Wednesday, January 26, 7 p.m.
Shannon Collis and Harry Smoak, Concordia University Special Individualized Programs MA and PhD students/researchers
Presentation on ongoing work on new responsive and sensate materials
Wednesday, February 2, 7 p.m.
TeZ (aka Maurizio Martinucci), internationally recognized artist, composer and co-founder of the Optofonica Lab in Amsterdam
Discussion of his work in the area of immersive audio-visual art and his upcoming projects focused on the "spectral sensorium"
Wednesday, February 9, 7 p.m.
Brian Massumi, Professor of Communications Studies, University of Montreal, and Chris Salter, artist, Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, and research director of LabXModal
"The Thresholds of Perception," a conversation
Related links:
• Atmosphere
• FOFA Gallery
• The performance of everyday life -- Journal, March 8, 2010