Lisa Graves

Jason Edward Lewis, B.Sc., B.A., M.Phil.

Professor of Computation Arts, Design and Computation Arts
University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary
Special Advisor to the Provost on Indigenous Spaces
Nominated Principal Investigator and Co-director, Abundant Intelligences Partnership
Co-director, Indigenous Futures Research Centre
Director, Initiative for Indigenous Futures
Co-director, Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace
Co-director, Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Digital Media

Research areas: Indigenous new media, Indigenous futures, digital poetry, the future imaginary, computational typography, computational culture, media arts, digital games, game studies and design, digital textuality, experimental typography, virtual environments, poetry, typographic design, computational aesthetics, Indigenous Peoples, mobile media, interface design, digital culture, science fiction

Contact information

Email:

Jason.Lewis@concordia.ca

Websites:

Personal Website
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace
Abundant Intelligences
Initiative for Indigenous Futures
Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media

ORCID:

https://orcid.org/0

Biography

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media theorist, poet, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he conducts research/creation projects exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. Lewis is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, critical, creative and technical levels simultaneously. He is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. Lewis was born and raised in northern California, and currently lives in Montreal.

Lewis co-directs the Abundant Intelligences Partnership, the Indigenous Futures Research Centre, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network, and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design. He directed the Initiative for Indigenous Futures and co-directed the Indigenous Protocol and AI Workshops.

Lewis’ creative and production work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Elektra, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, FILE and the Hawaiian International Film Festival, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, two Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mentions, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and multiple solo exhibitions. His research interests include emergent media theory and history, and methodologies for conducting art-led technology research. In addition to being lead author on the award-winning “Making Kin with the Machines” essay and editor of the groundbreaking Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper, he has contributed to chapters in collected editions covering Indigenous futures, mobile media, video game design, machinima and experimental pedagogy with Indigenous communities.

Lewis has worked in a range of industrial research settings, including Interval Research, US West's Advanced Technology Group, and the Institute for Research on Learning, and, at the turn of the century, he founded and ran a research studio for the venture capital firm Arts Alliance.

Lewis is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada as well as a former Trudeau, Carnegie, and ISO-MIT Co-Creation Lab Fellow.

He received his MPhil from the Royal College of Art for Dynamic Poetry: Introductory Remarks to a New Medium.

Education

MPhil Design (Royal College of Art), B.S. Symbolic Systems (Stanford), B.A. German Studies (Stanford)

Areas of expertise

Indigenous media and technology, Artificial Intelligences & Society, digital text, electronic literature, computational typography, critical history of digital media