Technopoetics Workshop Series

Project Summary:

Essayistic filmmaking is a genre of cinema that investigates and presents social issues, but unlike documentary filmmaking, its subject matter is approached in a more deeply personal and experimental way. This decentres the concept of the neutral filmic gaze, which is the idea that the filmmaker is simply observing and presenting the film’s subject objectively. Central to essayistic filmmaking’s questioning of objectivity in cinema are techniques of embodiment, in which personal “truths” from a subjective point of view — the experience of being in one’s own body — are prioritized over the “view from nowhere,” a concept popularized by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Advances in embodied interactive technologies such as motion-capture techniques provide exciting new opportunities to create essayistic films that explain and analyze societal concerns through self-reflective, experimental, ethnographic, and embodied digital productions.

The Technopoetics project is a workshop series over two weeks in the fall of 2019 for students in art, design, humanities, computer science, communications, and digital media. Using motion-capture techniques to make essayistic films, students will develop creative and critical approaches to storytelling. Through the workshop, students will have the opportunity to engage dance and performance groups such as the Theatre Centre, Theatre Gargantua, and Movement Perpetual, as well as be exposed to technical guest instructors from video-game company Ubisoft and Derivative, a Canadian-based developer that created TouchDesigner, a visual development platform.

Students will produce a collection of films on human-computer interaction (HCI) platforms around embodiment and their accompanying rhetoric. These will be presented through Ontario Tech’s Fabric of Digital Life, a web-based archive developed by Dr. Pedersen and the Decimal Lab that tracks the language that charts humanity’s progression from the analog to the digital. The workshops will act as a curriculum pilot for credit opportunities at both UOIT and OCAD U in the future.

Project Leads: Patricio Davila (OCAD U); Immony Men (OCAD U)

Project Team Members: Isabel Pedersen (Ontario Tech); Sharon Caldwell (Ontario Tech); April Xie (OCAD U)

Project Summary:

Essayistic filmmaking is a genre of cinema that investigates and presents social issues, but unlike documentary filmmaking, its subject matter is approached in a more deeply personal and experimental way. This decentres the concept of the neutral filmic gaze, which is the idea that the filmmaker is simply observing and presenting the film’s subject objectively. Central to essayistic filmmaking’s questioning of objectivity in cinema are techniques of embodiment, in which personal “truths” from a subjective point of view — the experience of being in one’s own body — are prioritized over the “view from nowhere,” a concept popularized by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Advances in embodied interactive technologies such as motion-capture techniques provide exciting new opportunities to create essayistic films that explain and analyze societal concerns through self-reflective, experimental, ethnographic, and embodied digital productions.

The Technopoetics project is a workshop series over two weeks in the fall of 2019 for students in art, design, humanities, computer science, communications, and digital media. Using motion-capture techniques to make essayistic films, students will develop creative and critical approaches to storytelling. Through the workshop, students will have the opportunity to engage dance and performance groups such as the Theatre Centre, Theatre Gargantua, and Movement Perpetual, as well as be exposed to technical guest instructors from video-game company Ubisoft and Derivative, a Canadian-based developer that created TouchDesigner, a visual development platform.

Students will produce a collection of films on human-computer interaction (HCI) platforms around embodiment and their accompanying rhetoric. These will be presented through Ontario Tech’s Fabric of Digital Life, a web-based archive developed by Dr. Pedersen and the Decimal Lab that tracks the language that charts humanity’s progression from the analog to the digital. The workshops will act as a curriculum pilot for credit opportunities at both UOIT and OCAD U in the future.

Project Leads: Patricio Davila (OCAD U); Immony Men (OCAD U)

Project Team Members: Isabel Pedersen (Ontario Tech); Sharon Caldwell (Ontario Tech); April Xie (OCAD U)