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)

Inclusive AR and VR Strategies

Project Summary:
Online education strives to include students regardless of their geographic locations, as long as they have internet connections and compatible hardware. It can make education more accessible and inclusive for students with diverse learning needs and reduce the requirement to travel to a physical location for classes, making it more cost-effective. Both OCAD U and Ontario Tech currently offer online learning via video-conferencing and asynchronous learning management systems (LMS), that is, through online systems that allow students to learn on their own schedules wherever they are, instead of at a set class time one place.

However, in design education, online students miss out on crucial hands-on experiences that on-campus students benefit from. In a typical course that includes design prototyping, for example, students engage in 3D printing, laser cutting, and shop fabrication; peers are frequently involved in testing and evaluating each design iteration, which requires interaction with physical prototypes. While online students may be able to present some aspects of their physical prototypes through video-conferencing and 3D CAD models, many remotely located peers are not able to touch, feel and manipulate the prototypes as designed. In other words, online design students are excluded from many hands-on aspects of design education.

This new online project-based design course will use consumer-level virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to include remotely located students in hands-on design prototyping. The course will be interconnected with a network of maker-spaces, allowing remote learners to access physical prototyping resources within their local communities. This will allow for a rhizomatic educational experience in which learning is more participatory and fluid, with students interacting in a more meaningful way to inform each other’s understanding of the subject matter.

Project Lead: Peter Coppin MFA, PhD, Associate Professor of Design and Graduate Program Director for Inclusive Design (OCAD U)

Project Team: Teresa Lee, MDes (OCAD U), others from Ontario Tech TBD

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