Driving Desired Futures: Michael Shamiyeh

Michael Shamiyeh
Thursday, May 14, 2015 - 9:30pm to 11:30pm

Can the study of innovation lead to universal principals that apply across fields as diverse as architecture, automotive and media design?

Innovation thought leader Michael Shamiyeh will discuss insights from his broad base of practice and theory, including his collaboration with iconic automotive brand Porsche, ongoing work with Kodak, and selected work from his international research and consulting centre, DOM Research Lab (Design-Organisation-Media), whose recent publications include Creating Desired Futures and Driving Desired Futures. Join us for this intimate and interactive seminar. 

Michael Shamiyeh is founder and head professor of the Design Organization Media Research Lab (DOM) and CEO of Shamiyeh Associates, an operative unit for creating desired futures. He studied strategic management and architectural design (at Harvard and St. Gallen) and has published in many international journals, books, and popular media.The work of Michael and his team has won numerous awards including the World Intellectual Property Organization 2010 Gold Medal for Best Invention and the Austrian Ministry of Science 2009 Innovation Prize. Learn more on Michael at http://www.domresearchlab.com/profile/michael-shamiyeh 

Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) is a centre for research and innovation at OCAD University. sLab integrates applied research, professional engagement, education and skills development to assist private, public, and not-for-profit organizations attain their goals. sLab trans-disciplinary teams draw on the growing SFI community of researchers and practitioners, design and business professionals, teachers and students, who are passionate about creative economies and sustainable futures

Venue & Address: 
Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), OCAD University  205 Richmond St. West at Duncan St., Suite 410, Toronto
Website: 
http:// drivingdesiredfutures.eventbrite.ca
Cost: 
Free

Learning from Latin American (Sub)Urbanism

Aerial photograph of two pickup trucks with men lying flat in the back
Friday, May 8, 2015 - 10:00pm to Saturday, May 9, 2015 - 12:00am

A lecture by Alejandro Cartagena in conversation with Shawn Micallef

For the past decade, Alejandro Cartagena has been investigating the relationship between Mexico’s urban centres and the suburbs built around them, examining the ways in which explosive growth has altered the landscape and affected the lives of residents.

In this talk, Cartagena will discuss the development of his photographic projects including Suburbia Mexicana, Landscape as Bureaucracy, Carpoolers, Roma-Roma and his latest work, Outgrowing

The Learning from Latin American (Sub)Urbanism lecture is co-presented by CONTACT, LACAP, the Faculty of Art at COAD University (through the photography department) and Circuit Gallery. It is presented in conjunction with Contacting Toronto: Expanding Cities, a CONTACT Public Installation and Warden subway station. Curated by Sharon Switzer. Co-produced by PATTISON Onestop and Art for Commuters. 

Image: Alejandro Cartagena, Carpooiera, 2011-2012, Courtesy of the artist and Circuit Gallery

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University, 100 McCaul St., Room 230, 2nd Floor
Cost: 
Free and open to the public

Botanica Tinctoria - Creating a Sustainable Materials Collection

Thursday, March 26, 2015 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

In this lecture, Rachel MacHenry will discuss how she has researched and developed a line of naturally dyed materials made from organic cotton and silk. The materials are produced in a closed loop system, with all waste materials going back into the production of the next generation of dye plants. The initiative works across areas as diverse as traditional agriculture, fair trade and contemporary design. Bringing together current ideas about environmentalism, contemporary scientific research and information gathered from the historical record, the project highlights the best of new and old methodologies in the creation of a range of contemporary design products. Rachel MacHenry is a textile designer and educator whose practice focuses on sustainability issues and artisan production.

Venue & Address: 
Room 530 - 100 McCaul
Cost: 
FREE

DF Lecture Series Winter 2015

Event Information Poster
Thursday, February 5, 2015 - 10:00pm to 11:00pm

Our Lecture Series continues next week Thursday, Feb. 5th with a talk from Dr. Jennifer Jenson, Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Institute for Research on Learning Technologies at York University.

Dr. Jenson's interest and work include: Digital game studies, new media, pedagogy and technology, gender and technology, multimedia and online content/design issues in education, educational gaming, and cultural studies of technology, and the design and development of educational games.

We look forward to seeing you next Thursday @ 5pm in the Music Hall at St. George the Martyr Church - 197 John Street.

Venue & Address: 
The Music Hall in St George the Martyr Church 197 John St. Toronto
Cost: 
Free

Nomadic Resident: Pedro Reyes

Image of a metal stringed instrument
Monday, November 17, 2014 - 5:00am to Friday, November 21, 2014 - 5:00am

 

OCAD University’s Faculty of Art will welcome Mexico city-based artist Pedro Reyes as Nomadic Resident for the 2014 program, to take place November 17 to 21. “Pedro Reyes's cross-disciplinary practice and interest in art as an agent of social change is in keeping with OCAD U's commitment to studio teaching that engages the intersections of aesthetics and ethics in contemporary art,” said Dr. Vladimir Spicanovic, Dean of the Faculty of Art at OCAD University. “His approach to art making, community building and social awareness will surely inspire many of our students and faculty.” 

Free public talk on November 18, 7 p.m.

Students will also have opportunities to engage with the artist during classroom visits, a collaborative project with students, critiques and a casual pizza lunch. 

The Nomadic Residents program was launched with the generous support of Partners in Art in 2006. Residents include Rirkrit Tiravanija (2006) Ann Hamilton (2007), ORLAN (2008), Hal Foster (2009), Adel Abdessemed (2010), Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh (2012) and Candice Breitz (2013). The series continues with the generous support of the Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation. 

Reyes studied architecture but considers himself a sculptor. His work integrates elements of theatre, psychology and activism and takes on a variety of forms, including penetrable sculptures and puppet production. As part of this residency, Reyes will meet with faculty and students, participate in critiques and work with a group of students on a collaborative project. In 2008, Reyes initiated the ongoing Palas por Pistolas where 1,527 guns were collected in Mexico through a voluntary donation campaign to produce the same number of shovels to plant 1,527 trees. This led to Disarm (2012), where 6,700 weapons were transformed into a series of musical instruments. In 2011, Reyes initiated Sanatorium, a transient clinic that provides short unexpected treatments mixing art and psychology. Originally commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Sanatorium has been in operation at Documenta 13, Kassel (2012); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013); and The Power Plant, Toronto (2014). Reyes lives and works in Mexico City.

Image: Disarm (Violin), 2013, Metal, Approx dimensions: 67 x 23 x 13 cm, Courtesy of Lisson Gallery, London

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University Auditorium, 100 McCaul Street Free Admission Limited Seating
Email: 
<p>dliddington@faculty.ocadu.ca</p>
Cost: 
Free

Tasty coloured sounds: The experiences of synaesthetes Dr. Julia Simner, University of Edinburgh

Poster for Crossing Sensory Boundaries, with an abstract colourful background
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - 11:00pm

Crossing Sensory Boundaries: Synesthesia Events Co-sponsored by OCAD University

Synaesthesia is an inherited neurological condition that gives rise to a kind of 'merging of the senses'. For example, synaesthetes might 'see' colours when they hear music, or experience tastes in the mouth when they read words. One particularly common variant is experiencing colours when reading letters or numbers, and this variant of the condition – known as grapheme-colour synaesthesia -- is found in around 1 in 100 people. What are the experiences of synaesthetes, and how do these unusual experiences develop during childhood? How do they impact on schooling and early life development and how do adult synaesthetes navigate their multisensory worlds? I will explore the nature of these cross-sensory experiences and ask what they might also tell us about sensory processing in the population at large. I’ll describe what I have learned from the scientific research carried out at my Synaesthesia and Sensory Integration lab over the last decade, and how synaesthesia might open novel ways of understanding creativity, perception and the very nature of reality.

Dr. Julia Simner is a neuropsychologist and leading expert in the field of synesthesia research. She trained at the Universities of Oxford, Toronto and Sussex, and she currently runs the Synesthesia and Sensory Integration lab at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work focuses on the psychological and neuroscientific bases of synesthesia, and has been published in the high impact science journals such as ‘Nature’. She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia and is keenly interested in facilitating the public’s understanding of science. Her work has been reported in over 100 media articles worldwide, including the NY Times, BBC, CBC, Telegraph, Times, New Scientist, Scientific American etc. In 2010 she was recognised as an outstanding European scientist by the European Commission’s Atomium Culture Initiative and her science writing for the general public has been published in some of Europe’s leading national newspapers.

This presentation is co-sponsored by OCAD University, The Colour Research Society of Canada, MaHRC, and the Fraser Mustard Institute for Human Development, with financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Refreshments will be served following the lecture.

Organized by David Griffin, Instructor, Faculty of Art and Doreen Balabanoff, Associate Professor, Faculty of Design.

Venue & Address: 
Faculty of Music, University of Toronto 80 Queen’s Park Crescent Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

When Art Meets Science: Broadening Horizons through Interdisciplinary Practice

image of a petrie dish with a red pattern
Sunday, March 9, 2014 - 7:00pm

A panel discussion with Dr. Robin Kingsburgh, moderated by Dr. Ian Clarke, Associate Professor, Liberal Arts & Sciences

Science and art often have a perceived divide in contemporary culture, yet historically both their roots stem from similar manifestations of creativity and aesthetics, in exploring, responding to, and explaining Nature. This Royal Canadian Institute panel presentation brings together scientists, artists, and those with a foot in each of the ‘two cultures’ to discuss their interdisciplinary practices, and encourage novel ways to understand the world around us.

Royal Canadian Institute Lecture Series

Lisa Carrie Goldberg: Multidisciplinary Artist, and founder of Action Potential Lab, Toronto’s first laboratory dedicated to merging science and art.

Robin Kingsburgh: Trained astronomer, painter and educator, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences & School of Interdisciplinary Studies, OCAD University; Division of Natural Science, York University.

Scott Menary: Member of the ALPHA antimatter team and Polanyi prize winner, Department of Physics & Astronomy, York University.

Stephen Morris: J. Tuzo Wilson Professor of Geophysics and pattern formation artist, Department of Physics, University of Toronto.

Moderator: Ian Clarke, Biochemist, Cancer Researcher and Artist, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences & School of Interdisciplinary Studies, OCAD University.

Morris: Belousov Zhabotinsky reaction. Menary: Neutrino Image of the Sun (Source: NASA/ Robert Svoboda, Louisiana State University).

Venue & Address: 
Macleod Auditorium, Medical Sciences Building, University of Toronto 1 King's College Circle Toronto, Ontario
Website: 
http://royalcanadianinstitute.ca/lectures/winter-2014/
Cost: 
Free

Material Traces: Time and Gesture in Contemporary Art- Lecture by Dr. Amelia Jones

Image of Doctor Jones
Wednesday, February 5, 2014 - 11:30pm

Graduate Studies and the President's Office are please to welcome Dr. Amelia Jones

Amelia Jones practices a queer, anti-racist, feminist history and theory of twentieth- and twenty-first century Euro-American visual arts, including performance, film, video, and installation—articulated in relation to increasingly global frameworks.

Jones is the author of a number of books including Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), and Body Art/Performing the Subject(1998), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada(1994), and Self-Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006). This latter book expands on her work on body art, exploring the experience and understanding of the self in relation to performances of the body via technologies of representation from analogue photography to the Internet. It is linked to Jones's new research on the problematic of identity or identification in relation to visuality and Euro-American histories and practices of contemporary art and visual culture broadly construed; this latter interest finds its way into a number of articles published in journals from Art History to Parallax and The Drama Review and the book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012). Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, tracing the rise of identity politics in the mid-twentieth-century and critically examining debates in art discourse about "gaze theory," "post-identity" movements, and "multiculturalism." The book covers case studies of art practices exploring aspects of how we identify in relation to visual images, and offers a new theory of how to think issues of identification in relation to visual culture.

Jones has curated exhibitions, including Sexual Politics (1996, UCLA/Hammer Museum) and Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art (2013, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal). She has organized performance and creative events including Theorising Queer Visualities (2005), Faith and Identity in Contemporary Visual Culture (2006), and Fluid States: Trans- Montréal, for the Performance Studies International 2015. And she has edited volumes such Contemporary Art, 1945-2003 (2005) and Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (new edition, 2010), which collectively attempt to rethink standard chronologies and modes of thinking about areas of visual culture studies and art history by including voices previously marginalized, or otherwise not fully accounted for, in debates and histories of these fields. Strategically, as with Jones's curating and single-authored books, these aim to provide new ways of thinking histories of art and ideas that work in productive tension with existing dominant histories. This goal of (un)doing and/or rethinking art's histories (including the very structures through which these histories unfold and are institutionally embedded) is also reflected in the new series Jones is co-editing with Marsha Meskimmon at University of Manchester Press, entitled "Rethinking Art's Histories."

Jones's research is also at the forefront of the surge of interest in retrieving histories of feminist art and histories of performance or live art practices from the 1960s and 1970s. She has published major essays on feminist curatorial practices as well as an article on Marina Abramović's recent projects re-enacting body art works from the past and staging herself as an artwork (in The Drama Review, Spring 2011). Her new book, co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (Intellect Press, 2012) includes a range of primary documents, artist's projects, and academic articles examining the issues surrounding historicizing ephemeral, live art practices.

Venue & Address: 
Central Hall 100 McCaul St. Toronto, Ontario
Website: 
http://www.ocadu.ca/graduate-studies
Email: 
arowe@ocadu.ca
Phone: 
<p>416 977-6000 ext 4366</p>
Cost: 
Free

Scarpa Reception and Lecture Cancelled

Image from Scarpa Reception and Lecture
Thursday, October 30, 2014 - 11:00pm to Friday, October 31, 2014 - 12:00am

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the VIP Reception and Public Lecture by Tobia Scarpa, scheduled for this Thursday, October 30th, has been cancelled. The Office of Graduate Studies, along with theIstituto Italiano di Cultura, is working to reschedule the lecture for a later date, and will be in touch with details as they become available.

For questions or concerns, please contact:
OCAD U Office of Graduate Studies 
416.977.6000 x 423

Keywords: 

FROM LA TO CAPE DORSET: PUBLIC ART STORYTELLING IS AN OCAD U HOT TOPIC

Matta, the eldest elder in town. Nunavik. Image courtesy Cape Dorset Mural Project
Judy Baca with one of her murals. Image courtesy Judy Baca.
Patrick Thompson and Gootileak Echo paint a mural in Iqaluit. Image courtesy Cape Dorset Mural Project

World renowned Los Angeles artist, educator, activist and community arts pioneer Judy Baca brings her vision for public art to OCAD U for a March 14 lecture presented by the Faculty of Arts, while OCAD U alumni Alexa Hatanaka and Patrick Thompson campaign to facilitate mural painting in Cape Dorset, Nunavut. All three artists are engaged in large-scale, collaborative multi-artist projects centred around recording memories and telling the stories of communities.

Judy Baca’s political landscapes

“I hope to use public space to create public voice, and consciousness about the presence of people who are often the majority of the population but who may not be represented in any visual way.” Judy Baca

Judy Baca with one of her murals. Image courtesy Judy Baca. Baca is a Chicana muralist who teaches at the University of California. In 1974 she founded the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program, a community arts organization that evolved into the Social and Public Art Resource Centre (SPARC). As artistic director of SPARC, Baca’s focus is on giving voice to historically disenfranchised groups and preserving their stories.

One of her most cherished projects, for which she served as director, is The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a multicultural history “tattooed” along a flood control channel in the San Fernando Valley. It’s one of the longest murals in the world. She is also inspired by the land, believing there’s an intelligence to living and growing things and to the earth that nurtured them. “I have always known the value of art as a tool for transformation both personal and political” she said. “What I have had to learn through being attentive to my own curiosities and artistic focus, is that I choose often to use land as my method of recording memories and stories in my paintings and drawings.”

Baca’s talk at OCAD U is a co-presentation by Latin American Canadian Art Projects, Community Arts Practice (CAP) at York University and OCAD U’s Faculty of Art.

Alumni help spark imaginations in the north

Patrick Thompson and Gootileak Echo paint a mural in Iqaluit. Image courtesy Cape Dorset Mural Project OCAD U alumni Alexa Hatanaka (Printmaking) and Patrick Thompson (Drawing & Painting) are getting ready to fly to Cape Dorset, Nunavut where they were invited to paint a large outdoor mural on the hamlet’s co-op building, collaborate with local artists and facilitate youth workshops. The artists have been collaborating together on murals and youth workshops in fly-in Canadian arctic communities for four years (though Thompson has been involved in such projects for ten years).

Hatanaka and Thompson will be working on the project in Cape Dorset from April 16 until the end of June, helping to collaborate on a colourful mural for a busy, northern centre that’s cold and dark for many months of the year. One of their youth workshops will delve into contemporary mural art practices and techniques while another will culminate in the painting of wildlife-proof garbage bins throughout the community.

Their project is partially funded with support from the Ontario Arts Council and First Air, with accommodation by the Kinngait Lithography studio apartment, but the couple is also seeking Indigogo funding for materials, cargo shipment and artist honourariums.

Join the conversation:

Share your favourite mural on OCAD U’s Facebook page

Learn more:

Attend Judy Baca’s lecture

Judy Baca

Cape Dorset Mural Project
 

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