Hexagram Mondays

Marie-Christiane Mathieu
Volumes sans contours

Omar Cherkaoui / Jason Martin
Artgrid : nouvel horizon dans la collaboration cyberculturelle

Sha Xin Wei
Poetics of performative space

Hexagram Mondays at SAT are presented by the
Hexagram Institute for Research and creation in Media Arts ant Technologies,
the Interuniversity Center for Media Arts (CIAM) and the SAT.

MARIE-CHRISTIANE
MATHIEU
Centre interuniversitaire en arts médiatiques (CIAM)
VOLUMES WITHOUT CONTOURS
Through
different works, I will try to show the pathes that lead me to consider the
use of new materialities and their interactive qualities in the vaarious ways
to connect the body to its environment and to its society. Objet : mort d’objet
(Object : death of an object) – 1996, Comment faire disparaître
un objet : mode d’emploi (How to make an object disappear : user instructions)
– 1996, Autopsie du vide (Autopsy of the void) – 1998 or Ou-topos
ou le jeu de l’œuvre (ou-topos or the play of the work) – 1999,
Monument du vide (Monuiment of the void ) – 2001-04, a CIAM-funded project,
Soup(e)- 2001 and 4 alcoves for an ill-adapted woman – ongoin, are all works
which constitute in my practice the necessary meshes for developing a concept
for which I coined the term aître (aire + être, (spatial) area +
being), while taking us into an aesthetic convergence that merge body, architecture,
territory and computer science within a living organism. This organism grows
within a paradoxical environment determined both by the mass and weight of our
buildings and the aerial of the electrommagnetic waves which now control our
relation to the world.

Marie-Christiane
Mathieu is a new media artist and holds a Ph.D. from the DEPA program (Études
et Pratique des Arts) from UQAM. She participated in numerous national and international
events, and published several papers in different art magazines, including a
recent one in Parachute 119, spring 2005. FOur of her lectures, presented n
Canada, USA and Germany, have been publiched in collective books of the SPIE
(The International Society for Optical Engineering) and of the IS&T/SPIE
Electroniv Imaging. She receievd many grants and prizes from the CALQ, the CAC,
the CRSH and the Shearwater foundation, and teaches at the UQAM department of
Hostory of Art, and at the Multidisciplinary School of Image at the UQO (Université
du Québec en Outaouais). She is the director of Studio XX in Montreal.

OMAR CHERKAOUI
(presented
by Jason Martin)
Professor, Computer Science Department, UQAM
Director, Laboratory for Research in Telecomputing
ARTGrid: NEW HORIZONS IN CYBERCOLLABORATION
For
artists, coordination and collaboration are key activities that are present
throughout 3D computer graphic projects. As well, project managers and artists
must work together to assure the success and on-time completion of the project.
To this end, timelines and effective communication must be in place. Unfortunately,
there are obstacles that may appear unexpectedly and put at risk the timely
delivery of a project. These obstacles may include missed assignments, miscommunication
and even the overwriting of key files.

ARTGrid is a collaborative
creative platform application that is specifically designed for project managers
and artists. It provides tools that help manage workload and keep track of their
contribution to the project. We will demonstrate how ARTGrid supports a group
of artists and project managers by giving them tools to coordinate and collaborate
on 3D computer graphic projects.

Using ARTGrid,
the project manager is able to:
1) break up the work assignments
2) assign the task workload proportionately among the artists
3) merge the contributions of the artists to finalize a project.

Concurrently, the
artists have “easy to use” effective tools and are able to:
1) open, save, close their project files directly from a shared or private drive
space without the concern of overwriting files
2) track the history of their project activity
3) fully annotate their project file if needed

ARTGrid was financed
by CANARIE.

Omar Cherkaoui
is a teacher at the Computer Science Department of UQAM. He obtained his PhD
in Computer Science in 1990 at the Université de Montréal. He
is the director of the research laboratory in computer networks (Lab Téléinfo),
where he supervises projects in the domain of hi-speed network administration
and new multimedia software superimposed on IP networks such as developing new
media art collaborative platform, a dynamic repository for virtual characters
and a morphological selector, implementation of a SNMP-v3 protocol, a construction
of a Web semantic for wireless computer networks and finally an architecture
for fiber optics.

He is involved
in the committee of CIAM (Centre Interuniversitaire des Arts Médiatiques)
and Hexagram. He is a project evaluator for many organizations including CANARIE
and Canadian Heritage.

He is the author
of La téléinformatique and La téléinformatique :
de la conception d’un réseau aux applications, he is also co-author of
La gestion de réseau and over a hundred articles. He is a critic for
journals and magazines such as J-SAC (IEEE), JNSM (Kluwer), ComMag (IEEE), IM,
NOMS, DSOM. He is member of IEEE, ACM, and GGF.

SHA XIN WEI
Associate professor, Computer Science Department
and Fine Arts Department
Concordia University
POETICS
OF PERFORMATIVE SPACES
I discuss in this essay are some of the questions motivating playspace installations
and events like TGarden, txOom, and trg, and the qualities of experimental experience
that may make such responsive media spaces playful events. My
interest in these responsive media spaces stems from two intertwined conversations.
The first is a series of conversations about agency, language, and hybrid ontology,
in which we put labels and concepts like “interaction,” “map,”
“system,” “grammar,” “expression,” and “human”
in play. The second is a specific set of challenges by two practitioners of
experimental theater to make events in which we and our participants could palpably
encounter, and experiment bodily with radicalized articulations of agency, self,
desire, and action.

How can we make
a responsive space and event within which initially accidental, unmarked, unrehearsed,
ordinary gestures can acquire perceptible symbolic charge? These questions are
practical questions of craft, and could only be answered or explored materially,
bodily, in physical built spaces and peopled events, but the way in which we
explored them was by doing performance research. We made installation-events
that straddled the border between closed shop studio improvisation-experiments
with special audiences, and open performances with a public.

Now the same questions
about the event also have a radical, micro-textural inflection. Could technologies
like computational media, realtime sound and video (re-)synthesis, cheap hobbyist
sensors, and the like, be added to the mise en scene of experimental event?
Stone resists, and a tree greens, and software breaks regardless of what we
say. If we desire matter to perform differently, we cannot simply legislate
or script it by brandishing a pen alone, we must also manufacture a symbolic
material substrate that behaves differently from ordinary matter.

The kind of events
I describe, the kind we’re exploring in the Topological Media Lab, are
collective, co-present, embodied, and a-linguistic. The potential for physical
contact is a condition for the collective embodied experiences needed to conduct
experimental phenomenology. Our events are designed for three or more participants,
three to destabilize dyadic pairing, with an eye to lower the threshold to improvisation
of being in that space. I say embodied to mark that the fleshy bodies of the
participants essentially move and act together in the co-construction of the
event. The line between actor and spectator is dissolved, so any body may adopt
the disposition of an actor as an agent of change in the event, or equally a
spectator as a witness of the event. The ambient environment is thick with media,
filled with thick sound, thick video, dense physical materials, so that inhabitants
live in a dense matter that responds and evolves in the course of the activity.

I ask whether and
how such substrate spaces can serve as places for radical experiments regarding
the architectural body.

Sha XinWei, Ph.D., is Canada Research Chair in media arts and
sciences, and Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science at Concordia
University in Montréal, Canada. He directs the Topological Media Lab,
a studio-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational
and phenomenological perspectives. Major art research projects include the TGarden
responsive environments, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic
video, and Softwear gestural instruments. Sha Xin Wei was trained in mathematics
at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and worked more than 12 years in the fields
of scientific computation, mathematical modeling and the visualization of scientific
data and geometric structures.

In 1995, he extended
his work to network media authoring systems and media theory coordinating a
3 year long workshop on interaction and computational media at Stanford. In
1997, he co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple
Research Labs, dedicated to designing technologies that people and organizations
can robustly reshape to meet changing socio-economic demands.

In 1998, Sha also
co-founded the Sponge art group in San Francisco, to build public experiments
in phenomenology of performance. With Sponge and other artists, Sha Xin Wei
directed event/installations in prominent experimental art venues including
Ars Electronica Austria, V2 The Netherlands, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada,
Future Physical United Kingdom, and Postmasters New York. These works have been
recognized by awards by major cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois
Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the LEF Foundation, the Canada Fund
for Innovation, the Creative Work Fund in New York, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

After obtaining
an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2001 at Stanford on differential geometric performance
and the technologies of writing in Mathematics, Computer Science, and History
& Philosophy of Science, Sha joined the faculty of the School of Literature,
Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta,
and the research faculty in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center
in the College of Computing, where he founded the Topological Media Lab.

In 2004-2005,
Dr. Sha was Visiting Scholar in History of Science at Harvard University, and
the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, writing about agency,
materiality, performance, and topological media. In 2005, Dr. Sha became director
of the Active Textiles and Wearable Computers Axis at Hexagram.
Dr. Sha is a co-editor of the journal, Artificial Intelligence and Society.
Recent publications include the essays “Resistance is Fertile: Gesture
and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media,” Configurations 10.3 (2003),
“Demonstrations of Expressive Softwear and Ambient Media,” Ubicomp
(2003), ” Whitehead’s Poetical Mathematics,” to appear in Configurations,
and “TGarden As Experimental Performance,” to appear in Modern Drama.