People
Alice Jarry
Milieux Associate Director Dr. Alice Jarry is an artist, researcher and educator who specializes in site-specific responsive works, socio-environmental design, digital arts, tangible media, and community-oriented projects. Her research brings concerns about sustainability, aesthetics, and politics to bear critically upon materiality, material production, and contemporary matters-of-concern regarding urban communities and infrastructures. With matter inseparable from both form and practice, her installation work examines how materiality - engaged in constant processes of transformation and circulation with site, technology, and communities - can provoke the emergence of adaptive forms and resilient socio-environmental relations.
See moreBart Simon
CURRENTLY ON SABBATICAL Bart Simon is the director of Milieux, TAG research centre co-founder and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His areas of expertise include game studies, science and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game studies and design research crosses a variety of genres and platforms looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday life. His current research on the Immersive Theatre and Games, materialities of play, and player-makers in Minecraft is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada. Other projects include work on indie game scenes, solar media, social theories of play, and modding cultures.
See moreJason Edward Lewis
Jason Edward Lewis is the co-director of the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. He is a full Professor of Design and Computation Arts, a digital media artist, poet and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research / creation projects using virtual environments to assist Aboriginal communities in preserving, interpreting and communicating cultural histories, devising new means of creating and reading digital texts, developing systems for creative use of mobile technology. He was the director of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, a seven-year SSHRC-funded Partnership focused on how Indigenous communities imaging themselves seven generations hence. Lewis co-founded and co-directs the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network that investigates how Aboriginal people can participate in the shaping of our digital media future, and he co-directs workshops combining traditional stories and game design at the Kahnawake First Nations' high school. He is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, creative and technical levels simultaneously. Lewis' creative work has been featured at the Ars Electronica Center, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Urban Screens and Mobilefest, among other venues, his writing about new media has been presented at conferences, festivals and exhibitions on four continents and his work with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace has won multiple awards.
See moreOlivier Charbonneau
Olivier Charbonneau is associate Director of the TAG Research Centre. As an Associate Librarian at Concordia University and compulsive blogger, Olivier is fascinated by how law and information mingle. He is a doctoral student at the Faculté de droit at Université de Montréal. He has over 15 years of professional involvement in library or cultural communities. He holds two masters degrees from Université de Montréal, one in information sciences and another in law, as well as an undergraduate degree in commerce from McGill University. He has kept a research blog since 2005 in French at www.culturelibre.ca and a work blog since 2011 in English at OutFind.ca. His interest centre around copyright, cultural economics, open access and any social media trend.
See moreMiranda Smitheram
Dr Miranda Smitheram is a Co-Director of the Textile and Materiality Research Cluster and the Director of MaSH Lab at Milieux. She is a design researcher, educator and artist, who explores themes of remediation and materiality. Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Miranda is currently Assistant Professor of Material Futures in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. Her research practice is tactile, haptic and embodied, and incorporates ancestral and speculative methods to work with ecosystems, socio-cultural matter, and nonhuman collaborators. Through this she explores developing new remediated and hybrid materials, to contribute to sustainable, relational and Indigenous futures. Dr Smitheram comes from an industry background in fashion and textile design with ten years of experience as a design team leader and fashion designer, in commercial multi-brand direction and as award-winning designer/business owner of her independent fashion label. Her current research explores decolonizing matter, and centres an ethics of care and relationality. Through unraveling ontologies and kinship of invasive plant species, Miranda frames possibilities of rematerializing these unwanted invaders through soft surface, biofabrication and textile applications to propose localized solutions through materiality. Miranda’s research moves between digital, virtual, and physical, with a particular interest in the ontologies and critical materiality that is revealed through the flux of these processes. Both her field research with flora and her digital research with materiality follow an ontological design approach. These mediated materials take shape as textile forms, structures and digital artworks that question the interaction and agency of human and more-than-human, place, and space in a post-anthropocentric context.
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