Ice and Water, Einstein’s dreams

source: betatopologicalmedialabnet

The Topological Media Lab (TML) was established in 2001 as a trans-disciplinary atelier-laboratory for collaborative research creation. In 2005, TML moved to Concordia University and the Hexagram research network in Montréal, Canada.Its projects serve as case studies in the construction of fresh modes of cultural knowledge and the critical studies of media arts and techno-science, bringing together practices of speculative inquiry, scientific investigation and artistic research-creation practices. The TML’s technical research areas include: realtime video, sound synthesis, embedded sensors, gesture tracking, physical computing, media choreography, and active textiles. Its application areas lie in movement arts, speculative architecture, and experimental philosophy.
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source: betatopologicalmedialabnet

The Topological Media Lab approaches media arts and technologies research as a creative endeavour that cuts across disciplines and fields of experience. The TML describes its atelier research as studying processes of “subjectivation, agency and materiality from phenomenological, social and computational perspectives.” It approaches this by suspending assumptions about what we think are ego’s, humans, machines, objects, and subjects, and think instead of transformations on things, and see how they emerge in play and process. This is informed by a continuous, rather than tokenized object or grammar-based, approach to material change, hence the “topological” aspect. Topology is a field of mathematics concerned with the non-metric (non-numerical) properties of space and the continuous, dynamic relationships through which space is constituted.

TML researchers investigate how people build, inhabit and use sensate or active matter. Philosophically, TML research draws inspiration from the phenomenology of the Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, the questioning of representation and meaning by Wittgenstein, the philosophy of technology of Simondon, and ethico-aesthetic sensibilities of Guattari amongst other sources. The TML is both an atelier and a research laboratory for research in improvisatory gesture and movement from humane but also non-anthropocentric perspectives. Projects conducted in the atelier draw on and inform research in the areas of performance, music, media arts and embodiment theory. The topological experiments also contribute to ongoing research in the computational and natural sciences, seeking to understand the dynamic interplays of social, psychical and material space.
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source: betatopologicalmedialabnet

The Topological Media Lab invite’s you to visit Einstein’s Dreams, time-conditioning installations, at the Concordia Hexagram-Blackbox. For 4 weeks, the Hexagram Blackbox will be transformed into a sandboxfor altering senses of time. Over the course of the month, visitors are invited to encounter this studio-workshop as a prototype for atelier process as a mode of knowledge creation, and knowledge creation as play.

Einstein’s Dreams is a research workshop that brings to bear ten years of media magic with realtime video, sound, lighting that evolve in concert with people’s movement.

In this workshop, inspired by vignettes from Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams, we will culminate environments that condition temporality. In one, time slows to a halt as you approach a particular place; in another there is no future; in third, time sticks and slips; in a fourth age reverses and what is rotten becomes fresh as time passes.

Director and choreographer Michael Montanaro, Chair of Contemporary Dance, Canada Research Chair New Media Sha Xin Wei, team with media artists and researchers in the Topological Media Lab — a lab for making new kinds of hybrid mediamatter.