Catherine Richards - Principle Investigator

Catherine Richards is a visual artist in old and new media art. Her work explores the volatile sense of ourselves as new information technologies shift our boundaries.

Her many international exhibitions include: Sydney Biennale, ISEA, A/V Festival, ACM SIGGRAPH, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, V2, The Banff Centre for the Arts, SPECTROPIA, National Gallery of Canada, ZKM.

Awards received include the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts prize; fellowships include the National Gallery of Canada; the unique residency AIRes at the National Research Council of Canada; grants include AT&T Canada and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology.

She is a Professor Emeritus, Department of Visual Arts and former University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa.

Maria Lantin - Co-Investigator

Dr. Maria Lantin is the Director of Research at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. For many years she has been joining her love of Computing Science with her belief in the innovative potential of the arts. A circuitous route led her from obtaining her PhD in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University to leading the Visualization Research Lab at the Banff CentreÕs Banff New Media Institute (BNMI). Working primarily in teams, she has had the joy of bringing to life many artist projects involving digital technology, and continues this practice at Emily Carr where the Intersections Digital Studios (IDS) provides an ample playground for experimentation.

She has been playing with stereoscopic 3D images and applications (both creative and applied) since 2000. Starting with Mainframe Entertainment where she worked on the first IMAX stereoscopic animation (that never made it to the big screen but was still amazing), to working on photogrammetry software at IDELIX Inc, to running a stereoscopic CAVE at the Banff Centre, she has been experimenting with S3D in many forms. Her interest is in experimental and interactive forms of media. She likes people that reconstruct things. Working with her immensely talented team at Emily Carr, she has had the privilege of building a Centre that is curious, investigative, and actively engaged with the local creative communities.

Maureen Matthews - Consultant

Maureen Matthews is the Curator of Ethnology at the Manitoba Museum. She is an anthropologist with a long journalistic background as an award winning CBC radio documentary maker. She has built her anthropological practice on journalistic projects centred around supporting native languages and speakers and has used audio to emphasize the value of native languages and the wisdom and humour of native speakers. Her theoretical work has a dual Ojibwe and anthropological focus bringing together strands of Ojibwe philosophical and metaphorical thinking with contemporary anthropological work on the nature of personhood and the animacy and agency of objects.

For the last three years, Maureen has been working at the Manitoba Museum developing collaborative exhibits about aboriginal issues in Manitoba, most recently "We Are All Treaty People" with the Treaty Relations Commissioner of Manitoba, James Wilson. Prior to working at the museum, Maureen prepared the academic papers which will be used to support a UNESCO World Heritage Site bid on the East side of Lake Winnipeg. The bid is the joint project of five native bands and two provincial parks andincorporates 4.3million hectares of intact boreal forest. Her work involves providing detailed evidence to back up the assertion that the Ojibwe people of the region have a uniquely valuable ecological and cultural relationship with their boreal forest homeland.

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Contributors

Lawrence Cook

Prof. Eric Dubois
University of Ottawa

Chris Kroiter
Stereographer

John McElhone
Chief Conservator, National Gallery of Canada

Introduction

When Objects Have Agency. Human hearts are a living object 'gift of life'; and a technological one. Successful transplanted patients give 'token objects'; to the cardiologist who cannot part with them. Here the role of objects is dramatically manifested as they intervene in life processes, inter-relations and the limits of being human.

In stereo, (an illusion) these objects live a kind of half-life, apparently material yet active in unexpected ways and operating out of reach.

Contents

• Collaboration with the Medical Research Team, University Health Network (UHN)

Cardiac Transplant Unit, Toronto General Hospital

• Catherine Richards' .IMG Research / Creation Lab

University of Ottawa

• Transitio_MX 05 - September 21-29, 2013, Mexico City

Biomediciones Festival of New Media Art and Video

• Exhibition: Still Lives 1 & 2 - September 21-29, 2013

Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, Mexico

• Exhibition: Shivering Symposium, May 9-10, 2014

Winnipeg, Manitoba

• UAAC-AAUC Conference 2014 Congres - October 28, 2014

Toronto

• Exhibition: I'm Afraid to Ask - October 24 - November 7, 2014

Open Gallery, OCAD, Toronto

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Collaboration with the Medical Research Team University Health Network (UHN), Cardiac Transplant Unit, Toronto General Hospital

UHN's Cardiac Transplant Research Program

... Unusual emotional and psychological responses to the life-transforming procedure can produce real distress for some heart transplant recipients, a fascinating new study of a Toronto hospitalÕs patients suggests. Video interviews with 25 recipients found many had questions about their identity after receiving another person's heart, felt an intruder had found its way inside them, or experienced an intense, emotional bond with the donor whose death meant they could continue living.

One 50-something woman even said she stopped wanting to have sex with her husband after concluding - despite anonymity rules - her donor had been a man.

The project itself had unusual origins, stretching the usual, evidence-rooted boundaries of health care and shedding new light on a remarkable treatment the world now largely takes for granted. Dr. Heather Ross, the cardiologist who heads the UHN's cardiac transplant program, said her view of the treatment changed when she began exploring philosophy. The transplant world typically has viewed the procedure in "Cartesian" terms, as a bio-mechanical exchange of spare parts, she notes. The ideas of phenomenology she examined, however, pointed to body and consciousness being closely linked and suggested "we are in a never-ending process of becoming," said Dr. Ross, who has been working with British philosopher Margrit Shildrick and others.

- National Post December 12, 2014

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Dr. Heather Ross

MD, MHSc, FRCP(C)
Director of Cardiac Transplant
Toronto General Hospital
Toronto, Canada

Dr. Margrit Shildrick

Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Linkšping University
Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto.

Patricia McKeever

Senior Scientist
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital

Susan Abbey

Director, Medical Psychiatry
University Health Network, Toronto, Canada

Jennifer M. Poole

MSW, PhD
Associate Professor & Academic Co-ordinator, Continuing Education (Social Work)
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

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Tokens of gratitude are given repeatedly to the cardiologist, Dr. Ross. by successful heart transplant patients. They appear to be inconsequential but they bridge the unfathomable: my new heart was never 'dead' but was alive/dead; if my immune system defends me, the intruder heart dies and so will I. These objects take on a life of their own and live in Dr. Ross's office. She cannot part with them,

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This project was inter-linked with the Hybrid Bodies project.
More information about this project can be found at the following web site: http://www.hybridbodiesproject.com/

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Catherine Richards' .IMG Research / Creation Lab

University of Ottawa

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Transitio_MX 05 - September 21-29, 2013, Mexico City

Biomediciones Festival of New Media Art and Video

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Exhibition: Still Lives 1 & 2 September 21-29, 2013

Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, Mexico

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Exhibition: Shivering Symposium, May 9-10, 2014

Museum of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba

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UAAC-AAUC Conference 2014 Congreès - October 28, 2014

Toronto

Universities Art Association of Canada/l'association d'art des universiteés du Canada

Panelists

Professor Catherine Richards, Visual Arts, University Research Chair , University of Ottawa.

Dr. Maria Lantin, Director of Research , Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Dr. Maureen Matthews, Curator of Ethnology, Manitoba Museum.

Session Chair

Dr. Caroline Langill, Associate Dean, Facilities, Policies and Planning in the Faculty of Art, OCAD

Presentation ABSTRACTS

Richards

There is a conversation within art practice that presumes artwork as an interactive entity and artists anticipate that their art works/objects will have lives of their own. One could say this is a primary reason for making art. Art schools are full of metaphorical talk which instantiates this kind of thinking. This presentation describes objects that unexpectedly appeared to have their own intentions. These artworks arose from a collaborative project with the research team at the Cardiac Transplant Program, Toronto General Hospital, and University Health Network. These works were created in the context of human heart transplants as both a living object 'the gift of life' and technological object. It was the successful patients ' gift' objects that began to appear to demonstrate an agency of their own, forcing a powerful reluctant encounter that was decidedly outside of the modernist framework whether it was artwork or the hospital itself.

Lantin

I wonder about objects in virtual environments. They don't age, they bear few life traces. We act upon them with the most functional of gestures. Yet in the physical world there are some objects that we revere and that act as catalysts of patterned behaviour. We could say they are agents in a dance with the phenomenal world. A dance that includes repetition, superstition, mimicry, creation, and destruction, memory and patterns.

I wonder how we design for the agency of objects. How do we encode agency when its enactment is contingent on all the participating actors, and their context? How we do represent agency in virtual objects? How do we design objects to have more potential for agency? How do we detect movement towards an objects that signals an "agency" type of relationship? How do certain types of movements activate a space? Can we give subtle movements to virtual objects to signal an agency type of relationship? How would we expect such objects to move?

I propose a new way to think of virtual environments where we encode agency as an evolved, rehearsed, and enacted dance between objects, animals, and their environment.

Matthews

Niningishkaa, Anishinaabe perspectives on person-like things.

In Art and Agency (1998), Alfred Gell developed an anthropological theory which skirted Western definitions of art and aesthetics, to explain the social role of objects which act like art in all cultures - including cultures without a concept of "art". Gell's theory neatly parallels Anishinaabe concepts about animate and socially active objects, including very beautiful objects, but no category that approximates "art." This paper takes a combined Anishinaabe and anthropological perspective to explore what Anishinaabe speakers can tell us about detecting and accounting for the role of animate objects (Hallowell 1960) and what an anthropological attentiveness to the personhood of objects (Strathern 2005, Latour 1993, Jackson 1989) can reveal. It also considers recent scholarship on Actor Network (Latour 2013), Affect (O'Sullivan 2001) and Thing Theory (Brown 2001, Mitchell 2001, 2005) which, taken together, provide a theoretical and metaphorical triangulation of art and objects that make things happen.

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Exhibition - I'm Afraid to Ask - October 24 - November 7

Open Gallery, OCAD, Toronto

Human hearts are a living object 'gift of life' and a technological one.

Successful transplanted patients give 'token objects' to the cardiologist who cannot part with them.

Here the role of objects is dramatically manifested as they intervene in life processes, inter-relations and the limits of being human.

SHIVERING: THE SYMPOSIUM - Manitoba - May 9-10, 2014

SHIVERING was a three year, multi-disciplinary SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) funded investigation into the social role of objects, particularly art objects, examined through the faceted lenses of art research, digital and multimedia art practice, and contemporary anthropological theory. The principal investigator, Catherine Richards, is Professor of Art at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Maria Lantin, co-investigator, is Director of Research at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Dr. Maureen Matthews, the project's cultural anthropologist is Curator of Ethnology at the Manitoba Museum.

Contents

• SHIVERING: THE IDEAS
• SHIVERING: THE EVENT
• THE PANELISTS
• TEXTS AND LINKS

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SHIVERING: THE IDEAS

In the course of this project, the three of us have been meeting and talking about the idea of the social agency of objects and its consequences for art and curatorial practice. We started with the British anthropologist, Alfred Gell, who more directly than anyone else, connected ideas about art and the apparent animacy and social agency of objects. In his book, Art and Agency (1998), he tried to find a way, outside the Western definition of art and western aesthetic conversations, to explain objects which act like art in other cultures - including cultures which famously have no word for "art". He argued that it ought to be possible to talk about the social power of art objects without the vocabularies and conceptual limitations of aesthetics, commoditization and colonialist connoisseurship. He argued instead that we look simply and carefully at the role of objects which act in peopleÕs lives and become aware of what they are doing.

Gell's work was at the forefront of a burgeoning anthropological investigation of the social life of things, (Appadurai 1986), Thomas (1991), the consequences of materiality (Miller 2005; Tilley 2004), the nature of personhood (Strathern (2005), the role of the senses by Howes (2003), Edwards, Gosden and Phillips (2006), and the development of Actor Network Theory by Bruno Latour (1993). While Gell is very well known in the UK, where he taught at Cambridge University, these ideas have not been widely applied in North America.

Looking at art from the perspective of social agency appeals to anthropologists who work within communities where ceremonial objects may be grammatically animate and are often treated as categorical persons. It facilitates accurate and sympathetic treatment in such cultural environments. It also appeals to anthropologists because it offers an equally useful perspective on the Western/European practices including the tendency to personify objects and to speak about objects as doing things or making something happen. Art galleries across the western world are dedicated to the premise that objects in and of themselves, communicate powerful ideas and transcend temporal constraints. The conviction that historical and ethnographic objects have the power to teach history and educate people across cultural boundaries is at the heart of Western museological display and collecting practice.

This vocabulary of the animate objects has entered the world of computing, a world where concepts of personhood and objectness are morphing and mutating. There has been a shift in computing science toward object-oriented computing and the "Internet of Things." Especially in complex game programming and simulation, programmers are creating defined agents which perform complex and evolving roles within programs in a relational field which is itself evolving. Interesting questions emerge with respect to the ways in which our understanding of objects and agents shapes their digital representations and even more interesting ones when networks become agents, dynamically creating their own roles based on aggregate patterns of action.

Computational possibilities are also transforming contemporary concepts of personhood. In artificial intelligence and robotics, the relevance of the substrate, the body, is increasingly being questioned because of the possibility of "backing ourselves up" to be restored to life at some time in the future (Kurtzwell). The Turing Test has new relevance in the context of the "living algorithm" where agency is relational and does not depend on any overt self-awareness.

Programmers conventionally incorporate a sense of working with a living system or a responsive entity when they tackle the process of "debugging" a program. In this sense there is a parallel with art practice where the conversation presumes a sense of a whole interactive entity and requires being mindful of the full set of interactions. Similarly, artists anticipate that their art works/objects have lives of their own. One could say this is a primary reason for making art. Art schools are full of metaphorical talk which instantiates this kind of thinking. In 'crits', where students are struggling and teachers are trying to explain deficiencies in process and outcome, the assumption of animacy is overt. Expressions such as 'having a dialogue' with an art objects presumes a conversation. We ask, 'Are we listening to the work? What is it saying? Where do we go next? What works?'

Artists retain the metaphor for finished art work. We expect our art go out into the world, or at least into the world of art, gathering attention and social power. The stories of successful works take on the character of biographies, full of name dropping about famous owners and heroic stories of their roles in shaping or inspiring events. Once they become gallery-ized, museum-ized and media-ized they can have strange after-lives as mugs, posters, art books, screen savers and global commercials, making things happen in an entirely new arena.

We argue that paying attention to the life and agency of art/museum objects creates an opportunity for a theoretically useful critique of material/digital objects in contemporary life and what this means for modernisms and post-modernisms. Within the paradigm of modernism, an artistÕs intentionality is sufficient for a banal object such as a toilet (Duchamp 1917) to be snatched from its utilitarian context and very acceptably repositioned within the art world discourse. On the other hand, it is rare that an object already powerfully operating in the wider social world would is considered an acceptable locus of artwork. A religious icon or talisman is often first drained of its intentionality and then discussed only in terms of form and treatment when it is being considered as art. Objects which become art through cynical devices such as de-contextualization, irony or simply being quoted as a formal silhouette lose the social agency they once had to circulate as art. However, as artists move toward multi-media practice with work which responds to viewers and as this form of art practice explores the idea of robotic and emotive objects, which take on lives of their own and interrupt the lives of viewers/participants, the notion of objects with social agency is hard to resist, not just in other cultures but in our own.

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SHIVERING: THE EVENT

On the weekend of May 9-11, 2014 we held a small symposium, an intensive discussion of ideas about objects, art and their role in our world and invited 10 scholars to join us, people who are actively working on issues having to do with the animacy and agency of objects in museums and art galleries and in media and digital art practice. Our principal objective was to have a concentrated discussion of the practical and intellectual consequences which flow from registering and observing the social power of objects in life and what this awareness means for our research, analysis and art practice.

Participants brought examples of their latest work: writing, thinking or art, to the Manitoba Museum, the home of a large number of socially active other-than-human entities. We organized our symposium around four core topics which we discussed during the day and informally at dinner as well.

Session 1 - Objects that live

Welcome and introductions

Maureen Matthews, D. Phil (Oxon), Curator of Ethnology, Manitoba Museum, and Consulting Scholar, American Philosophical Society Centre fort Native American and Indigenous Studies with Elaine Owen, Pauingassi community representative.

Ruth Phillips, PhD, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture, Professor of Art History (Cross-appointed, PhD program in Cultural Mediations, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture), Carleton University.

Jennifer Kramer, PhD, Associate Professor, Curator Pacific Northwest, Museum of Anthropology, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Early Career Scholar and Faculty Associate, University of British Columbia/Museum of Anthropology.

Tea and visit to the museum lab

Wiikaanag, Ritual relatives in the Pauingassi Collection: a group of important ceremonial Ojibwe artefacts, photographed and described in use by American Anthropologist A. I Hallowell between 1930 and 1940, collected in 1970 by Jack Steinbring of the University of Winnipeg and then reconnected to the community via Ojibwe language recordings and photographs from 1992 to the present. The collection is in the process of being repatriated to a trust on behalf of the community.

Session 2 - Objects that make things happen

Maria Lantin, PhD, Director of Research and Director of Intersections Digital Studio, Faculty of Graduate Studies, at Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Ben Bogart, PhD, Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Ben Bogart is an artist working in installation, audio-visual improvisation and software development. His current work, "A Machine that Dreams: An Artistic Enquiry of Cognitive Theories of Dreaming and Mental Imagery" deals with computational implementations of embodied creativity, memory and dreaming.

Session 3 - Objects that make us

Catherine Richards, Professor of Media Arts and Full Professor, Department of Visual Arts and Research Chair, University of Ottawa. in Media and the Arts Artists currently working on multidimensional, stereoscopic images of commemorative mnemonic objects.

Caroline Langill, Associate Professor of Art, Associate Dean, Facilities, Policies and Planning in the Faculty of Art. Ontario College of Art and Design and independent curator.

France Trepannier, University of Victoria, is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and researcher of Kanienökéhaka (Mohawk) and Québécois ancestry. France was also the co-founder and Director of the artist-run center Axe Néo-7 in Gatineau, Quebec, co-chair of the Aboriginal Program Council at the Banff Centre and the co-recipient of the 2012 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellowship by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. France is currently the Vice Chair for the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective.

Jen Mizuik, director, visual/digital arts at The Banff Centre, Banff Alberta, curator, arts centre manager with a focus on digital media and contemporary arts practice.

Tea and visit to the museum lab

I'm afraid to ask, new work by Catherine Richards. These artworks arose from a collaborative project with the research team at the Cardiac Transplant Program, Toronto General Hospital, and University Health Network. These works were created in the context of human heart transplants as both a living object 'the gift of life' and technological object. It was the successful patients ' gift' objects that began to appear to demonstrate an agency of their own, forcing a powerful reluctant encounter that was decidedly outside of the modernist framework whether it was artwork or the hospital itself.

Session 4 - Making things happen: making happening things

Discussion. Transcript in progress.

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THE PANELISTS

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TEXTS AND LINKS

33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art: The Challenge of the Object

CBC IDEAS program with Maureen Matthews: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2010/12/07/wihtigo/

Interactive Futures Conference (http://if2014.ecuad.ca/)

Absolon, Kathleen E. (Minogiizhigokwe). Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know. Fernwood Publishing, 2011. Print.

Bogart, Ben. "Imagination-Art-Reality"".

Bogart, Ben. "The Illusion of Usability: Perception, Simulation and Culture"", TED Talk, Munich. 2014. Web. http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2014/the-illusion-of-usability-perception-simulation-and-culture/

Cohen, Harold. "What is an Image?", Conference Proceeding, IJCAI. 1979.

Gill, Rajdeep S. Transforming Curatorial Practice : Envisioning and Nurturing Ethical-Creative-Archival Ecologies of Connectedness. Univesity of British Columbia. 2013. (PhD thesis)

Ginzburg, Carlo and Davin, Anna. "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method." History Workshop 9 (1980): 5-36.

Holly, Michael Ann. The Melancholy Art. Princeton: Princeton UP. 2013.

Hutson, Matt. The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane. New York: Hudson Street, 2012.

Kovach, Margaret. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations and Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Kramer, Jennifer. "Möa;bius Museology: Curating and Critiquing the Multiversity Galleries at the UBC Museum of Anthropology" in Museum Transformations: Art, Culture, History (Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips, eds.) Wiley-Blackwell Press.

Kramer, Jennifer. "Appropriation (?) Of the Month: The Bet of the Broncho and the Raven" in IPinCH. June 19, 2014. Web http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/outputs/blog/appropriation-month-bet-broncho-and-raven

Nancy, Jean-Luc. L'intrus, Paris: Galilée. 2000.

McCall Sophie. First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship, UBC Press, 2011

Phillips, Ruth. "The Politics of Reconnection: Museum Collections as Sites of Indigenous (and Non-Indigenous) Cultural Recovery".

Phillips, Ruth. "Things Anashinaabe: Art, Agency and Exchange across Time" in Before and after the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes. Ed: David W. Penney &Gerald McMaster. Smithsonian 2013.

Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1995.

Trépanier, France and Creighton-Kelly, Chris. Understanding Aboriginal Arts in Canada Today: A Knowledge and Literature Review, Canada Council for the Arts, 2011.

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Maria Lantin

Director of Research at Emily Carr University of Art + Design

VIVE (Very Immersive Virtual Environment)

VIVE combines the Oculus Rift headset with motion capture systems to create a whole body virtual experience. Being able to roam and interact with the environment creates a more realistic VR experience. Emily Carr researchers are using this system to investigate modes of interaction and networked presence in VR.

For a short video click HERE