AHIS 333 Interdisciplinary Forums Fall 2009 Featured Speakers

AHIS 333 Interdisciplinary Forums Presents
Fall 2009 Featured Speakers - Why Collaborate?

September 17 Situated Knowledges: Henry Tsang and Rita Wong
September 24 CodeLab: M. Simon Levin and Jer Thorp
October 1       Uts'am/Witness: Nancy Bleck and Chief Bill Williams
October 8       Gehry Technologies: Confluences and Paradigm Shifts: Hanif Janmohamed
October 15     The Art of Engagement: Tania Willard and Daina Warren
October 22     A Filmmaker's Personal Approach to Collaboration: Thomas Riedelsheimer
October 29    Living on the Edge: Bing Thom
November 5   Congratulations! A Performance by Janet: Amy Modahl and Camilla Pickard
November 12  Intimate Portraiture and Dialogue: Sandra Semchuk and Lucie Chan
November 19  Animated Collaboration: A Necessary Aspect of Production: Martin Rose
November 26  Cooperating with Animals: Carol Gigliotti
December 3    A Conversation with Restaurateurs: Vikram Vij and Meera Dhalwala
December 10  Collaborative Culture and Art Making: Vanessa Richards and Sol Guy

All talks commence at 3:50pm and end at 5pm

These events are free and open to the public.

Lecture Hall 301, South Building
Emily Carr University of Art + Design
1400 Johnston St., Granville Island, Vancouver

Biographies of Lecturers:

Nancy Bleck is an artist whose photography, film and video explores notions of the witness, nomadic subjectivity, ecology, embodied ethics, with an emphasis on collaboration and social change. Bleck is co-founder of the Uts'am - Witness project, 1997-2007, together with Hereditary Chief Bill Williams, mountaineer John Clarke, and the Roundhouse Community Centre. She teaches at Emily Carr. In 2007, Bleck received a ‘Woman of Distinction' award in the category of arts, culture and design.

Meera Dhalwala has worked with international non-profit organizations in Washington, DC, on human rights and development projects. In 1995, she joined Vij's. Their philosophy is to keep spices and cooking techniques Indian, while using meats, seafoods and produce that are locally available.

Dr. Carol Gigliotti's has been involved in new media since 1990 and writes about ethics and technology. Her forthcoming book, Leonardo's Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals, includes essays by philosopher Steven Best, literary theorist Susan McHugh, feminist biologist Lynda Birke and a dialogue between Gigliotti and cultural theorist Steve Baker. She teaches Environmental Ethics, Critical Animal Studies and Interactive Media at Emily Carr.

As one of Canada's leading music executives, Sol Guy is co-founder of DCM and co-creator, co-producer, and host of 4REAL. He has worked with artists such as Lauryn Hill, P Diddy, India Arie, k-os, Rascalz, The Roots, Outkast, Kardinal Offishall, Dead Prez, B.I.G. and The Wu-Tang Clan. His Direct Current Media with Josh Thome utilizes the power of media and the Internet to educate, inspire and empower others to make a difference.

Hanif Janmohamed's human-centered, art-infused approach to design has resulted in award winning design for projects including the CD-ROM Glenn Gould: The New Listener; video exhibitions on the work of Frank Gehry; User Interface design for Nikon Digital; and Confluences - The Design and Rtealization of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Janmohamed is currently exploring the design implications of the poetic object, and is part of a team developing a real-time collaborative web-based platform called OMBU.

The public works of M. Simon Levin include gardens, telecommunication systems, utility trucks, alternative tours of cities, storytelling tricycles, whispering book carts and land care centres in Canada, USA, Mexico and Australia. As an extension of his art practice, Levin works with artists and non-artists, from students to policy makers in creating public works as a way of pushing social awareness of how public space operates and for whom it is designed to do so.

Vanessa Richards is a musician, performance artist, poet and facilitator. As founder and Artistic Director of London-based Mannafest, her performance art and music toured premier clubs, concert halls and galleries including The Jazz Café, Fabric, South Bank Centre, and Tate Modern.

Documentary filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer is well-known for his Rivers and Tides about the artist Andy Goldsworthy. His films deal with a variety of topics and are increasingly of feature length for theatrical release. He has won major national and international film and television awards for directing as well as for editing and camerawork. Riedelsheimer is a member of the German and European Film Academy.

Martin Rose has been an independent animation filmmaker in Vancouver for two decades. He is also a producer at the National Film Board, Pacific + Yukon Centre where he coordinates auteur animation projects such as The Trembling Veils of Bones, an Irish-Canadian co-production that involves combining a live actor and computer-generated animation; an abstract experimental film; and a stereoscopic modern fairy tale. Rose is Associate Professor in Animation at Emily Carr.

Emily Carr Associate Professor Sandra Semchuk is a co-founder of The Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon, and her artwork has been widely exhibited internationally. As a feminist, she uses autobiography to locate herself in resistance to colonialist narratives. Semchuk has collaborated with her father, Martin Semchuk, and her recently deceased husband, Cree actor/writer James Nicholas, and is working on a photographic book about the internment camps during WWI in Canada where more than 5000 Ukrainians were interned.

Bing Thom is one of Canada's most accomplished architects and urbanists. A dedicated and artful city-builder, his global reputation has risen in consort with that of Vancouver, the city he has done much to protect and to improve. Ground-breaking buildings and urban designs produced by his firm have been published in most of the world's leading architectural journals, and he has been recognized for his design accomplishments and civic stewardship by being awarded the Order of Canada.

Janet: writer, zinesta, performer, and general muckraker. She thwarts professionalism, adopting new roles, new outfits, new hairstyles, old outfits in an effort to deconstruct systematized roles and conflated structures, be they academic, political or social. Janet was three. Here Janet is two, Camilla Pickard and Amy Modahl.

Lucie Chan's drawing-based works and installations have been exhibited nationally, including the traveling exhibit Just my Imagination, the Foreman Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In 2006, she was nominated for the Sobey Art Award. Chan has been teaching at NSCAD for the past four years and is a new faculty member at ECU.

A former geneticist, Jer Thorp's digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art. His organic Flash experiments and generative artworks has been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, BusinessWeek and the CBC. Thorp's award-winning software-based work has been exhibited internationally and all over the web. As a developer and designer, Thorp produced work for Honda, the CBC, FOX, and the LA Kings. He is a contributing editor for Wired UK.

Henry Tsang is a visual and media artist whose projects incorporate digital media, video, photography, language and sculptural elements in the exploration of the relationship between the public, community and identity in the new global order. He is currently working on the public art project Maraya with Glen Lowry, M. Simon Levin et al, that reflects the uncanny similarity between Vancouver's False Creek and the Dubai Marina. Henry received the VIVA Award in 1993.

Vikram Vij opened the original 14-seat Vij's Restaurant in Vancouver in 1994, and has since cooked on many television shows and for such events as the Montreal Festival of Lights and the James Beard Awards in New York. A certified sommelier, he is passionate about pairing wines with Indian food.

Daina Warren is of the Montana Cree Nation, in Hobbema, Alberta and has curated such projects as the New Forms Media Arts Festivals 2004 - 2005, the Earth Village for the World Urban Forum 2006. She has assisted the LIVE Biennale of Performance Art since 1999 and was associate curator with grunt gallery from 1999 to 2009. She is currently in the Masters program in Critical and Curatorial Studies at UBC, specializing in contemporary Aboriginal arts practices.

Painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, and comics artist, Tania Willard is also the editor of Redwire Magazine, an Indigenous youth magazine and website that is one of the only forums for independent aboriginal culture, art, and politics in Canada. She has worked with grunt gallery to coordinate the community arts conference and publication, Live in Public: The Art of Engagement; runs Red Willow Designs; and has artwork in the Stanley Park Environmental Art Project.

Chief Bill Williams, ta-lall-SHAM-cane siyam, has been on the Squamish First Nation Council since 1980, and the community's Hereditary Council since 1995. He has played a leadership role among First Nations by successfully blending business and conservation efforts, and successfully negotiated Squamish control of 80% of the allowable cut in Squamish Territory. Chief Williams was awarded the 2005 Eugene Rogers Award for Leading Conservation Efforts by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

Rita Wong investigates the relationships between contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology, and decolonization. A recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award, Wong is the author of three books: sybil unrest, in collaboration with Larissa Lai; forage; and monkeypuzzle. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies such as A Verse Map of Vancouver, Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry. She is currently working on a research project exploring the poetics of water.