Faculty Research

Most full-time faculty at Emily Carr, and many sessional faculty members, are pursuing their own creative practices in art and design and in research projects, in addition to careers as educators and leaders.  Some of the research programs currently underway are highlighted below.

Maria Lantin and Leila Sujir – Breath I/O

We are surrounded by images. We spend hours surfing YouTube, watching movies, and playing video games. The type of image, where it is seen, on which surface, in what form factor and by whom - these are all factors in how meaning is synthesized from pixels resulting in a felt experience. In Breath I/O, Dr. Maria Lantin, Director of Emily Carr Intersections Digital Studios, and Leila Sujir, Associate Professor in Intermedia Cyberarts at Concordia University, are investigating the mix of video, virtuality, and the body. By reconfiguring the screen in a stereographic virtual environment they can work with video as a whole, as individual frames, or as pixel particles.

With three years of funding from the SSHRC Research Creation program, the team has chosen to work with lungs as a representation of a personal physical space that is communicating with the environment with each breath. The virtual lungs serve as container, screen, and interchange medium for moving images and sound. Breathe I/O will result in an interactive virtual reality sculpture presented in three dimensions in virtual space, in a variety of versions, including a pair of lungs and a chorus of lungs. Rhythms, sounds, interactions, and projections relating to exchanges with the outside world will be explored.

The work is intended to investigate the relationship that humans have with virtual image space. It will be situated in the artistic space between painting, photography, sculpture and virtual reality, and in the research space of film theory, culture theory, and philosophy. Breathe I/O will be exhibited in gallery settings and at conferences, and will result in journal and on-line publications.

Ruth Beer  and Jim Budd – Catch and Release: mapping stories of cultural and geographic transition

The historic fishing village of Steveston was one of the primary reasons for the multi-cultural immigration that helped to foster the settlement, economic development, and social growth on the west coast of Canada. Today, it is a focus of a multi-year research program that involves a community grappling with local and global environmental, socio-cultural and historical interplays. Dr. Beer and Jim Budd from Emily Carr, and Dr. Kit Grauer from the University of British Columbia and a team of Emily Carr graduate students are working with Steveston museums and other coastal city museums to create innovative integrated dynamic art installations during the multi-year research program starting in 2009.

The work will result in interactive storyscapes/installations, and an interactive website which provide ongoing documentation of the integrated art and design creative process and extends the artwork with viewer participation. New media, sensor technologies, and tangible interactive tools will be used to insert and overlay stories from the community together with those told through the Britannia Museum and Shipyard Historic Site. The overall goal is to encourage and support active user participation to create a more immersive experience of storytelling and self-authorship; "catching" and "releasing" stories from the community into the public sphere.

Rita Wong – Downstream: A Poetics of Water

As the biotic, communal and transformative qualities of water are threatened in the current environment, so is human well-being. Dr. Rita Wong and her team of scholars from five other universities will explore the roles of culture and poetics in supporting a healthy, water-based ecology. Cultural perspectives shape how people view and interact with water, be it as a commodity, a resource, a form of spiritual embodiment, a reminder of how all life on the planet is interrelated, and more. The project involves respectfully listening to local, global, and indigenous perspectives on water, and considering what is both spatially and temporally downstream.

Building toward a conference at Emily Carr in 2012 around World Water Day, the project will make space for environmentalists, community leaders, elders and academics to dialogue with writers and artists. Downstream will also lead toward a book and media that poetically explore how the local relates to the global through water. The project’s collaborators include Dorothy Christian, Peter Cole, Pat O’Riley, Larissa Lai, Karolle Wall, Kelly Phillips, and Walter K. Lew.

Henry Tsang, Glen Lowry, M. Simon Levin  -  Miraya: Vancouver as Dubai as Vancouver.

What makes a city? Emily Carr’s Henry Tsang and Glen Lowry are asking this question by focusing their lens on the replication of Vancouver’s False Creek halfway around the world – in the desert west of Dubai, named the Dubai Marina.

With a Research/Creation grant from SSHRC, they have brought together a team of artist researchers from the fine arts, new media, literature, cultural theory, history and geographical disciplines to critically examine issues of community formation, urban ecology, public culture and contemporary art practice. According to architecture critic Trevor Boddy, there now exists in Dubai an “almost perfect clone of downtown Vancouver – right down to the handrails on the seawall, the skinny condo towers on townhouse bases, all around a 100-per-cent artificial, full-scale version of False Creek filled with seawater from the Persian Gulf.”

Seawalls and lofty buildings can now be effortlessly lifted from specific places and grafted elsewhere wholesale. Urban developments now compete with new media as providers of experiences associated with virtual reality. Through Dubai’s revisioning of Vancouver, Miraya investigates our experience of urban space and sense of belonging to a locality, to a site and its history, and to a public.

Creating installations that are interdependent and interactive, Miraya  will activate the seawall walkways in Vancouver and Dubai connecting two geographically, politically, and culturally distant locations, which, nonetheless share an uncanny similarity as well as growing economic ties. During this last year of the project, Tsang and Lowry intend to create a live link between the two sites via a series of interactive “portals" that will create the impression of peering down through the centre of the earth to a connected site on the other side of the world. The "portals" will be activated by viewer presence, and will encourage a dialogue of sorts between those who find themselves on either end of the looking glass.

Rubén Möller   – Chaos

Rubén Möller is approaching his current research project, “Chaos”, in a decidedly methodical, analytical, and non-chaotic fashion. Möller has a broad background in animation, including as a director, editor, sound designer, and motion control designer, and is currently a sessional faculty member and researcher at Emily Carr.

The conceptual framework for his current work involves the mathematical theory of chaos as a model for understanding massively non-linear systems. He uses this approach to analyze the conversion from traditional linear story telling, to the non-linear narratives associated with time-based mediums. The theory extends through traditional filmic languages used in film and animation, to contemporary interactive mediums such as the Internet and video games. While ‘story’ remains the hallmark for experiencing all time-based works, a structure can be seen in the chaos permitting new conventions to reflect current expectations and outcomes. This structure, once understood, informs the development of time-based mediums as an art form and how humans interact with the experience of the screen.

The research is leading to an interactive multi-media installation to be shown at the upcoming Interactive Futures; an international conference being hosted by Emily Carr in November 2009. A large-scale human hand is being milled in acrylic using a CNC facility in the Intersections Digital Studio (IDS). A camera and lighting robot designed by Möller is being used to shoot sequences of a set, and the resulting image is composited with a virtual hand scanned in 3D from an actual sculpted model. The works portray the struggle of communicating with touch, sound and sight; the three avenues that ‘New Media’ articulates. The stories in all the works are motivated by a plot of sensual caresses to violent gestures to challenge the nature of narrative protocols and provide alternatives to creative expression within time. The piece is presented in 3-D on the IDS stereo wall.

This research explores the interface of technology and story-telling. Behind the scenes, it is an advanced blend of the latest technological tools with the traditional craft of the animator. To the user, it feels immersive, organic and compelling.

Christian Blyt – Sustainable Wood Design

Christian Blyt is an Industrial Designer with a passion for developing new applications for wood.  “How can we use wood in a more sustainable manner using modern technology—and make a beautiful product of superior quality” is the question his research has been addressing for the past 12 years.  With an MA from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, and a practical furniture design and manufacturing background, Blyt is the right person to be asking this question.  

His research has led to the development of a patented process for the manufacture of a corrugated veneer material with unique properties.  Only a few millimeters thick, the Corelam™ is manufactured with very little raw material.  It has surprising strength in one direction, along with flexibility in the other direction. This performance suggests structural applications.  The material is elegant and simple, combining the natural beauty of wood veneers with  a lightness of appearance that offers many design opportunities.

Blyt brought this unique product from initial research as his Masters Thesis to the brink of full production. The development of the process and manufacturing equipment has been funded by private backers, the National Research Council (NRC) and Forestry Innovation Investment (FII) Value to Wood program.   It is expected that the first large scale applications of Corelam™ will be in place before the end of 2009.

The current research program, conducted with funding from the NRC “IRAP” program and conducted at a University of British Columbia acoustics lab is focused on the acoustic properties of Corelam™.  Acoustic designers have long sought materials that are simple to work with, are lightweight and beautiful, and that offer directional acoustic performance or dampening properties – Corelam™ may be that material.  

Julie Andreyev – Animal Lover

Animal Lover is a research area that examines animals and their methods of communication as creative beings uniquely distinct from humans. According to Julie Andreyev, “Animal Lover looks at questions and critiques addressing modern relationships with animals; how animals are regarded by humans”.  In television and film, animals are usually depicted anthropomorphically by attributing human characteristics to them. These types of representations do not contribute to knowledge about the animal as a distinct being, but are inevitably human-centred metaphors. The way animals are portrayed in image and text has a crucial influence on how animals in human cultures are treated. More importantly, ways of representing animals influence what form future trajectories of treatment will take.

The goal of Animal Lover is to move away from an emphasis on the metaphorical animal/entertaining animal –attitudes which potentially reduce the animal to mere icon and tool in human cultures –towards a more integrated view of the animal and the powerful presence of their imagery. Animal Lover contributes directly to an expansion of cultural knowledge within a critical field of increasing ethical importance.  The work encompasses research and creation on a number of projects, including interactive installations, high definition videos and an exploration of new techniques combining motion capture and animation.

Paul Mathieu - Ceramics, Computers, and the Archive

It is rarely considered that ceramics is actually an archival material, but in many ways, ceramics is the memory of humankind.  Paul Mathieu's current research project, funded with a SSHRC grant, explores the relationship between two forms of archives: ceramics and computer technologies.  The work began in 2007 with web research on the current state of development of the use of computers to produce ceramic objects; the website www.paulmathieu.ca is being built to house this material.  At present, Paul, with the help of student assistants, is using 3-D computer aided design tools to develop objects which are informed by ceramic history, while being logical only with a virtual context.  The intent is to create objects which are sufficiently complex in both form and surface as to be realizable only with computer technology.  "it is important for the object to have both a form aspect and a surface aspect since ceramics is distinct as an art form in its relation to the form/surface continuum" he explains. 

The work will continue with the realization of these virtual forms using rapid prototyping technology, which allows a printer to produce the form in ceramic materials suitable for firing.  The firing of the object renders it permanent - the ultimate "backup" of the virtual object.  "My intent here is for this object, whatever it will be, to represent a moment in time (now) to be passed on into the future" says Mathieu.  

This research represents the current state of a long and  distinguished career as an researcher, teacher, and artist.  Paul Mathieu was recognized in 2007  as major Canadian ceramicist with the Saide Bronfman award for excellence in the fine crafts from the Canada Council for the Arts.  The jury described him as "accomplished", a "risk taker", and an artist whose work is based in innovation.  

 Contact Rob inkster, Director of Research and Industry Liaison for more information