Speculative Life Research Cluster

07/22/2024

Planetary Design, Reclaiming Futures--Conference coming October 23-26 at the ICI Berlin, Organized by a great group of people including Sudipto Basu, Nadia Christidi, and Eylül Iscen myself, as part of Governing Through Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought

Today, many people are experiencing the uneven impacts of climate change, pandemics, wars, market crashes, biodiversity loss, and supply chain disruptions on a global scale. That a shared planetary future is, at best, uncertain is widely accepted. Governments, corporations, consultancies, and design...

06/07/2023

Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, "The Smartness Mandate" (MIT Press, 2023)

05/02/2023

The Speculative Life Research Cluster's Machine Agencies group along with the Algorithmic Media Observatory are pleased to host Dr. Louise Amoore’s lecture on Machine Learning Politics on May 16th at Milieux Institute.

☞ Registration to the event: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/dr-louise-amoore-lecture-on-machine-learning-politics-tickets-623706110767

☞ For more information on the event click the link bellow ☟

Dr. Amoore introduces the concept of machine learning politics.

03/21/2023

We are excited to share the release of the .able journal in the frame of • able Journal : A journal A new free and peer-reviewed image-based journal at the intersection of art, design, and sciences.

This international event will take place in Paris, Barcelona and online.
able was created at the initiative of Chaire « arts & sciences » of the École polytechnique, the École des Arts Décoratifs - Paris and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso, .able journal is published by Actar Publishers and supported by some thirty international academic partners, brought together to publish innovative interdisciplinary research.

For more information, click the link bellow.

From March 23rd until the 29th, participate in a week-long series of online and in-person activities to explore new forms of visual publications investigating contemporary sociopolitical, anthropotechnical, and environmental issues.  How can we go beyond text in communicating practice-bas

03/14/2023

Today in preparation of Dr. Sophie Chao talk : More-Than-Human Entanglements in the Plantation Nexus (March 23rd, online), the Critical Anthropocene Research Group will host a readin group from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM to discuss Dr. Sophie Chao's work in preparation of the Critical Anthropocene Speaker Series.

The group will be reading Dr. Chao's paper titled "Plantation" available on the Environmental Humanities website.

To join this preliminary session, please use this zoom link: Meeting ID: 925 048 7498

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On Thursday, 23rd March, Dr. Chao will join us virtually from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM to speak about "More-than-Human Entanglements in the Plantation Nexus."

All details about this event are on the link below.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of anthropological interest in the topic of the plantation–an industrial formation and enduring logic that has been instrumental to the rise of colonial racial capitalism and the construction of modern nations and natures. In this talk, Dr Chao will draw on long...

03/13/2023

The Milieux Biolab, the Concordia University Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality, and the City of Montreal will host a one-day workshop to explore different avenues to measure and understand atmospheric pollution on the scale of the city in an approach of research creation.

Participants will experiment with biotechnologies and bio-filtering materials for materializing air particulate matter, build a DIY monitoring kit, and visualize indoor and outdoor air pollution using microscopy techniques.

Information and registration here:

A one-day workshop hosted by the City of Montreal, the Milieux Biolab, and the Concordia Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality In urban settings, the toxicity of the air, a milieu that is felt although invisible, is a growing issue. Particulate matter and gases generated

02/21/2023

Do not miss Jean-Michaël Celerier's workshop on scoring interface Ossia.
This workshop will take place at Concordia University Speculative Life Research Cluster, 10th floor of the EV Building, room 10.625, (1515 Sainte-Catherine OuestMontréal, QC, H3G 2W1).

PLEASE REGISTER BY CONFIRMING YOUR PARTICIPATION AT: [email protected]

This workshop will give an overview and teach the participants how to use the free, open-source, cross-platform software ossia score, starting from the ground up, and with the goal to enable them to create installation work, displays, interactive music. The workshop will be given by the software

02/14/2023

This Friday, the Ethnography Lab will host fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson for a talk: How can science fiction can contribute to doing social sciences otherwise ?

Kim Stanley Robinson is a world-renowned science fiction author, winner of both the Nebula and Hugo awards, who’s work centers mostly on the imagination of distant and proximate futures affected and dealing with what we might now identify as an inevitable climate crisis. KSR's work on this matter stands out for his combination of uptodate developments in the scientific and social understanding of this crisis, with fictional situations which more than illustrate an imagined future, illuminate and map the present. KSR is today a principal figure in ecosocialist debates and an undoubted reference in arguments about the restrictions that the capitalist mode of production imposes on finding effective solutions to this crisis.

Join us for this event animated by Marie Lecuyer and Carlos Velásquez, Concordia PhD candidates in Social and Cultural Analysis.

⇶ FOR REGISTRATION ↦ email lab coordinator, Maya Lamothe-Katrapani at [email protected]

Kim Stanley Robinson is a world-renowned science fiction author, winner of both the Nebula and Hugo awards, who’s work centers mostly on the imagination of distant and proximate futures affected and dealing with what we might now identify as an inevitable climate crisis. KSR's work on this matter ...

02/07/2023

Join us today for artist in residency Tim Murray-Browne's talk at Milieux Concordia.

Information: 16:00 - 17:30 at Milieux Concordia University in the Milieux Resource Room (EV. 11.705).

02/03/2023

The Speculative Life Research Cluster and the Performing Arts Research Cluster are glad to host Tim Murray-Browne as an artist-in-residence.

Tim will give an exciting artist talk: When we use a computer, do we have to think in the language of the computer?

Please join us on February 7th, 4pm at Concordia Milieux Institute!

Tim Murray-Browne will talk about his artistic practice of building embodied interactive systems. Particularly with dancers, he has found code introduces abstractions of the body, which can be more limiting than enabling. Recently, he has been using unsupervised AI to devise rather than design inter