Graduate Student Roundtable

Timetable

The roundtable will last 1 hour and 15 minutes. Each student will have 15 minutes of presentation time with 15 minutes questions and an open discussion at the end of the session.

Abstracts

Alejandro Mayoral Baños: "The Indigenous Friends Mobile App: Decolonizing Digital Technology towards Reconciliation"

In the second decade of the 21st century, the new era of information and communication technologies has opened a new dilemma of how Indigenous peoples may create and innovate sociotechnical approaches to encounter colonizing processes based on the empowerment in cyberspace, academia and the internet. The Indigenous Friends Mobile Application is an educational project in Canada that has challenged several dimensions of this engagement through a transdisciplinary approach in its conception, design, maintenance and growth. This participatory academic and activist work has brought inquiries in several new areas of knowledge, such as, the definition and framework of Indigenous Software Protocols, the Pedagogies of STEM for Indigenous peoples, the conceptualization of Indigenous Social Media, the scope of Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge in digital spaces, as well as Indigenous identities and embodiment in the cyberspace. The incorporation of these ideas and principles into the design of Indigenous Digital Technologies provides the potential to continue the path of decolonizing virtual spaces and offers an opportunity to create new areas of reconciliation.

Alejandro Mayoral Baños is an Indigenous academic and activist, who is currently working with organizations in Canada and Mexico deploying participatory and community-driven ICT projects by/with/for Indigenous peoples. He is the creator and founder of the Indigenous Friends Initiative in Canada and Magtayaní in Mexico. Alejandro has plenty of experience leading, collaborating and participating in various projects around Indigeneity, ICT4D and volunteerism in Mexico, Canada, Peru, Chile and Bolivia. His research includes inquiries about Indigenous Software Protocols, STEM Pedagogies for Indigenous peoples, Indigenous Social Media, Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge, Indigenous identities and embodiment in digital spaces and ICT4D by Indigenous peoples.

David Han: "Challenges of Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Digital Media Arts Education"

This presentation will explore the successes and challenges presented by the interdisciplinary nature of emerging art and technology practices. By examining two projects completed within educational settings, the presentation will discuss how participatory art-making within a digital media arts context have the potential to teach participants with technical skills, present opportunities to critically engage with emerging forms of art and technology, bring diverse interests together and build community. The first project, LUXX, was a wearable-tech enhanced playground game, designed, developed and produced by 3rd year students in York University’s Digital Media Program. The second project, Media Embassy, was a series of multimedia workshops for members of a public housing community in Toronto currently undergoing a massive, 25-year revitalization.

David Han is a media artist, scholar and educator whose work employs emerging technology to explore the boundaries between computation, cinema and immersive media. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema & Media Studies at York University. His doctoral work explores the unique affordances of virtual reality (VR) and aims to expand the range of possibilities for creative practice in VR. He holds a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship and sits on the board of InterAccess, a non-profit gallery, educational facility, production studio, and festival dedicated to emerging practices in art and technology.

Alison Humphrey: "Shadowpox: Visual FX in the Eye of the Storm"

In 2019, young people in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America will co-create a networked narrative in a science-fiction storyworld. An “edge effect” where performing arts meet public health, Shadowpox imagines a deadly new disease composed of viral shadows. At the height of a pandemic, young, healthy volunteers step forward to test a breakthrough vaccine. But their commitment to joining the network of co-immunity will be tested by a battery of modern anxieties and ancient fears.

My dissertation develops a new mixed-reality framework to empower youth civic imagination. Exploring vaccination both as a biological phenomenon and as a metaphor for participation in the body politic, students will create their own characters, experiment with interactive digital effects projection-mapped on the body, and upload their interlinked stories to the Shadowpox portal.

Following an initial workshop at RADA, Shadowpox was exhibited during the 2017 World Health Assembly in Geneva, where The Lancet called it “powerful and playful.” Its culminating phase will be a storyworld co-created by youth on four continents. Inspiring reflection and debate in the audience of their peers, their work will generate new insights into one of the thorniest political dilemmas of our era: voluntary participation in the collective good.

Alison plays with story across the fields of drama, digital media, and education. After starting out as an intern at Marvel Comics, she produced one of the first ever online alternate reality games for science fiction author Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic. She initiated one of the earliest transmedia in-fiction blogs in a TV series, and co-wrote and directed two interactive, live-animated sci-fi theatre projects: Faster than Night (Toronto) and The Augmentalist (Silicon Valley).

Alison holds a BA in American studies and studio art from Wellesley College, an MA in interactive multimedia from the Royal College of Art, and an MFA in theatre directing from York University that broke ground using motion capture in Shakespearean performance. Currently a Vanier Scholar at York, her practice-based doctoral research explores how a science-fiction storyworld (shadowpox.org), co-created with young people on four continents, can empower civic imagination and public health problem-solving. alisonhumphrey.com

Melanie Wilmink: "Producing the experience of Art in the City"

Melanie Wilmink will discuss her work on the recent course revision for Art in the City, ARTH 1900, as it relates to her doctoral research around spectatorial experience in exhibition spaces. For this course, Wilmink worked with Erin Yunes and Stacy Denton to re-vision an online blended introductory Art History course for non-major students. Building on the design by Dr. Richard Hill, the team re-structured the course to work as modular components, showcasing a range of York University instructors and community members. This enables the course to continue annually with new Course Directors, students are able to sample a variety of teaching talent from the department. With online lectures, the course delivers all content digitally; however the lectures are often structured to mix virtual and physical experience, as walking tours that allow students to listen to lectures while having embodied experiences of actual spaces and artworks, or as video-lectures that enable intimate and behind-the-scenes access for students to local institutions. Online content is also simultaneously supported by in-person tutorials, which support the lectures and readings with real-world discussion and workshops.

Melanie Wilmink is a doctoral candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University, and a recipient of the 2014 York University Elia Scholars Award and 2015 SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Her research examines the inter-connectivity between spectatorial experience and exhibition spaces, and aims to determine how public art situations act as vehicles for metaphoric and physical transportation. Her ongoing research was developed through curatorial work in Calgary and Toronto; Wilmink was the project coordinator of the most recent iteration of the Situated Cinema project through the Toronto-based Pleasure Dome media arts exhibition collective, and co-editor of the anthology Sculpting Cinema (2018). www.mwilmink.wordpress.com