Hi all! I have the pleasure to launch the new noemalab blog with a report on the Subtletechnologies festival! If you wish to have a look at past reports on Sublte Technologies Festival, please, visit the old blog As you may remember, this festival coincides with the beginning of summer […]
2) manuality I should probably not separate what I consider “manual” from “craft”. however, there was something very ingenuous, concrete and…well evoking the “working with hands” in the projects presented by theEDGE laboratory I was very impressed by the material being produced at the EDGE adaptive lab at Ryerson university. […]
Exhausted and hyperstimulated, I attended the last day of the symposium hoping to not have to speculate too much and to se something very physical and material. I got what I wanted. it looks like whoever drafted the program of the festival had the same needs. the day was then […]
When I was ordering my notes for the blog I realized that two events, respectively the Speed Dating for artists and scientists and the gallery exhbition had the same prefix: Syn, used to express something acting together, united, in SYN-chrony. In the first case, syn-apsis normally refers to the fusion […]
As part of the multidisciplinary commitment of Subtle Technologies, the already mentioned screenings, a performance held on the rooftop patio of the Beaver Hall artists’ cooperative at the foot of McCaul Street, an exhibition at the Hotshot gallery, as well as a speed dating fro artists and scientists animated the […]
in the field of virology and immunology there has been often a drive to represent and simulate the way in which viruses may infect their hosts. however, this has been done only visually, using animations or 3d simulations. the same has happened in the field of computer science and info-security, […]
An artist and researcher form Latrobe University, Australia, Mary Rosengren illustrated a key issue in visualization as an act of mediation. in particular she focused on the relation between those images produced in the artists’ studio and those in the laboratory. Barbara Maria Stafford once said that visualization is “a […]
entertaining and increadibly informative at the same, the mini-lectures by Ben Schumacher andStephen Morris, respectively a physicist specialized in quantum physics and a physicist specialized in patterns formations in fluid represented what I would have loved to see in a science professor but didn’t and ended up in literature. through […]
unlike the previous day, which featured a variety of fairly diverse projects and collaborations, many of the saturday and sunday’s presentations and demonstrations seemed to focus on educational concerns whose outcomes eventually contributed to both fields involved (mainly science and the arts) in unexpected ways. For instance, the goal of […]
reappropriating the lost sounds of the territory after having lost it to the technology of the Ipod as in the work of Cara-Ann Simpson; substituting a sense for the other, either because one is lost or non-existent as in the collaborative work of Deborah Fels and David Bobier; associating mathematics […]
As I mentioned before, despite the diversity of topics proposed by the projects featured in this year’ festival edition, the similarities are stunning. it is as if the works by the most disparate artists/scientists/geeks were engaged in a sustained and coherent dialogue. In general, in all the presentations, beside a […]
Bringing a perspective radically different from the one brought to life the day before with the screening, but still framing her work in a way that sheds a new -innovative-light over scientific experimentation, the use of the lab and its instruments, Jennifer Willet presented her Windsor-based lab “Incubator” and the […]
Although it launched without a defined theme linking all the presentations and performances, Subtle Technologies maintained a structure that has proven quite successful in its previous instances: it comprised of a screening, a performance, an exhibition and a symposium rich of the most diverse projects and collaborations. To kick off […]
welcome to Subtle Technologies 2011 a lot of news this years, both in terms of themes developed and programming. unlike the last few years, it won’t feature a specific key theme. in fact, this year the programming committee has decided to leave the topic “free”. maybe this is a sign […]
2) A second type of ethics concern was raised by a number of arists involved in the exhibition “Transbiotics” and by scholars working at the intersection between art and research. A problem that has been widely discussed (see the recent book Tactical Biopolitics 2008, MIT press ) but that won’t […]
In the context of the main theme of the conference and the exhibition, the issue of ethics emerged following two directions: 1) ethics in pondering the figure of the hybrid, the entanglement of zoe and bio, the intersection of bio and info. In the first case, Zylinska suggests that we […]
While Steinman‘s concern is not the fate of the object (or the organ, here represented in a simplified matter, because a complete—if ever exists–rendition would not help diagnose a stroke or a blood clot), or whether the object is represented realistically or just schematically . her concern is more related […]
During a panel dedicated to “sensations in worlds…” Thomas Lamarre paraphrased Gabriel Tarderegarding the issue of social textures and, in particular, the divide between things in the world and things of the mind: in opposition to Durkheim, who posited a preexisting divide between individual and society that must be mediated […]
As Daina Tainina claimed early on during her intervention, it is not sufficient to write about the intersection of meanings, words and material. Rather, it is necessary to make these intersections happen, by concretely practicing or experiencing such intersections, in the same way Leibniz did with calculus, an attempt at […]
Remaining in the field of textiles, two further works provided diverse approaches that departed from the simple notion of tissue = skin, or skin =textile, to demonstrate not only the connections, but also the ethical issues that underpin the use of such logical analogy. For instance the work of Seçil […]
Despite the broad and multilayered notion of tissue and tissue culture, a number of participants in the conference and the exhibition interpreted the term as a synonym of skin, as a text, as fabric. However, all the explorations revealed a much deeper and complicated understanding of the above notion. […]
