Laser 11 – Distributed Greenery

LASER 11 Hexagram Montréal
Co-Chaired by Nina Czegledy and Gisèle Trudel

WEDNESDAY APRIL 13, 12:30 P.M. – 14:00 P.M. (EDT) Find your timezone here
TIOHTIÀ:KE | MONTRÉAL
FREE WEBINAR (REGISTRATION REQUIRED): To register fill out this form

In French and in English

Participants:
Annick Bureaud [director of Leonardo/Olats, Paris]
Beatriz Herrera [Intermedia artist]
François-Joseph Lapointe [co-investigator member, UdeM]

Moderator/Respondent:
Matthew Halpenny [student member, UdeM]

The curatorial collective Traveling Plant (Europe) will meet the Critical Gardening Collective (Montreal) to activate issues and environments in the making. The first group situates the concept and the materiality of the plant in movements of travel, exhibition and community; the other group combines bipolar mosses, cybernetic sculptures and bacterial piles to create sympoietic gardens in various localities.

The round table will begin with short presentations by emissaries of the two collectives, with position statements about their respective projects. This will be followed by a dynamic, open discussion with publics, highlighting questions raised by their research and distributed creations, a multispecies nature proliferating with spaces, technologies and temporalities.

To introduce this new edition of the LASER Hexagram series, Nina Czegledy, Gisèle Trudel and Chantal T Paris will briefly share their quantitative and qualitative analysis of the ten previous editions.

The curatorial collective Traveling Plant (Europe) will meet the Critical Gardening Collective (Montreal) to activate issues and environments in the making. The first group situates the concept and the materiality of the plant in movements of travel, exhibition and community; the other group combines bipolar mosses, cybernetic sculptures and bacterial piles to create sympoietic gardens in various localities.

The round table will begin with short presentations by emissaries of the two collectives, with position statements about their respective projects. This will be followed by a dynamic, open discussion with publics, highlighting questions raised by their research and distributed creations, a multispecies nature proliferating with spaces, technologies and temporalities.

To introduce this new edition of the LASER Hexagram series, Nina Czegledy, Gisèle Trudel and Chantal T Paris will briefly share their quantitative and qualitative analysis of the ten previous editions.

BIOGRAPHIES

Annick Bureaud is an independent art critic, curator and event organiser in the field of art and technosciences. She is the director of Leonardo/Olats. She co-founded The Traveling Plant project with Tatiana Kourochkina, Marta de Menezes, Claudia Schnugg and Robertina Šebjanič. www.annickbureaud.net – thetravelingplant.net/ - www.olats.org

Beatriz Herrera is a Montreal-based, Chilean-born intermedia artist. Initially trained as a Ceramicist, her practice is now centered on the intersections between gardens, machines, aesthetic beauty and ceramics. Beatriz Herrera holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Intermedia & Cyberarts 2010) and a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture 2013) from Concordia University. She has had various solo and collective exhibitions, including at Montreal PRIM (2009), Toronto Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Center (2009), Montreal Eastern Bloc gallery (2015), Gatineau Daïmon (2015), Admare (2015), and at La salle de diffusion de Parc-Extension 2018 and Maison de la Culture de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (2020).
beatrizherrera.ca

Francois-Joseph Lapointe is full Professor in the Department of biological sciences at Université de Montréal and Hexagram member. In his scientific research, he is mainly interested in phylogenetic analysis and the application of population genetics for biodiversity conservation purposes. In 2012, he obtained a PhD in the study and practice of in arts (UQAM) and created a new field of research, choreogenetics, by transposing the stochastic processes of genetics for choreographic purposes. He is the author of 120 scientific publications and over 270 conferences and 75 invitational research seminars. He has participated in some fifteen international artistic exhibitions. In 1990, the Governor General of Canada awarded him the Academic Gold Medal for his doctoral work.
www.fjlapointe.com

Matthew Halpenny is an interdisciplinary media artist from Montréal who works between the milieus of biology, society, and technology. Their work seeks to disrupt conventional boundaries around life, evolution, the body, consciousness, and human expression. Such ideas have been explored through use of the human body as a performative instrument, artificial organisms, technological-biological sculpture, and networked cognition performances. Their work is inspired by systems theory, embodied cognition, sense theory, emergent behavior, multi-species being, and media ecologies. They were previously a research member at Milieux Institute – Speculative Life, where they worked within the Speculative Life and Critical Materiality research clusters. They are now working as a research member of Hexagram through the Université de Montréal. His research on technological-biological system relations was published by ISEA. Mediums: Microbial Fuel Cells, Slime Mold, Electronic & Biological Sensors.
www.matthewhalpenny.net

This series is supported by Hexagram (www.hexagram.ca), funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

SPONSORS:

The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 50 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks