Graduate students enrolled in CMSTMM 708 “Cultural Production and the Environment” will be presenting their final research/creation projects in a virtual exhibition titled CH(I)ASM.
The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty used the term chiasm to refer to the way humans, like all organisms, intertwine and interact with the world around them. CH(I)ASM, then, meditates on the interrelationships that bind us together as well as those that separate us. The artwork featured in this exhibit focuses on the in-between spaces where these connections are formed.
The artworks will be featured on the Factory Media Centre website from May 10 to May 31.
CMSTMM 708 examines various threads of historical and contemporary discourse around the environment, ecology, materiality, and human/non-human interrelationships, culminating in the making of artwork informed by the theoretical component.
The artists in the exhibit are:
Nick Brown-Hernandez
Boxi Chen
Kathryn Fraser
Jordan Gaudreau
Laura Newcombe
Vanessa Polojac
Karina Robertus
Andrea Vela Alarcon
Kathryn Waring
Kyle West
CH(I)ASM features artwork by students enrolled in the Communication and New Media MA and Communication, New Media, & Cultural Studies PhD programs at McMaster University. For more information on the program, visit the Communication Studies and Media Arts department site: https://csma.humanities.mcmaster.ca/graduate-programs/
Nick Brown-Hernandez, Andrea Vela Alarcon
To Marsh
To Marsh is a web-based project that acts as a space for nurturing the difference of meaning, experiences and creative expressions resulting from our visits to the land currently known as Cootes Paradise. This project contains written and audio-visual responses, as well as propositions for the visitor to take with them and activate wherever in collectivity.
This collaboration parts from a recognition of the interdependencies between human and other-than-human beings, and the re-imagining of colonial ways of knowing that foreground human hierarchy and exceptionality through language. We have been guided by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” (2013), where she prompts us to shift English’s strategic objectification of the Land through nouns, by turning them into verbs, for example “to be a bay.” This seemingly simple transformation has the potential to unravel otherwise ways of speaking not about, but with the Land. Thus, letting language recognize the world as a space where everything is alive.
To Marsh practices language as multiple ways of being in and with the world, rather than a reference for fixed meaning. The five verbs hosted here have multiple interpretations in no real hierarchical order, none claim a true meaning, just more propositions for us and other visitors to keep exploring. We encourage you (the visitor) to take this digital space as a practice of what we understood the Marsh does and is. A space for difference to be nurtured, a space of healing, a space for us to slowly play and, as Haraway (2015) writes, propose new abstractions.
Each walk is presented as a separate video because each walk should be understood as a separate time and separate place – no experience was alike, with different weather and temperature and a different me walking.
Boxi Chen, Jordan Gaudreau
R/er\G-ro_B.r
We wish to demonstrate a duality between traditional and AI art, ultimately constructing a new, 2D art form that combines AI generation with human intervention. Our work serves as a bridge between ‘natural’ and technological, deviating from standard artistic paradigms. We tap into the idea that humans live on an earth that continuously cycles between animate and inanimate matter, and precisely within the intersection of active and inert matter that our project lies. Not only does the form of the artwork represent the chiasm between AI and humanity, the content behind suggests a merger between synthetic and composed visual language. Viewers will feel overwhelmed at a glance, their senses overloaded by visual stimuli. As they continue looking, they will recognize familiar hues, calming shape language, and organic matter.
Our work effectively repurposes useless jumbles of pixels to create meaning. Images generated by artificial intelligence may not inherently form a sense of vital materiality, but through our careful curation, we make foreign AI matter accessible and meaningful. We hope to show a new form of Latour’s Gaia, escaping from femininity. Within these images, we capture the essence of humanity as Gaia, capable of forever transforming or destroying the earth. Ultimately, this project is expected to harness vital materiality, allowing each viewer to relate to particular focal points within the work. Furthermore, it showcases the idea that all matter in our environment contains a varying assemblage of vitality (both active and inert), that exists outside of the realm of human understanding.
About the Artists:
Boxi Chen: Ontario-based media artist, has been honing his skills in media production for the past several years. He has a special fetish for colours and utilized them in various media projects to show his passion for colours. Further, he has wonderful experiences in various media production projects such as film production, advertisements, radio, etc, and he has won the reward ” Best Lighting” from the 46th Uwindsor Film Festival. He is currently a graduate student and looking forward to devoting himself to the field of communication and media.
Digital illustrator and content creator, Jordan Gaudreau is currently an MA student enrolled in the Communication and New Media program at McMaster University, in the Faculty of Humanities. Jordan’s research interests include race politics in tabletop games and how real world stereotypes seep into gaming spaces.
Kathryn Fraser, Karina Robertus
When Meterology Meets Music
When Meteorology Meets Music navigates the complexities of the environment through the sonification and visualization of the Hamilton daily weather forecast. Through musical representation on the piano, our project transforms ordinary statistics into an all-encompassing auditory experience. The central concepts we explored in our work deals with animating both the invisible and the unexpected, themes of interconnectedness that pulls from Merleau-Ponty’s work, Kimmerer’s ideas of how language is used as a tool for recognition and connection, but for us, we have created an audible animacy. We really wanted to play around with this idea that we’re in a chiasmic relationship with our environment. Despite the fact that we have this ability to see and feel weather, we wanted to bridge this gap between Merleau-Ponty’s idea that there is no gap between forces. Here, we were able to control the weather in a way; harnessing this force of nature and ultimately, turn it into something beautiful.
About the artists:
Journalist and vocalist Kathryn Fraser is currently pursuing her MA in the Communication and New Media program at McMaster University, in the Faculty of Humanities. Her current research, under the supervision of Dr. Selina Mudavanhu, focuses on intersectional experiences of racialized women weathercasters in the Canadian media, understanding how/if they ‘weather a storm’ of discrimination. Kathryn worked as an on-air reporter at CTV Regina, is published in MacLean’s magazine and has performed off-broadway – always combining her love of musical theatre and weather through journalism.
Karina Robertus is a student in the MA program and a graduate from McMaster’s Honours Comm. program. Her research focuses on social media activism and how Instagram curates their algorithim to show people activistic material. In her spare time she reads whatever romance she can get her hands on and hangs out with her one year old minature American bulldog, Tony.
Laura Newcombe
circular beings
circular beings is a work about thinking in circles, going in circles, being in circles. I’m very interested in exploring how (human) bodies move through space, and how this travel between places and around places impacts them and the world. Conceptually, I was inspired by the principles of akinoomage as explained by Leanne Betasamosake-Simpson (2014) as well as practices of walking meditation such as kinhin, taking time to walk in a predetermined path around an area while reflecting on myself and learning from the world around me. The process of circling and the experiences of circling were central to the work, although I emerged with words and photographs of particular circles to share with you all as well. Something that emerged throughout my walks was the inextricability of ‘human influence’ from ‘nature’; a lot of the time human impact is considered ‘unnatural’ and ‘artificial’, but humans are also critters that live on this world, and the marks they leave are part of the world. The shape of a circle is often seen as natural/organic – but if it is too perfectly circular, it is ‘unnatural’. I have some ways to go until I can get past my own knee-jerk rejection of the ‘unnatural’ when I was trying to reflect on the ‘environment’. Each walk is presented as a separate video because each walk should be understood as a separate time and separate place – no experience was alike, with different weather and temperature and a different me walking.
About the artist:
Laura Newcombe is usually a digital illustrator, but as an MA student in the Communications and New Media program she has taken the opportunity to explore some different media and themes, such as photography, walking, and journaling. She will probably get back to her usual work of fanart and cute characters this summer as she works on her MA research project on fandom communities.
Kathryn Waring
The Craig Colony for Epileptics: Then and Now
In The Craig Colony for Epileptics: Then and Now, I ask how we might re-appropriate historical narratives of disability from the institutions which erased them from recorded history. Drawing on Zoe Todd’s understanding of “historical consciousness” as holding “the past occurs simultaneously in the present and influences how we conceptualize the future,” I suggest that one way of grappling with archival erasure may be to look to the present to understand the past. By searching for the aftereffects of historical violence on the land where it occurred, we may open up new possibilities for constructing historical narratives of disability and considering disabled futurities.
About the artist:
Kathryn Waring is an essayist and multimedia writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. She is currently a PhD student in Communication, New Media, & Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where her research encompasses digital storytelling, critical disability studies, and cultural memory studies. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Her creative work has been published in literary journals such as Essay Daily, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and American Literary Review, among others.
Kyle West
Take a walk in my shoes, your shoes or anyone’s shoes
Inspired by a series of photo walks looking down and looking out, this series examines how we interact with our environments through acknowledging the things that are often forgotten and the spaces left empty. This series promotes greater thoughtfulness when travelling through space.
This exhibition is presented in partnership with:
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