Our joint vernissage was a big success! Thanks to everyone who came to the Atwater Library to view everyone’s projects and to help us celebrate another big year in Intermedia! Documentation of some of the work right here.

The joint Intermedia 2+3 vernissage is this Friday. Website. Facebook Event.

As my colleague Dr.Matt Soar notes in the previous post, we have seen some exciting changes in the content and direction of the Intermedia Production Stream. We are dedicated to promoting thinking through making, or simply put, combining practice and theory. Our courses challenge and encourage students take creative and intellectual risks with various forms of analog and digital media. ( I like to think of it as “media gymnastics”.)

Last semester I gave a bookmaking workshop to both Intermedia 2 and 3 classes and we had some wonderful projects come out of it. Here is a sample of some book projects made in Intermedia 3  incorporating Arduino microcontrollers and  sensors. (See above). The Intermedia 3′s also developed two-minute machinima videos earlier in the semester. These videos were made in Second Life, a multiplayer real-time virtual world. Students built 3D graphic objects together to create a new Intermedia 3 production space/gallery and then staged their projects for the machinima video. (See below). This semester we will be working on a microscopy animation project using an inverted tissue culture microscope, Dragon Animation and After Effects software. The production of all this can be seen in the final exhibition we are planning to showcase works by Intermedia 3 and Intermedia 2 in April 2012.

(Photo credit: Tagny Duff, Top left image: Lowell Gasoi, bottom left: Maia Bridi, Middle image: Renee Goncalves, Top right hand image: Lowell Gasoi, Middle left: Bottom Left: Julia Haney. Video Credit: Sean Fraser)

At the beginning of this semester, the students in Intermedia II were asked to explore the notion of remediation. One potential form of remediation is to subvert a mediamaking tool, such as a piece of software, in a meaningful way. In other words, to create something new by making the software perform in ways that might not have been intended by its creator.

As an initial exploration of this concept, the instructor, Matt Soar, asked the students to try telling sequential stories using the timeline playback feature in the free wiki service Open Etherpad. The timeline feature plays back all the edits that have been made during the lifetime of the wiki, so, with very careful planning – and no mistakes at all! – simple animations can be created. To the best of Matt’s knowledge this is not something that’s been done before.

Intermedia II student Jennifer Watters used this technique really effectively to make a wry comment on the process of, and distractions attending, the writing of a term paper. NB Best viewed fullscreen.

Credits: Jennifer Watters, COMS374 Intermedia II, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montréal. Winter 2012. Instructor: Matt Soar. TA: Sean Fraser. A huge thank you to Chris Ball, creator of Open Etherpad, for tolerating our creative misuse of his service.

It’s been an exciting semester in Intermedia. Our first-year course wraps up on Monday, while the second- and third-year courses are taking a short break, and will pick up again in January. (COMS274 is a 3-credit, one semester, required course; in January, Professor Duff will repeat the course with the other half of our BA program’s first-year intake. Meanwhile, COMS374 and COMS474, being six-credit electives, run from September all the way to April.)

Our curriculum has undergone some important changes since last year, to better reflect emergent trends in technology, art and industry. For example, we no longer teach Flash in any of our courses; instead, the emphasis has shifted to HTML (and HTML5), the Korsakow System, and Processing. These are all ‘open source’ environments: Korsakow is an application for creating database narratives (currently being developed by a research team in the department, and led by Matt Soar); Processing is a Java-based programming language for artists and designers which began as a student project at the MIT Media Lab.

We have also expanded our commitment to analog mediamaking. In COMS374, for example, students were recently asked to remediate a favourite film, drawing on the fabulously creative traditions of artists books. Some outstanding examples are shown above; lots more here. A bookmaking workshop led by Tagny Duff helped everyone on their way. In COMS474, the students remediated work they had produced last year, creating some exciting and intriguing physical, interactive installations. This necessitated the use of Arduino microcontrollers, sensors, and Processing.

On Tuesday, the first-years will be presenting their final remix projects, some of which are Korsakow films. As time allows we’ll be posting more work right here. Stay tuned! Finally, if you’re a CEGEP or highschool student with questions about our program, or Intermedia in particular, don’t hesitate to get in contact with Tagny or Matt, co-directors of the Intermedia production stream. We can sometimes organize visits to local schools and colleges to talk about the work we do here at Concordia.

(Image credit: Matt Soar. Clockwise, from top left: ‘Night & Fog’ by Benjamin J. Allard; ‘The Wizard of Oz’ by Jeansil Bruyere; ‘Almost Famous’ by Michelle Walters; ‘Melancholia’ by Spencer Cavalier; ‘Into the Wild’ by Alex Begin; ‘Inception’ by Emily Owens; and, ‘Memento’ by Daphne Pungartnik.)

Welcome to the exciting upcoming year of Intermedia production courses for 2011-2012. We have many guests and off-site projects planned.(My colleague Matt Soar and I have been busy organizing!) For those of you anticipating your first-year course in Intermedia let me give you a sneak preview.

In Intermedia 1, we are partnering up with Festival du nouveau cinéma to create a zine documenting the events featured in the new media showcase (aka FNC Lab) this year. The festival programmers will be visiting our class to give an in-depth overview of the works featured in the FNC Lab so that students can plan which events to attend in advance. Last year Intermedia 2 students documented The Festival du nouveau cinéma and created a wonderful non-linear database using Korsakow (an open source software program invented by Florian Thalhofer and currently being developed by our very own Dr. Matt Soar (intermedia 2) in collaboration many other talented folk.)

For more information about Intermedia 1, check your Myportal account on the concordia website and log into your Moodle site to view the course syllabus.

A fantastic line up of guest artists and creative producers working with intermedia practices will also featured throughout the year. Some of them include Midi Onodera, Montreal media artist Adad Hannah, and Paris based curator/writer/videomaker, Jens Hauser. Stay tuned for dates, times and event details! We post information frequently on the site so check in and see what is going on. You dont want to miss these events.

I wish you all the best with your studies this year and I am looking forward to meeting many of you. If you have any questions before classes begin in September don’t be afraid to contact me directly.

Tagny

Tagny Duff
Assistant Professor
Instructor for Intermedia 1 and 3
tduff@concordia.ca

For any questions regarding Intermedia 2 please contact Dr. Matt Soar.

Come out to the vernissage and exhibition of Ubiquit_us at the VAV Gallery on Tuesday. Students will be presenting Pecha Kucha style artist talks about their works starting at 7:30pm. Beer and wine will be available (for donation).

Click here to get a free download of the exhibition catalog (and a sneak preview of what will be in the exhibition!)

‘The Visual Language of Herbert Matter’
A new documentary film by Reto Caduff

October 23rd 2010 at 7.30pm
Concordia University (Hall Building H-110)
1455 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal

The Quebec premiere of a fascinating new documentary film on the life
and work of Herbert Matter, the hugely influential mid-century artist,
designer and photographer. The director, Reto Caduff, will be present
for a Q&A after the screening.

Free and open to the public. More info: http://www.herbertmatter.net/

Sponsors: Montreal Signs Project; Dr Carole Brabant, Office of the
Vice President of Research & Graduate Studies, Concordia University;
ICOGRADA; Department of Communication Studies, Concordia
University; Department of Design & Computation Arts, Concordia
University.

We’re really looking forward to hosting Harmen Liemburg for a few days in September. Aside from his public talk he’ll also be working closely with the students in COMS374 Intermedia II.