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.

Tagny (COMS274 Intermedia I, COMS474 Intermedia III), Matt (COMS374 Intermedia II) and Dayna (COMS570 Diploma Intermedia) are busy finishing up their course prep for the new school year, and the labs will soon be ready to go (thanks to our fearless technicians Victor and Scott). We’re also making some improvements to this shared website. See you all soon!

Curious to see what Intermedia students have been up to over the last year? Then don’t miss the end of the semester Intermedia exhibition events programmed as part of Prodfest 2010.

Intermedia 3 will be showing work with Video 3. April 24, 8pm. 5333 Casgrain, Suite 601.

Intermedia 2 will be showing work with Sound 2 as part of Synaesthetics. April 28th, 7:30pm. 179 Jean-Talon West

View Interactive Map

The launch of Google Earth Street View showcasing panoramic images of streets around the world has created many concerns for citizens. What if you are captured on camera and then put on Google Earth for all the world to see, and you don’t even know it? What exactly is being represented in this form of image mapping, and for whom? Should the capture of such images be considered as an infringement on citizen’s privacy rights?

This semester students in Intermedia 1 took a look at the digital representations of Montreal via the panoramic image found in Street View. Students were asked to consider the potential and limitations of the way streets are mapped on Google Earth. How is memory, movement, history, and the culture of a location captured or perhaps omitted from such representations? How might we insert new memories of old histories, or speak to personal and collective experiences embedded the streets of Montreal?

Students selected a location to research and then traveled to that same location to take their own photographs. Some students decided to use found photographs that depicted events that occurred in their site many years ago. Using Illustrator, students used the photograph as the template for creating a vector graphic image to geotag on Google Earth. The results can be seen as graffiti, a way of tagging the digital wall of Google Earth. The images are intended to present another way of viewing the streets of Montreal from the history of riots on Crescent Street to a performance by students that challenge the collection of images by the Google Earth van.

We are now in the process of making a print and ezine featuring articles about each geotagged image. This will be posted soon!

Thanks to Tim Sinnott and GreenInfo Network for technical support.

Students in Intermedia I were given 6 minutes to present a live remix of digital images collected and created over the semester. Not an easy task! Presentations ranged from locative media projects, live VJ remixing of prerecorded images and illustrations, Flash animation projected onto the walls of the lecture hall, to low tech Fluxus performances combined with remixed video images found from the Prelinger Archives (see below). The live events were inspired by the intermedia based projects from the FNC lab at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema, discussions around digital sampling, copyright and mash-up culture, and lectures throughout the semester.

Here is a video component for a live performance entitled “Fear Culture” created by Gabrielle Gagne-Cyr, Kelly Malfara, Sarah Moore and Katrina Riccio.