The Biology of Story

I'm thrilled to be joining Amnon Buchbinder's rich and profound course The Biology of Story as a teaching assistant this autumn.

Check out the first lecture clip below, then head over to the course website and the innovative, interactive Biology of Story documentary for more:

"What if there was magic? A mysterious power, hidden in plain sight, all around us, touching us, touched by us – daily. Wouldn't we want to learn how this magic works? How to work with it, consciously and effectively. How to ensure that it works for the benefit of ourselves, our communities, our world. How to use this magic to cast good spells – and to break the bad ones. 

Well, that magic, that mysterious power, does exist. Its name is Story."

Communications, Transformations, Futures

I'm heading to the University of British Columbia on Unceded Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm) Territory this week for the 2019 Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory conference.

HASTAC is "an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists changing the way we teach and learn." This year's conference theme is "Decolonizing Technologies, Reprogramming Education," and there are some inspiring plenary speakers lined up, including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Karyn Recollet, and Elizabeth LaPensée.

I'll be part of a panel titled Communications, Transformations, Futures, presenting a talk on "Building Co-Immunity in Wiikwemkoong and Masiphumelele: Participatory Science Fiction to Inoculate the Civic Imagination." If you're in Vancouver on Friday, come say hi!

On location at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre

Photographer and communications consultant Jenn Warren joined our Shadowpox group recently at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre in Masiphumelele, Cape Town, and took some beautiful shots. Pictured: Sibulele Bontshi, Abongile Maputhuma, Buhle Mavi, Zanele Melapi, Lazola Nkelenjane, Asiphe Ntshongontshi and Aphiwe Zabezolo.

Bongo Mavi, with Alison pretending to be his cell phone

Zanele Melapi 

Lazola Nkelenjane

Abongile Maputhuma

Alison, Abongile, Zanele and Lazola in the "EduZone" computer lab

Discussing the next scene...

Building Black Panther

For last week's Cellphone Cinema workshop at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre, I put together a collection of links and videos on the making of the film Black Panther.

Early storyboards for the ancestral plane sequence by artist Simeon Wilkins:
http://www.storyboardsinc.com/boards/view/id/215/sectionId/2/categoryId/0/#9750

(click image above to enlarge)

An animatic is a video showing how the panels from a storyboard would look as a sequence of shots. Here are a few from Simeon Wilkins, starting with the ancestral plane sequence above:

And why not, here’s storyboards for T’Challa’s first trip to the Ancestral Plane #BlackPanther #WakandaForever #MarvelCinematicUniverse pic.twitter.com/Hh0buIVzlq

— Simeon Wilkins (@SimeonWilkins1) February 18, 2018

(Click below for more...)

Brainstorm profiles Shadowpox

Brainstorm is a monthly newsletter published by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation at York University. Megan Mueller, senior manager of research communications, wrote a wonderful profile on Shadowpox:

Interactive video game highlights the impact of vaccine decision-making
https://yfile.news.yorku.ca/2019/02/07/interactive-videogame-highlights-the-impact-of-vaccine-decision-making/

The piece also included a new video with Steven J. Hoffman, the scientific director of Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic (among his many other titles):

Debajehmujig Catches Shadowpox

This past week I had the joy of collaborating on a pilot workshop for Shadowpox: The Cytokine Storm with Debajehmujig Storytellers on Manitoulin Island. Shout-out to the talented and fabulous Bruce Naokwegijig, Joahnna Berti, Daniel Recollet-Mejaki, Sheila Trudeau, Sheldon Mejaki, Reece Wabegijig, Samantha Brennan and Bradleigh Steven Trudeau.

The Debajehmujig Creation Centre in Manitowaning, Manitoulin Island, Ontario

Discussing a scene with Debaj artistic director Bruce Naokwegijig 

Bradleigh Steven Trudeau records in the sound studio.

In the loading dock for Sheila Trudeau's "video journal" scene 

Friday's Shadowpox workshop – Debajehmujig Storytellers, Val O'Leary, Andrea Letander-Trudeau and Adrian Rampersad of Wikwemikong High School, and Maurianne Reade of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine – having waaay too much fun. 

Shadowpox technical director LaLaine Ulit-Destajo joined us on Saturday, and got to catch the company's brain-bending Christmas clown show Gulchmuss. (Of which songs still stuck in head...)

Inoculating at the Ideas Digital Forum

Ideas Digital Forum was two fascinating days in October of "engaging conversations between artists, curators, digital specialists, and scholars dedicated to thinking critically and collectively about the future of digital technology, digital art and public art galleries."

The symposium was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts’s Digital Strategy Fund, whose principles include:

• "a focus on collaboration, partnership and networking; 
• open-mindedness, and willingness to share knowledge, results, ideas and lessons learned; 
• experimentation, risk-taking and iterative development."

The forum's organizers have just posted videos from the full lineup of speakers, including this one where I had the chance to share some of the thoughts and challenges from the creation of Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic.




I'm hugely grateful to Linda Jansma of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Zainub Verjee of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, and everyone else who worked to create such an inspiring meeting of minds.

Viral art at the exhibition Public Notice

Toni Hafkenscheid took some beautiful official installation shots of the exhibition Public Notice, curated by Sonya Jones at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, where Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic is showing until January 19, 2019. Here's the full exhibition catalogue:



And here are a few of my favourite images:

Abraham Anghik Ruben, The Right of Passage

Abraham Anghik Ruben, The Right of Passage; Ruth Cuthand, Trading

Shadowmapping

You know that feeling when... you suddenly realize your doctoral research may have been influenced by a comic book you read when you were sixteen?

(This post is a not-yet-coherent collection of thoughts and extended quotes bouncing between a 34-year-old superhero storyline and a raw, recent theatre controversy, by way of the design of the Shadowpox virus. One day it may yield a succinct essay, but for the moment I'm ruminating out loud as an academic experiment.) 

Artist Bill Sienkiewicz's brief but legendary run collaborating with writer Chris Claremont on the X-Men spinoff comic book The New Mutants (issues #18-31) had two highlights. The second was the introduction of the character Legion, who is currently enjoying a mindbending television adaptation by Noah Hawley.

The first was the 1984 Demon Bear Saga (currently in production as a feature film). In these three issues (#18-20), according to Jay Edidin and Miles Stokes of the podcast Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, "you’re watching the definition and scope of superhero comics change and stretch. We are – literally and figuratively – off the map."

It’s worth remembering, as you flip through these, that you’re watching the definition and scope of superhero comics change and stretch. We are–literally and figuratively–off the map. (New Mutants 

That's the "literal" map, up there in the left-hand corner. (New Mutants #20) 

New Mutants #20, "Badlands", brought our heroes to a climactic battle on an astral-Plains. The shadowy Demon Bear, which the team originally believed was a figment of their leader Danielle Moonstar's nightmares, had attacked her and left her in hospital fighting for life.

Maker Culture and Youth

One of the most enjoyable essays I've ever put together was for Jennifer Jenson's Cultural Studies of Educational Technology course. From the syllabus:

This course will approach technologies both old and new through a mostly asynchronous online course. The premise of this course is that media have never been separable from what we purport to teach (i.e. curriculum “content”). 

As a way to demonstrate this, we will trace a path through the history of pedagogy via the educational “technologies” or “media” deployed at various times and for various purposes: from orality to recitation to literacy to online courses, cultural conceptions of the relative value of “knowledge” have found very different shapes in school curriculum and practices.

This course will pay particular attention to the educative possibilities for new and emergent digital media, asking whether and how “content” reshaped, re-mediated and invariably altered by these technological affordances, enacting shifts in not only how we learn and teach, but what counts as “knowledge”. 

The course, then, will be an exercise in the very thing it proposes to study: how a shift in media (this time to largely screen-based course delivery) will necessarily change what it is we come to know and how we know it as part of our learning together at distances. 

We will primarily focus on the design, development and practical implementation of digital technologies for education. In doing so, we will more fully explore the notion of “techne”, that is technologies as fundamentally constructive rather than receptive media for consumption.

The week's activity asked us to think about the assigned readings on "Maker Culture and Youth" through the medium of comics (arranging images in multi-panel form, with text in word balloons, using the app Comic Life). This was the result (and yes, that's me in full mullet)...

(Click on to read the rest of the comic...)