<Immune Nations>, an evidence-based exhibition about the constructive role that art can play in public discourse around life-saving vaccines, will open at the McMaster Museum of Art on September 2!
Daniel Recollet Mejaki, Samantha Brennan and Bruce Naokwegijig reflect on the December 2018 workshop Shadowpox: The Cytokine Storm, at Debajehmujig Storytellers, Manitoulin Island, 26 October 2020.
Guest editor and research-creation trailblazer Natalie Loveless introduces the project, which I had the good fortune to join just before starting my doctorate, thus:
Initiated in 2014, <Immune Nations> brought together scientists, policy experts, academic scholars, and artists to work on an interdisciplinary and collaborative research-creation project tackling complex issues related to the use and distribution of vaccines in the world today.
The project… aimed to address a gap between knowledge about vaccines and how they work, and vaccine reception in the public imaginary, including fears and misinformation.
All the contributions to the <Immune Nations> special issue are worth a read, but I'm going to link here to the two I wrote or co-authored:
The Shadowpox game was created with a simple goal: to help players imagine the effects their seemingly private vaccination choices had on the friends, family, strangers, colleagues and neighbours around them. Actually, that wasn't originally the goal. It was only in the process of developing the game that I realized my design mindset was blind to one of the major reasons vaccines work: herd immunity, a concept that has jumped to the forefront of debates about public health policy responses to Covid-19. The middle section of this 2018 talk (from 4:55 to 12:10) explains how the game's design evolved as my understanding did:
I'm half design geek, half drama nerd, so it was even more exciting when the storyworld expanded into its second, participatory-storytelling phase.
This 2019 video from York University's Office for Research and Innovation sets the game in the context of the wider research-creation project:
"In a world plagued by a deadly new disease composed of viral shadows, young, healthy volunteers across the globe step forward to test a breakthrough vaccine.
"Shadowpox is an immersive science-fiction storyworld that imagines community immunity both as a public health phenomenon, and as a metaphor for any voluntary collective effort."
Science & Fiction (FILM 3841, Digital Culture) takes a mixed-reality approach to experiential education, blending academic study with dramatic composition and digital production.
In addition to more traditional ways of learning about the biology and sociology of immunization, students will create videos in which they play volunteers in the Phase I trial of a vaccine against the shadowpox virus.
Designing a networked sci-fi narrative to build scientific, civic and media literacy, Shadowpox invites participants to grapple with one of the thorniest political dilemmas of public health: voluntary participation in the collective good.
In the spirit of international collaboration that marks the Covid-19 research effort (as well as Shadowpox research-creation in the UK, Canada and South Africa), I'm working with York's Immersive Storytelling Lab on an online complement to the course – one that will invite teachers and learners to explore the concepts and conflicts around vaccination through this co-created work of “citizen science fiction.”
It's hard right now to visualize what our world will look like by the end of the year, but I also can't picture anything I'd rather be doing than collaborating with young people to imagine and build a future of co-immunity.
The round hole...the square peg. If neither bends, which will break?
A left-handed boy is just beginning school. In 1979 China, conformity is a matter of survival, so his teacher convinces his father to correct his 'problem' for the boy's own good.
At home and at school, the boy struggles to understand his place in the world, guided only by the sage advice of an ambidextrous street-corner barber.
Then one day, his father sprains his right wrist in a bicycle accident...
Left-Handed
Canada, 2002, 10 min
Cast
Daniel Yan, Arthur Cheng, Xiao-Ming Yu, Xingfa Zhang, Fu Yu
Crew Director: Baoqi Ye Producer: Alison Humphrey Screenwriter: Baoqi Ye & Alison Humphrey Editor: Peter Yu Cinematographer: Jeff Maher Original Score: Kirk Elliott Sound: Rob Turi Design: April Viczko
Produced in the Sheridan College Advanced Television and Film program, 2002.
Distribution: The Movie Network, Air Canada, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Facets.org.
Awards 2004 Chicago International Children's Film Festival – Montgomery Prize Certificate of Excellence, Best Film or Video by an Emerging Director, Baoqi Ye. 2003 Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards – Best Cinematography, Student Category, Jeff Maher. 2003 WorldFest Houston – Gold Award, Graduate Level Student Production 2002 Anchorage International Film Festival – Best Super Short Film
About the Director Baoqi Ye graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai, receiving his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Industrial Design. Ye worked for Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Shanghai first as Art Director, then as Creative Group Head. He has created dozens of commercials for clients like Vespa Scooters, Siemens Home Appliances and Beck's Beer. The Beck's campaign won both Gold and Silver medals in the Times International Chinese Advertising Awards organized by Taiwan Times Newspaper.
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 11:30am-12:30pm The Sensorium Research Loft 4th Floor CFA, Room M333 RSVP to sensinfo@yorku.ca
Please join us for our next Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series featuring Cinema and Media Arts PhD Candidate and Sensorium Graduate Research Associate, Alison Humphrey!
Alison Humphreyplays with story across drama, digital media, and education. As a Vanier Scholar in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, her research-creation doctoral dissertation explores how a participatory science fiction storyworld, Shadowpox, can help young people build scientific, civic and media literacy by exploring immunization and vaccine hesitancy through a superhero metaphor.
The project’s first phase, full-body videogame, debuted during the 70th World Health Assembly in Geneva, where The Lancet called it “one of the most powerful and playful ways to illustrate both the individual and population-level implications of community immunity.” The second phase is a networked superhero narrative, The Cytokine Storm, co-created with young artists on three continents.
The third phase adapts this narrative into a Scalar-based online platform for a “courseplay”, a hybrid undergraduate seminar that weaves academic study with dramatic composition and digital production. Science & Fiction: Imagining Immunity in an Immersive Storyworld (which will be offered in York's department of Cinema and Media Arts in the coming academic year) takes a new approach to the concept of experiential education: action refraction, where students use metaphoric world-building and digitally augmented role-play to explore one of the thorniest political dilemmas of public health: voluntary participation in the collective good.
Shadowpox: How "Citizen Science Fiction" Can Boost Immunity
Alison Humphrey will discuss how her research-creation project, Shadowpox, a participatory storyworld exploring immunization through a superhero metaphor, can help young people build scientific, civic and media literacy. A full-body Shadowpox videogame debuted during the 70th World Health Assembly in Geneva, where The Lancet called it “one of the most powerful and playful ways to illustrate both the individual and population-level implications of community immunity."
The other three presentations sound fascinating:
Your Brain in Action Denise Henriques - Professor, School of Kinesiology & Health Science
Humans surpass all other animals and robots when it comes to the diversity and malleability of movements produced — we are the world’s most versatile movers. Dr. Denise Henriques explains how the brain’s remarkable control systems make this possible.
Transgender Studies: What You Should Know & Why It Matters Sheila L. Cavanagh - Associate Professor of Sociology
This presentation will introduce you to the burgeoning field of transgender studies. Transgender studies is based on the experiences of those who identify as transgender. Transgender is an umbrella term that includes everyone who is, in some way, gender diverse or gender non-conforming including, but not limited to, transsexuals, bi-genders, non-genders, Two-Spirits, etc. Transgender studies is not only concerned with the study of transphobia (discrimination against people who are differently gendered), but with questions relating to sex and gender embodiment.
And this one is especially timely the morning after Toronto's #FridaysForFuture Climate Strike. I only wish I weren't speaking at the same time!
Is a 100% Renewable Energy Future Possible? Advances for Community Participation in a Low-Carbon Energy Transition Dr. Christina Hoicka - Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies
Over 80 percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are energy related and Canadians are among the highest per capita energy users and GHG emitters. Under the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming by 2°C, Canada committed to a 30 percent reduction below 2005 levels of GHG emissions by 2030. However, scientists now caution there are clear benefits to keeping warming to 1.5°C, requiring an acceleration of carbon mitigation activities. This talk discusses the important factors to acceleration of a low-carbon energy transition, such as the innovation-diffusion of low-carbon energy innovations for communities, made up of individuals, households and organizations, to adopt, as well as diversity and inclusion in the energy and innovation sectors.
"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."
