Canada - Montreal - Conference - Responsive Environments: Architecture, Technology and the Senses - Workspace Unlimited

MONTREAL - CONFERENCE - RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS: ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE SENSES - WORKSPACE UNLIMITED
27.03.2009 > 28.03.2009

Nestled in geodesic domes, the members of the 1960s utopian communities, their minds chemically expanded, surrounded by stroboscopic lights, projections, loud music and perfumed incense, attempted to counter the modernist project of disciplining and isolating the senses by revisiting the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. The term environment became ubiquitous and served to define these new multimedia spaces or forms of art that involved the participation of the audience, as in the famous happenings organized in the late 1950s by Allan Kaprow, who was the first to introduce the definition of environmental art.

In a way that echoes, once again, experiences of the Sixties, like the famous events organized by the EAT group (Experiments in Art and Technology), the last few decades have seen the development of a new culture as opposed to a counterculture with the exploration of the use of personal digital technologies, prosthetic devices, wearable computing, responsive dynamic systems and topological media. Collaborating, very often with scientific institutions, architects, designers and artists have appropriated the new advanced technologies to generate ambiances that act as mediating devices, enhancing and questioning our new technobodies. They create responsive environments: spaces that interact with the people passing through, inhabiting or using them.

The Belgian Workspace Unlimited organization, founded by Thomas Soetens [new media artist] and Kora Van den Bulcke [architect] has been invited to participate at the Colloqium  on Saturday, March 28.

Workspace Unlimited is a mobile laboratory and creation space dedicated to experimental new media production and research, situated at the point where art, architecture and digital technologies converge to create new contexts of hybrid and augmented reality.   

The complete conference program can be found at:
http://www.arc.umontreal.ca/...