Digifest Wishes OCAD U a Happy 135th Birthday!

This autumn marks the 135th anniversary of OCAD University. Throughout its 135 years, OCAD University has been a city builder, whether through the creation of the Grange at the north end of Grange Park that was designed by George Reid to be the first building in Canada for the sole purpose of art education, or the Sharp Centre for Design created by British architect Will Alsop which has become a symbol of the combined power of art and design, OCAD University and the City of Toronto.

Who would have thought that when it opened its doors in 1876 that the Ontario School of Art, located at 14 King Street West and home to 25 students, would become OCAD University with more than 4,000 students, hailing from 50 different countries, in a mixture of undergraduate and boutique graduate programs. In recognition of this evolving mission, OCAD University adopted the moniker “University of Imagination”. We encapsulate the vibrant passion and energy that have resounded in the school’s studios, classrooms and laboratories bursting with fearless and well-founded ideas and a solid foundation in critical thinking.

From all the Digifest team – Happy Birthday OCAD University!

Janine Marchessault

Janine Marchessault holds a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization at York University. Her research over the past five years has been concerned with excavating some of the Canadian experiments with film and media that were showcased at Expo 67 in Montréal. A particular concern in her work has been the historical relationship between architecture and the cinema screen. Her research has also focused on  urban space and cartographies of place, with a lens on Havana, Helsinki, Berlin and Toronto. Over the past twenty years, she has worked with the curatorial collective Public Access, to investigate new models of urban public art.

She is the author of Ecstatic World: Media, Humanism, Ecology (forthcoming, MIT Press); Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications, 2005); and co-editor of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2007) as well as Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (Routledge, 2000). She is a past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada and a founder of the Future Cinema Lab which has been funded by a Canada Foundation for Innovation Grant. The lab is devoted to ‘new stories for new screens’. She is also a member the 3D Film Consortium (3DFLIC), where she is investigating the new aesthetic grammars of 3D media.

Place, Memory and Site Specific Art Exhibitions

This talk will address new approaches to site specific art by looking at several examples that combine urban screens, large scale architectural projections, locative media and participatory art forms.  My research seeks to understand how such media art exhibitions create experimental communities and social excavations that redefine our sense of urban place and common purpose.

Presenter(s) websites, twitter handles, or other related sites

Projects:

www.visiblecity.ca

www.l-o-t.ca

www.leonadrive.ca

www.futurecinema.ca