SSHRC INSTITUTIONAL GRANT (SIG) COMPLETITION
RESULTS
OCAD received a small grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support of research and scholarship in disciplines supported by SSHRC. This is an important first step in supporting faculty members who are eligible to apply to SSHRC for any one of their many interesting research grant programs. As a result, the Research Committee approved the creation of a "Research Seed Grant Competition."
The Office of Research is delighted to report that the following six researchers were successful in their applications to the first ever OCAD Research Seed Grant Competition:
Dr. Ananda Shankar Chakrabarty
Dr. Ananda Shankar Chakrabarty’s current research focuses on European post-modern and contemporary art within the context of late 20th century intellectual and cultural obsession with trace, ruins, and the need to archive – commemorate – the human experience. Works by several European artists from the 1970s onward reveal a strong engagement with shifting regimes of temporality as well as protean explorations of marks and traces as archival inscriptions. Such a situation, coeval with aesthetic responses to archaeological vestiges and prehistoric imagery, resonates distinctly with the accrued emphasis on commemoration in contemporary socio-cultural discourses throughout Europe. Dr. Chakrabarty’s current research, framed by an interdisciplinary perspective emerging from the fields of art history, philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory, seeks to illuminate this highly fecund yet understudied facet of a creative moment that defies facile taxonomy.
Eric Nay
Eric Nay has yet to begin consciously working on his OCAD SSHRC seed grant project in the flesh, but has already been exploring further prototyping his projected outcome to include a sustainable cottage prototype to be hopefully designed with a colleague and artist at OCAD (not an architect) as a future projected outcome. Rural reclamation, agricultural superstructures and other cool conference and lecture-worthy buzzwords can be seen on the horizon, with aspirations well beyond the sad solar panel selection and motorcycle batteries on the plastic shelves of Canadian Tire stores across Ontario. With winter gone and construction season upon us, Eric hopes to begin testing some forms, ideas and hacked technologies very soon as he promised to do with his grant money.
On a more productive horizon Eric has been furthering his theoretical work in sustainable design by writing a number of papers, all in various stages of publication in proceedings, websites, etc. which include papers for the 5th World Environmental Education Conference in Montreal, the 2nd Climate Change Technology Conference in Hamilton and the International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED ’09, at Stanford University in California. Additional invitations to the massive sustainable campus gatherings held annually in California are also on his agenda for the summer.
Eric also recently published an article, “Sustainable Practices,” in Studio Magazine, the bi-annual publication of the Ontario Crafts Council advocating how craft professionals can thoughtfully incorporate sustainability into their practices. The simultaneous appearance of multiple levels of hysterical documentation sprouting up around the world disputing the efficacy of what we are actually accomplishing in designing for sustainability is proving to support Eric’s most cynical views that 98% of sustainable design is hollow rhetoric and furthering his personal quest for a more profound and vested understanding of what sustainability’s contested meanings hold for his students, the design professions and himself. As Bertold Brecht reminds us, “The new meat is eaten with old forks.”
Dr. Soyang Park
Dr. Park’s research program consists of two interconnected projects on contemporary South Korean society, culture and art viewed from a postcolonial perspective:
Project 1- Postcolonial Aesthetics extends her research on transference (enactment of the repressed in psychoanalysis) and its communicative aesthetic formation in relation to the subject of the repressed and marginalized in Korean society through the case study of dissident minjung (people’s and grassroots’) art in Korea in the 1980s and early 1990s. Dr. Park stipulates that the minjung art practices of Lim Ok Sang and Oh Yoon interacted with sites of trauma, the sense of loss, and reconstruction of community in attaining their aesthetic of transference.
Research Topic: Problematic beauty and a synaesthetic aesthetic system: reconsidering Buck- Morss’ essay, ‘Aesthetics and Anesthetics’ from a postcolonial perspective
Dr. Park also investigates this dimension through the case study of artistic practices of post-1992 era, for instance, by Choi Jeong Hwa. She stipulates that his works mimic and transform a hybridized vernacular aesthetic of popular objects that are treated as peripheral and inferior by mainstream art historians and in so doing explores a uniquely self-reflective and critical force within its own aesthetic system, and enacts a new postcolonial aesthetic view from an imperfect utopia of Korean modernity.
Research Topic: An imperfect utopia, a modernity and spectacle: an architectonic postcolonial aesthetics in Choi Jeong Hwa’s plastic spectacle’
Project 2 - Enacting Memory and Performing Community: society, culture, and art in post-minjung South Korea (1993 - 2006) Explores the dynamic nature of the Korean public sphere in the post-1992 era (the victory of popular minjung struggle finally ended the military authoritarianism in 1992 and installed a civil government) through a case study of diverse state, civil and civil-state collaborative activities that have been organized to overcome the colonial and authoritarian past, consolidate the democracy, various reform projects in order to reinvent their community. The various social forces seem to complement, counter-balance, and oppose the administrative, regulatory and controlling function of the state. (Koo 1993; Choi 1993; Park 2004). Precisely, the research topic ‘the colonial past, the ghost, and the cultural turn: undoing the colonial ghosts’ investigates the decolonization efforts of the state and societies which concern historical trauma and ghosts from the colonial past that have continued to reshape the Korean political and cultural landscape of this period.
Peter Sramek
Un Percement du Temps is the working title of Peter Sramek’s current research/creation project supported by a SSHRC Seed Grant. During a week in Paris this past April he reviewed over 600 albumen photographs of Parisian streets by Charles Marville acquired by the Musée Carnavalet in the 1870s. As part of his exploration, he made over 90 test photographs documenting street views selected from the collection. This summer, Sramek will return to Paris to work with a large format camera, following an arc across old Paris from the place de l’Opéra to place d’Italie, creating a slice, not only of the urban space but also through time as these images recapture views made over a century ago. The work continues his exploration of the relationships between the photographic documentation of cities, our romantic conceptions of historical Europe and the role that photographers play in creating how we conceive of cultural heritage.
In approaching his research, Sramek has constructed a bilingual software tool consisting of a database of images and descriptive information including his own contemporary images of the sites. This is allowing him to organize the data collected, record observations and plan a work trajectory.
The initial objective in reviewing the collection was to identify intersections between the work of Marville and that of Eugène Atget from the early 1900s. The database allows these relationships to be tracked and comparisons annotated. Notes were kept about the prints viewed and a link created to the Atget database of the Musée Carnavalet. Cross-references were checked to the one main published catalogue of Marville’s work by Marie de Thèzy. This is now permitting quick identification of locations and Sramek’s notes on differences between her published images and the prints in the museum’s collection may prove to be useful. Concurrently, Sramek has sourced period maps in order to pinpoint historic streets and select sites for the next photographic stage.
So far the research has resulted in an understanding of differences in the approaches of the two photographers, despite the superficial similarities of their massive topographical studies. The process is to now select which Marville and Atget images to place in juxtaposition, along with the contemporary large format photographs which Sramek will be making.
Dot Tuer
Dot Tuer's research objectives are to investigate how the issues of colonialism, hybridity, and identity are engaged through the representational strategies of contemporary art and ritual in the Americas. The central goal of her investigation is to propose how these representational strategies are significant for the understanding and contextualizing of the role of art and ritual as a form of transmission and revision of historical memory and colonial resistance. She has recently completed an in-depth analysis of these strategies in the work of Canadian artist Jamelie Hassan to be published in a survey catalogue of her work. For the SIG grant, Tuer undertake research in November 2009 on the work of contemporary artists in Bolivia, and in particular, the work of Guiomar Mesa, who incorporates elements of colonial history directly into her paintings. In this regard, the works of contemporary Bolivian artists have little diffusion in the English-language art world at an historical moment when Bolivia is a particularly interesting site of indigenous self-determination and post-colonial politics.
Greg Van Alstyne
The sBook Project: Designing the Future of the Book
This project seeks to envision and prototype new platforms for reading, writing and publishing in the digital media era, by understanding and meeting human-centric needs and wants where the space of the screen and the printed page intersect. The roots of this effort began when Dr. Robert K. Logan, Chief Scientist of OCAD's Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), outlined a user scenario for what he called the "smartbook" in 2005. Since that time, Greg Van Alstyne, Associate Professor of Design and Director of Research for sLab, and Dr. Logan have worked closely with a growing international team of researchers, including sLab Senior Fellows Dr. Gale Moore from University of Toronto and Dr. Peter H. Jones of Redesign Research, to set the stage for an ambitious research and innovation project. The "s" in "sBook" refers to the design criteria to which we are dedicated: simple, searchable, smart, social, sustainable, and scalable. Our team is awaiting results from an application for support from HP Labs, and is preparing applications for Ontario-based public funding sources. We've been working with OCAD Graphic Design graduate Garry Ing as a Research Assistant to conceive and design a richly featured project web site, enabling us to publish our findings to date, including a literature review, a peer-reviewed poster presentation from ElPub 2008: The 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing. Bob Logan presented the project in April 2009 at MIT's international conference "Media in Transition 5" in Cambridge, MA. Our next presentation is set for BookCampToronto, June 2009 at the MaRS Centre, where we will be recruiting publishing partners for a planned foresight and innovation charrette. Finally this summer we plan to begin prototyping with Graduate Research Assistant David Green, who is enrolled in OCAD's Interdisciplinary Master's in Art, Media and Design.
Last Modified:1/24/2012 12:57:13 PM
