WORKSHOPS
A week after the Colloquiums, we invite you to enjoy the work of five different educators on a virtual creative workshop that builds upon the concepts and ideas discussed in the talks and the tour.
The structure of the workshops consists of several short explanatory portions intercalated by activities designed having in mind the use of materials that you can find easily at home. These activities will invite you to explore in two hours ideas like how shadows, lines, contrast and motion alter our understanding of the human face? How meaning and significance of colours change depending on their name? How our art practice could be impacting our bodies and the one of those around us? What role play ambiguity on imagination and creativity? How can colour be used to reveal or hide the information like in a spy game?
Explore each workshop explanation, register, and enjoy learning by doing.
A World Without Color
Disorders in the Perception of Color
Bettina Forget
May 2nd, 2021
Sunday
2:00 PM EST
Duration: 2 hours
Description
How does a portrait capture the essence of the self? When does your own face become that of a stranger? In this workshop, participants will explore how shadow, line, contrast and motion alter our understanding of the human face. Participants will experiment with pencil and charcoal on paper, smartphone photography, simple digital image editing techniques, and web-based artificial intelligence (AI) to create a series of iterative self-portraits. The portraits will examine how we typically perceive light and darkness but also investigate non-normative ways of seeing faces, such as prosopagnosia (face-blindness) and akinetopsia (motion-blindness). The workshop will include short presentations by the workshop leader, group discussion, individual art-making, and collaborative work.
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Required Materials
Drawing paper, tracing paper, pencil, charcoal, smartphone, flashlight or similar light source, access to a basic image editing software such as Photoshop or Gimp, and access to a web browser.
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Age Restriction
This workshop is best suited for 12 and older. We suggest that younger participants attend with adult supervision.
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Artworks featured in the workshop
Charlie Alakkariallak Inukpuk – Untitled (Head of an Inuit Woman with Two Braids)
(1941)
George Arluk – Untlited (Chaman) (1990)
Parr – Les Miens (1961)
Prudence Heward – Rosaire (1935)
Fritz Brandtner – Sans titre (Abstraction) (1968)
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About the Instructor
Bettina Forget is a gallerist, art educator, researcher, and visual artist living and working in Montreal. Bettina directs the SETI Institute’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program. In this capacity she facilitates the collaboration between artists and SETI researchers, foregrounds art-science research practice, and establishes a network of institutional partners active in art, science, and technology. Bettina owns and runs Visual Voice Gallery. Located in downtown Montreal, Visual Voice Gallery presents contemporary art exhibitions which create a dialogue between art and science. She is currently a Public Scholar and doctoral candidate in Art Education at Concordia University, Canada. Her research examines the recontextualization of art and science, and how transdisciplinary education may disrupt gender stereotypes. Bettina’s creative work focuses on space sciences, inspired by her avid engagement with amateur astronomy. Her artworks explore the subjects of astronomy, science fiction, and feminism. She has exhibited her artwork in the USA, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Singapore, and Nicaragua.
Born in Germany, Bettina has studied at Central St-Martins School of Art in London,
England, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in
Singapore.
The Color of Passion
Color as a Social Construct
Darian Goldin Stahl
May 23rd, 2021
Sunday
2:00 PM EST
Duration: 2 hours
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Description
This workshop will examine our linguistic connections with colours and the sensory evocations between words and vision. Together, we will explore how naming can alter or reinforce our perceptions of colour. Such linguistic links with colours have sparked controversy through the centuries, revealing that, ultimately, the meaning of colour is socially constructed. Participants will then add their own personal perspectives to the lexicon of colours. Each participant will employ the Adobe Color Wheel to choose a colour that speaks to them. Then, the instructor will guide the participants through a sensory naming exercise in an attempt to encapsulate the feeling of the colour. Finally, we will all submit our colours and titles to the Convergence website. This experiment's results will illuminate the influence of naming on our shared or disparate perceptions of colour.
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Required Materials
A pen and paper. Know how to take a cropped screenshot on the computer, tablet, or another device you will be using to participate in this workshop.
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Age Restriction
13+
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Artworks featured in the workshop
Henri Le Sidane - White Houses (1923)
Helen Galloway McNicoll – Under the Shadow of the Tent (1914)
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About the Instructor
Darian Goldin Stahl is an interdisciplinary printmaker and bookmaker. She holds a PhD in Humanities from Concordia University and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta. Darian’s SSHRC Vanier sponsored research-creation dissertation, “Book as Body: The Meaning-Making of Artists’ Books in the Health Humanities,” investigates how artists' book's can become multi-sensory objects of lived experience on the topics of illness, disability, health, and wellbeing. In the Fall of 2021, she will start a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the UNBC Northern Medical Program to continue merging fine arts, creative health practices, and health humanities pedagogies.
To view this work, please visit Darian’s website: www.dariangoldinstahl.com
Poisoned by Color
Neurotoxicity and Dyes
Laura Rosero
June 27th, 2021
Sunday
2:00 PM EST
Duration: 2 hours
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Description
As artists and art lovers, we are really concerned about beauty. As humans, we are really careful about what we put inside our bodies. But is it worth it to ask ourselves how our creative practice could be impacting our bodies and of those around us? We can easily forget about the by-products of ours and other creations, ignoring the hidden poisons in beauty.
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How can we develop an artistic path that positively impacts the world around us and in our bodies? How can we avoid the beauty of colour becoming poison for us or those (humans and no humans) around us? Even though not all paints are harmful to our bodies and the environment, this workshop will help you explore how colours are hidden in your home, in the form of waste and products in your kitchen. We will be creating paint using unusual material, recursiveness and imagination.
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Required Materials
The list of materials will depend on the colour you chose to create. Please access the pre-workshop package to see the details.
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Age Restriction
13+. If under 18, an adult must be present to guide, assist and/or supervise them.
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Artworks featured in the workshop
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - Ville d'Avray - The Fisherman by the Lock (1852)
Ferdinand Hodler - Haberdier (1895)
Francesco Guardi - Storm at Sea (1765)
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About the Instructor
Laura Rosero is an Afro-Latina multidisciplinary designer with a BFA in Design from Concordia University and a DEC in Graphic design from Cégep Marie-Victorin. She had the opportunity to participate in multiple research projects where design and science merge to solve problems that affect different communities' daily lives.
As a designer, Laura uses design to construct networks based on collectiveness, inclusiveness and mutual understanding. She wants to use design as a tool to translate the differences that divide us (human/non-humans) into common ground. Laura strives to create means that dismantle cultural/social/environmental barriers, give a voice to minorities and forge a fabric where there is no "them" and "those" but a wide and diverse "us."
Pareidolia: Dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity as a source of idea generation
Vision and Creativity
Antoine Bellemare Pepin
July 24th, 2021
Saturday
2:00 PM EST
Duration: 2 hours
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Description
Pareidolia is the fascinating phenomenon of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in ambiguous images, like recognizing a dragon or a space rocket in a cloud. This phenomenon emerges from our tendency to seek patterns in the face of uncertainty.
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This workshop will interactively relate the science behind pareidolia with practical, creative applications. We will explore different ways of experiencing pareidolic perception while learning about fundamental gestalt mechanisms enabling its emergence. Participants will be invited to develop creative ideas by constructing their pareidolia, with a specific focus on storytelling.
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Furthermore, a dialogue between human and machine creativity will be initiated through the use of tools derived from artificial intelligence exploring the intrinsic relation between pareidolia and creativity, the benefits of paying attention to your environment as a creativity trigger, and the emerging role that artificial intelligence could play on those relations.
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Required Materials
Before the workshop, participants are encouraged to access the pre-workshop package to arrive prepared for the activities.
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The day of the workshop you must bring an inspiring poem on the internet, one or two newspaper articles that brings questions to you, black and coloured pencils, and white sheets.
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Age Restriction
Any age. If younger than 13 years old, you need to be accompanied by an adult to participate/understand activities.
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Artworks featured in the workshop
Fritz Bradtner - La Tempête (1896)
Fritz Brandtner – Sans titre (Abstraction) (1968)
Juaran (Rodolphe de Repentigny) – Équilibre (1953)
George Arluk – Untlited (Chaman) (1990)
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About the Instructor
Antoine Bellemare Pepin is a multidisciplinary artist and Ph.D. student at Concordia University. He is enrolled in an Individualized program to create a dialogue between digital arts and neuroscience.
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His research-creation project focuses on the link between creativity, electrophysiological signals, and algorithmic compositions. His work explores how sensory noise influences creative perception and how meaning emerges from the integration of ambiguous information. Poetry, neuroscience, electroacoustic, and artificial intelligence are all vectors of expression that could fulfill this same exploration.
Color as a Tool
(Making the unseen visible)
Jihane Mossalim
August 21st, 2021
Saturday
02:00 PM EST
Duration: 2 hours
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Description
This workshop will explore the red, green, and blue (RGB) colour code used by both modern coloured screens used every day and the main fluorescent dyes employed to reveal the different brain components in contemporary science. Participants will create their own "brain structure inspired art piece" using a coloured drawing developed during the workshop. We will hide a word, a shape or a sentence within the drawing and then use the different features of an application or the filter properties of transparent coloured paper to make it appear.
Using the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) as an example, we will explore the use of colour as a tool to detect elements that might be very difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye. GFP is an organic molecule, a protein, found in jellyfish. It can be attached to other cellular components inside organisms to tag features for the biological study under the microscope. Once GFP is attached to a target of interest, scientists can make it appear using ultraviolet light, revealing them in a fluorescent bright green allowing the explorer to distinguish the components under study. We will emulate that process to understand better the connection between fluorescent colours in science and transformation, contrasts, and the use of the RGB model in computers and cellphone screens.
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Required Materials
1, 2 or more sheets of white paper
1, 2 or more highlighter(s)
An array of different coloured markers and/or pencil crayons
2 permanent markers (sharpies): 1 blue, 1 purple
Scotch tape (transparent)
Cellphone or any other electronic devices (with the Snapseed app and a flashlight app)
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*Clear drinking glasses with flat bottoms
*Food colouring (yellow, red, green and blue)
*If you do not, want not or cannot use your cellphone or any other electronic devices for this workshop
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Age Restriction
Children should be old enough to work with an app. with the help of a parent (5 years old should be the youngest).
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Artworks featured in the workshop
Multiple paintings from Montreal artist Andres Manniste
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About the Instructor
Jihane Mossalim is a painter and an art educator based in Montreal, Quebec. She is the Fine Arts Director of the Convergence Initiative, facilitating collaborations and projects between artists and scientists. She believes that art is a universal language and aims to find ways to bring this language to a broader audience in collaboration with the scientific community. In her art, she often plays with the concepts of childhood, strangers, memories and institutions. Her works have been exhibited across North America, Portugal and Scotland. She has created works for many horror and fantasy publications, including Joe Hill's Snapshot 1988 for Cemetery Dance Magazine.
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In 2021, she obtained her BFA in Art Education from Concordia University. She is also the recipient of a Glencross Family Award in Art Education and the Excellence Scholarship for Future Teachers. In 2020 she received a publishing grant from the Fine Arts Reading Room from Concordia University to create a small publication. The book is a collection of paintings depicting childhood memories and pictures shared by strangers from her social media. She is currently pursuing her MA in Art Education at Concordia University.
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