When we remember on November 11, it is generally with great sadness for lives destroyed and with horror at the power of war. But these feelings are useless -– or worse, can perpetuate more violence  – when they are directed only historically and uncritically. What we should remember this Sunday, and always, is that little has changed since 1918 when it comes to war. Soldiers are still working-class people sent to die en masse for imperialist interests on behalf of the wealthy. Civilians are still disposable.

Yet every year the appeal to remember is made by the same state that ships those who are honoured by this act off to die, with utter disregard for those who will be affected on the other end of their violence. It erases the experiences of women who are raped during war, individually or as part of a larger system of sexual slavery; children who are murdered, orphaned, or forced to participate in conflicts; queers and trans* people who are raped and killed; indigenous populations who are obliterated in the name of expansion, God, freedom, or defense on the part of the invading country; war resisters or deserters who are persecuted for their beliefs; independent groups who form outside the army during times of conflict to commit acts of sabotage; racialized peoples who face discrimination or internment – and this is only an abbreviated list. These lives often equal or outnumber soldiers, yet on Remembrance Day, it’s only those “who sacrificed their lives in military service on behalf of their country” who are worthy of our solemn reflection.

When the state presents November 11 as a day of national mourning without acknowledging its own role in creating the events that necessitate this mourning in the first place, it’s a reminder that nationalist commemoration has never really been about remembering the full extent of what happens and who is affected during armed conflict. Remembrance Day can all too easily serve as a platform for militaristic nationalism, a means – like the Harper government’s $28 million promotion of the War of 1812 – of garnering our pride in Canada’s armed forces even as we rattle sabres toward Iran.

This is not to say we shouldn’t remember – rather, we need to remember better. We need to be critical of national campaigns that erase the causes and casualties of war as well as disguise Canada’s interest in waging more of them. We need to ask ourselves if there’s anything odd – some would say completely fucked up – about commemorating the dead on the campus of a university actively developing weapons technology that will guarantee more dead to commemorate for centuries to come.

What we need to remember most of all is that remembrance is useless unless it remembers equally, and unless it actively seeks to dismantle the machinery of war by challenging the institutions that perpetuate it.

Flora Dunster is a U3 Art History student and former Daily Copy editor. You can reach her at flora.dunster@mail.mcgill.ca. Sheehan Moore is a U3 Anthropology student, former Daily Design & Production editor, and Chair of the Daily Publications Society. You can reach him at sheehan.moore@mail.mcgill.ca.

The post Amnesia in wartime appeared first on The McGill Daily.

By September, 101 objections to the Access Copyright’s (AC) plan were formally registered, including one by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). Ryerson University, University of Manitoba, and many others prepared to let their licenses with AC lapse in a move that would likely mean shifting course pack materials online and leaving reproduction rights up in the air. In a December broadcast email, the University of British Columbia told students the institution’s annual AC fees would surge from $650,000 to $2 million, creating what they called “unacceptable cost burdens to student and institutional budgets alike.” AC has since bent to pressure and reinstated the previous fee structure while negotiations with the AUCC proceed.

Quebec universities, including McGill, have not been immediately affected by Access Copyright’s tariff increase. They pay fees for licensing and reproduction rights to a separate collective, COPIBEC. But the current agreement is up for renegotiation next year, and it is yet unknown what kind of changes COPIBEC will push for. Steve Drolet, a coordinator at McGill Course Pack Services, believes the collective is monitoring the situation with AC to determine the extent to which they can follow suit with their fees. “They’re a business, they’re not really a public service,” he said in an interview. “They’re fighting for changes to the copyright law, and my perception is that they’re trying to do that to protect their purview over it.”

The uneasy situation with copyright collectives in which Canadian universities have found themselves is a strong indication of the current state of academic publishing. New possibilities and limitations on the use of scholarship are fundamentally restructuring how research is circulated and the ways we think about access.

Academic journals are at the center of the scholarly world. Regular publication is a mandatory part of almost all professorships, and academic careers hinge on the often-political world of peer-review. In an email to The Daily, Andrew Piper – German Studies professor and co-founder of the Interacting With Print research group – provided a look into the history of academic periodicals.

“The origins of the academic journal date back in a general sense to the eighteenth century,” he wrote. “Their proliferation was a bedrock of the Enlightenment ideal of the open access to knowledge.” But as the number of journals in circulation expanded and their contents became more specialized, questions of access turned to the issue of surplus – what Piper called “the equal and opposite problem of too much knowledge. How was one to contend with that?”

As the importance of journals within academia rose, publishers have capitalized on the burgeoning market. This has resulted in massive price increases – annual institutional subscriptions to journals published by Springer, a major for-profit academic publishing house, run from several hundred dollars to more than $8,500. In our current model, however, researchers depend on publishers for the organization of peer reviews, copy editing, and the storage and distribution of their work.

Furthermore, escalating prices create problems that run counter to the original intent of periodicals. “The journal, which was once the bastion of access to knowledge, is now inhibiting access because of its high cost,” wrote Piper. “It also means we’re buying fewer books. And this impinges on the type of knowledge that is made – more journals and fewer books usually means more specialization. Specialization in turn often implies non-access.”

Digitalization and sharing across the internet, often hailed as a great democratizer, has forced publishers to change their game. To maintain profit margins, many companies bundle journals together and sell subscriptions to libraries, a high-priced option that Piper says only increases the gap between “academic haves and have-nots.”

In response to the extension of publisher price controls on the web, the open access (OA) model sprung up in the 1990s and has steadily grown since then. Under the OA model, the onus to pay to access scholarship is shifted from the reader to a third party, such as a university, society, or museum. Often, OA journals use the author-pay scheme, in which the researcher or the institution funding them pays for the costs that go into copy editing and hosting their work. The fee ranges from a nominal $100 or $200, up to the £1500 that Cambridge University Press charges its contributors if they want to make their research openly accessible. This cost has hindered the total adoption of OA publishing: a 2010 study by Finnish economists showed that only around 20 per cent of academic articles had OA permissions.

To ensure the preservation and accessibility of their researchers’ work, many universities have created institutional repositories – public, searchable archives of the scholarship produced there. Amy Buckland, the electronic scholarship, publishing, and digitization coordinator of McGill’s institutional repository – eScholarship@McGill – considers this project a vital part of the school’s academic community.

“We want it to be the showcase of the intellectual output of the university,” she said. “So if journals go under, if databases become too prohibitively expensive to subscribe to, the library feels that at the very least we should be able to make McGill’s work available to the public. … Publicly-funded research should be available to the public.”

eScholarship@McGill works by requesting professors’ CVs, then contacting the publishers of their articles to see which they are allowed to put into the repository. Buckland says most publishers will allow for the copying of the postprint – the version of an article that has gone through the peer-review and editing process, but has yet to be copy edited.

But eScholarship@McGill’s archives are not restricted to professors: they also preserve graduate theses and dissertations, going back to at least 1965. “We wanted to give a bigger profile to our graduates” said Buckland. “So now you get good ‘Google juice’ on your name, whereas before you had to go to the ProQuest database, which not all libraries subscribe to, and which the general public can’t access.” Articles in the repository are accessible worldwide and “harvestable,” meaning they can be copied into other databases and further circulated. This helps provide exposure to professors and students alike.

Most people working in academia view open access distribution models as the ideal. “There is really no reason that all academic journals shouldn’t be published under an open access system on the web,” wrote Piper. “If you edit a journal today you have to be an agent in moving away from your corporate sponsor and towards an open, web-based publishing model.”

But the ideal may not always be realistic. Private publishers are not going anywhere, Buckland says, just changing their rules. “They do a lot of the grunt work” in disseminating research, she said. And the cost of review and editing that the open access scheme imposes on universities is a massive burden. “It’s not yet sustainable,” Buckland said. For the present, she envisions a collaboration between libraries and university presses, like the McGill-Queen’s University Press, which would decrease dependence on external publishing houses.

The problem for Piper, however, exceeds questions of digitization, distribution, and access: “How are going to address the crisis of academic publishing, not in terms of there being too few venues to publish research, but in terms of there being too much information for individuals to digest? This is something we have only begun to tackle.”

The post Academia in the age of digital reproducibility appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Bolsheviki is the tale of Rosie Rollins (played by Robert King), a veteran of World War I and a native, like Fennario, of Point St. Charles. One evening, on Remembrance Day, 1977, Rollins begins to piece together his story for a Gazette reporter writing a piece on Vimy Ridge. What emerges is a darker retelling of the war, one which abandons the grand narratives of heroic nation-building for an account straight from the trenches.

For Fennario, the battle at Vimy Ridge, which saw more than 3,500 Canadians killed, whitewashes the reality of a war motivated not by pride or honour but by economic interests. “The rank and file were there because they’d been told it was a fight for democracy,” he said, “but it wasn’t. It was divided by class. The interests of the officers within the army were not the same as everyone else, because they were going to go home and join the elite.”

Today, Fenarrio said, this same elite “celebrates and insists we celebrate with them the idea that they could make men fight for them, they could make people die for them. What did we get from it? We were promised a world of democracy, the war to end all wars, jobs when we got back. All we got, though, was two minutes of silence a year.”

Fennario’s family arrived in Montreal a century ago, and his roots stretch across the city’s anglophone working-class southwest. His sharp, often political plays have made him a central figure in Canadian theatre since his first piece, On the Job, premiered in 1975.

That his latest work arrives at a time when thousands of Canadians are still in Afghanistan is no coincidence, and Fennario is quick to point out that the problems of the First World War haven’t disappeared. Afghanistan, like World War I, is backed by the rich and the powerful and fuelled by “the same drive for markets and profits.”

Bolsheviki, then, serves as a warning. “They want bigger and better wars,” Fennario said, and the conflict in Afghanistan may just be the beginning. “That’s why it’s important to fight them when they’re small, when you can oppose them.”

But despite the play’s heavy subject matter, Fennario says Bolsheviki is anything but humourless: “Essentially, Rosie takes a piss on Vimy Ridge, and people piss themselves laughing at it.”

—

Bolsheviki is playing until December 5 at the Bain St. Michel (5300 St. Dominique). Visit infinitheatre.com for more details.

The post Power play appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It’s made by coating water molecules with a thin layer of modified silica, the main component of beach sand. The result is a dry powder that is 95 per cent water. Because the silica prevents the water droplets from recombining into a liquid, dry water is able to absorb gases, which combine with the water to make gas hydrates. Gases could then be safely stored before being shipped away in powder form – an economical alternative to the use of pipelines, liquefaction, or compression.

First invented by German scientists in the 1960s for use in cosmetics, dry water soon fell by the wayside until its rediscovery by Hull University scientists in 2006. A materials chemistry research group at the University of Liverpool, headed up by Andrew Cooper, then began to study dry water, and realized its potential extends far beyond face cream.

Ben Carter, the lead researcher in Cooper’s group, discussed the team’s work with The Daily by email. He’s most interested in dry water’s primary application, storing natural gas.

“A great many natural gas reserves (up to forty per cent by some estimates) are classified as ‘stranded,’ which is to say that they are too remote to be accessed economically using standard gas transport technologies,” he wrote. “Dry water gas hydrate could act as an alternative to these.”

While there are other ways to form natural gas hydrates, these depend on stirring or spraying to accelerate the process. Dry water needs no outside agent – it requires less energy and is more cost-effective than other options.

The same process that allows dry water to store methane can also be used to capture carbon dioxide, an angle which Carter said “has been seized upon more than we would like by the press.” At this stage of research, CO2 storage has only occurred under laboratory conditions. Real-world scenarios such as the absorption of post-combustion emissions, which could have drastic environmental implications, would probably just cause the powder to evaporate.

Dry water may not be the global warming fix-all the media are saying it is, but Carter still sees it as an environmental boon, calling it a “pollution preventer” in its application as a natural gas transporter. While natural gas does produce less CO2 than petroleum-based fuels, methane – the primary component of natural gas – accounts for more than 14 per cent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2004 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In Quebec, the provincial government has faced public backlash over plans to extract natural gas through “fracking,” a process which Natural Resources Canada has warned could increase CO2 emissions and diminish fresh water reserves.

Carter remains optimistic about dry water’s potential uses, however, especially in the development of cleaner energy sources. “Green fuel gases such as hydrogen in particular will require effective storage before they can be fully developed,” he wrote. “Alternative energy sources and their technologies are still long-term goals, and I think that in the meantime we need to address our effect on the planet in some fashion.”

The post Make up ingredient, pollution preventer? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

That audiences today are so eager to hear a talk about queer sexuality is indicative of an immense societal shift – an increasing acceptance that Weeks traced from the emergence of social constructionism in the 1960s to the present. In an interview with The Daily, he discussed the state of queer history and the role of queer activism in the face of globalization.

The McGill Daily: Traditionally, a lot of queer history has concerned itself with tracing an origin point for the notion of “the homosexual.” You’ve made a case for locating it at the end of the 19th century, and others have argued for different dates. Why do you think it’s valuable that we understand the emergence of “modern homosexuality?” What would you say the queer historical project is attempting to accomplish?

Jeffrey Weeks: Well I think we have to make a distinction between what was the focus in the 1970s when modern queer history began and what the focus is today. I think in the 1970s there was a preoccupation with trying to understand the shifting nature of gay identity, particularly in the wake of gay liberation, and in a sense the starting point was the present rather than the past. And the present was the emergence of new gay identities – gay liberation identities – and therefore it was almost a natural response to try to look for the origins of the emergence of these identities. And I think that was the main impulse in the 1970s.

Today the impulse is almost the opposite, to recognize in the past what we now recognize in the present, which is that there’s a great variety of ways of being gay or lesbian or transgendered, and therefore trying to seek in the past a similar pattern of diversity. In a sense the starting point in both cases is the present. But the aim is different. 

MD: So what would you say we should be focusing on now? Is the shift away from what we were seeing in the 1970s a good shift?

JW: I think it’s a shift that reflects two things. First of all, the shift in the interests of the lesbian and gay and wider world about same-sex desire and gender non-conformity. And secondly it’s based on the accumulation of knowledge, because a huge amount of research has been done on these issues and therefore we actually know more and we know more about the past as well as  the present.

My own view is that our focus shouldn’t be so much looking for origins of anything, whether it’s origins of identity or of same-sex marriage, or whatever. Our job now I think is, starting with our present awareness and consciousness and beliefs, to query the past. It’s querying rather than queering the past… . In other words, asking questions about dominant notions in the past.

The dominant notion of the past is still what you could call heteronormative and everything else is a deviation from that. I think what we’re learning is that sexual and gender norms of the past were very complex and often contested. There was a dominant model but within that, there was a huge variety of ways of being. And that has become increasingly the focus of queer history, I think.

MD: You talked last week about the way that “queer” moved from the streets into a more formal academic discourse. What’s your impression of the current state of queer within academia and the direction you perceive it to be heading?

JW: Basically the origins of queer history – or lesbian and gay history as we called it then – were grassroots. It was a bottom-up view. We were looking for the ways in which lesbian and gay people … lived in the past, and the way in which this helped us to understand the present. So it was very much a grassroots movement. Of course, by the late 1970s it was very theorized, and the work of Michel Foucault was very influential in that. I think the focus tended to shift away from the grassroots more towards a top-down analysis, the way homosexuality was structured by society. It looked at the issue from the other way around. That became a focus of quite a lot of theoretical disputes and political disputes. The so-called social constructionist controversy which went on in queer history for the next ten or 15 years into the 90s.

So it became it a theoretical issue as much as a political issue. And I think in that process, the notion of agency got lost. A further development of the theoretical debates was of course the emergence of queer theory. … But it had great difficulty in actually approaching the experience of people who lived same-sex lives themselves. A gap developed between the practice of queer theory and what it was trying to do, which was explore transgression and difference and variety and so on. It couldn’t address – because it was so abstract – the actual facts of agency and the problems and difficulties in forms of agency.

Agency got missing somehow in all this debate. And I think the good thing about this conference actually is that it focused increasingly on forms of agency and the way people live their lives, against the odds, and I think that’s a very important stress to have.

MD: Do you think that’s something that’s emerging across the field?
JW: I think so, because I think there’s a wide recognition that people make their own history, but not in circumstances necessarily of their own choice. It’s finding a balance between the way people make their own history in very complicated and difficult periods, and what the structural constraints and opportunities are. You need to hold a balance between structure and agency all the time, doing any sort of history.

I think what I’m saying is that the balance had shifted too much towards the structure, and not enough towards the agency. I was pleased to see that there’s a move back towards greater recognition of the diverse forms of agency over the last few hundred years.

MD: In the last few years we’ve seen a real increase in the visibility, on a global level, of what many refer to as “queer” issues. For example, the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill, the conviction of the Malawian couple Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, and the repeal last year of anti-sodomy laws in India. A lot of LGBT and queer groups across the world are involving themselves in these issues, but there’s also been criticism of these groups for imposing Western templates of gay liberation onto these non-Western societies. What role do you think queer communities – especially activists and academics – should be playing in these situations?

JW: I think several things have been happening at the same time. I think in the West, where modern homosexuality was in a sense defined, and new forms of controlling homosexuality were pioneered from the 19th century onward, There has been an incredible liberalization and most Western countries now, with some exceptions, have by and large have reformed the laws and opened up the opportunities for same sex marriage or civil partnerships, and there’s a greater attitude of toleration and so on – all of which is largely positive.

But the fact that so much has changed in the West has given rise to a recognition that in other parts of the world, things may be going in the opposite direction, and sometimes in direct response to what’s happening in the West. For instance, fundamentalist regimes across the world – or indeed in the Western world – look at what’s happening in the West, and the greater tolerance of homosexuality, and say, “Look, this is what happens if you allow modernization to get out of control, this is what happens if you abandon God.” And that feeds into homophobia in some other countries in the global south, especially in Africa – the role of the Anglican church in Nigeria for instance is extremely dangerous, and is feeding a schism in the world Christian movement.

Now what’s happening is that activists in the West see what’s happening there and want to show signs of solidarity, and I think what’s emerged out of that is a discourse of human sexual rights, which isn’t simply a Western imposition of Western values. It’s reflecting people’s struggles for harmony and self-expression in the world as a whole, and especially in the global south – it’s the politics of solidarity. But there is a danger of course that in doing that, people want to – not so much impose, because we haven’t got the power to impose – but present a model of development that culminates in the contemporary lesbian or gay of the Western world, and we’ve got to respect the fact that homosexuality, and sexuality generally, is lived in a whole variety of different ways in different parts of the world. So it’s important to respect those differences while defending people’s right to express their sexuality, and that I think is what the movement for human sexual rights is trying to do.

Now there is a paradox in all this – that many parts of the world which decry Western influence, especially governments saying, “Keep out of our morals, we have our own traditions and we want to follow our own traditions” … there’s an irony in that, in that what they are now defending – the laws against homosexuality – were actually laws which were imposed by the imperial power in the 19th century, particularly Britain.

MD: Should academics involved in queer issues even be playing a part in these conversations?

JW: I think it’s essential that those of us who have studied these issues and are aware of them should do our best to demonstrate to the world that sexuality isn’t a given, that there’s no such thing as a true sexuality, that there are various forms of sexuality, and they take different forms in different cultures and different histories. We have to respect those differences while insisting that there are certain common human values and norms  that every country and every culture should follow. And the supreme one for me in relationship to sexuality is that people should be free to express their own sexuality in their own ways, at their own pace. As long as those don’t harm others, and don’t impose violence on others, people should be free to express them.

That seems to be a human value, a universal value. So while it’s respecting cultural difference, I think it’s absolutely right for people in the West, and indeed anywhere else, to say, “Yes we respect difference, but we also respect that there are certain common values which we must respect to be fully human.” And that doesn’t seem to be a Western norm, that seems to be a universal norm.

MD: You’ve been retired for several years now, but you’re still obviously very much involved in these discussions. What are you most focused on now? Do you intend to keep speaking and publishing?

JW: Well what I retired from were management positions in  university and a commitment to full-time work. I took slightly early retirement in order to find more time to write and to research, and to do a bit of travelling like I’ve done to Montreal. So that’s what I’m doing, and that’s what I hope to continue to do. I’ve got several book projects — I’ve just finished a book — and I’ve written a number of articles which are being published. And I hope to continue to do that, as long as I have the energy and commitment to do it. So retirement isn’t the end.

The post Sovereign sexualities appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Abarca-Cantin maintains the importance of making a space like this available for women, citing the varying needs of different genders. “It’s a bit like math,” she says. “We learn in different ways.” She perceives social obstacles between women and technology, too, and in particular points to elderly women who, on entering a computer store, may “be told by salespeople, ‘Oh, you need this [product] for safety.’ But [these women] can make a huge impact on the market.” Discrimination can start at home, too. “Families aren’t as comfortable paying the $10,000 tab every year for their daughter to go and study game design and 3D animation and be a gamer,” Abarca-Cantin noted. 
The studio’s most regular features are their Salons Femmes br@nchées, monthly show-and-tells that bring together new-media artists and enthusiasts from Montreal and beyond to present their work, in the process engaging each other and their audience in discussing new technologies. Recent salons have featured photographers, choreographers, and graphic artists who, by incorporating these technologies into their projects, have created intensely personal art with a level of interactivity previously unachievable. Last month’s “Celldance” presentation, for instance, demonstrated the potential for camera choreography to complement human dancers.

In addition to these salons, Studio XX has partnered with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in creating the First Person Digital project, aimed at developing emerging female talent. The studio received over 60 submissions for the project, to be narrowed down in the coming weeks to the six best proposals. These teams will collaborate over the next few months with Studio XX and the NFB, building partnerships with artists and tech experts to develop new approaches to multimedia storytelling. Their final products will be presented in November at the studio’s biannual HTMlles exposition, along with pieces from Digital Ludology – XX’s video game art project – and works that Abarca-Cantin calls “some of the best and most exciting” released over the last two years.

Quebec artist audrey samson was living in Rotterdam, the Netherlands when she first heard about Studio XX from a friend. “If you go back to Montreal, you should check this place out,” he told her. “It’s right up your alley.” Now samson is wrapping up a two-month residency with XX and preparing to present her latest work, “threads/,” this Friday at Compagnie F.

samson’s position is one of three eight-week residencies available at Studio XX, which include full studio access, work space, a modest stipend, workshop participation, and tech support valued at $1,125. Previous artist-in-residence Magali Babin describes “a sense of trust between [her] and the studio” that quickly developed during her residency.

samson has reaped benefits from her time at the studio, too. “There are always people working here, and you can always ask them questions and see what they’re working on,” she said. It also means access to presentations and exhibits she might “never be able to see otherwise.”

Her “threads/” project is a digital art installation with two interfaces, one physical and one virtual. In the gallery space, it takes the shape of an antique sewing machine table, complete with the original pedal. But where the machine would normally sit rests a computer keyboard, whose buttons control sewing machine sounds that are piped through the piece’s speakers. The pedal then acts as a crossfader which, when moved up and down, interweaves the sounds of the sewing machine with recordings of women discussing their relationship with technology. Online, the physical controls of samson’s installation are replaced by clickable images pulled from a Google search for “women and technology.”

samson had already completed a large portion of “threads/” when she came to the studio, but over these two months she has been able to “totally, entirely change it.” In part, this means women can now record their stories directly into the piece from the gallery space.

More drastically, though, samson has completely reprogrammed her piece. “The whole back end used to be built with proprietary software,” she said, but she’s used her time at XX to rewrite “threads/” using FLOSS – free/libre open source software – which encourages collaborative public development of the source code and makes licenses liberally available. 
Championing the use of FLOSS is one of Studio XX’s core objectives, and it’s also something samson believes in personally. “Ideologically speaking, it’s important to own the tools you’re working with,” she said. FLOSS has its practical implications for samson as well. Buying new software licenses for every new computer gets expensive, and for workshop students, “Telling people they have to buy $800 software to take your class…that’s not very accessible.” Accessibility and opportunity are ideals at the heart of Studio XX, which samson describes as a place “for women to come learn, but also to gain exposure and to work.” 
samson is more hesitant than Abarca-Cantin to talk about specific hurdles facing women. She shies away from words like “barriers,” preferring to avoid terminology that may portray women as victims. There are “many types of learning,” samson says. She likes the idea of women-only classes, where she has found students “to be generally more receptive to technical knowledge” than in co-ed environments.

Both women seem to agree on the importance of “providing opportunities for women…in an area (new media/technology) where women are by far the minority,” as samson put it in an email. This is the sentiment that has kept Studio XX running strong since its creation 14 years ago – two years before Google even existed – that guided it through the dot-com bust and the rise of social networking, and that will now pull the studio into the future as its artists continue to create innovative art incorporating the latest technologies – technologies Abarca-Cantin predicts will include Apple’s new iPad. “Oh, we’d love to play around with one of those!”

The post The XX factor appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Pédron is a UQAM graduate who described her video-dance projects as pioneering “virtual space as a new space for dance.” Her three short videos, Il était encore des fois, Strange Fruit, and Mémoire des choses qui tombent, represent three years of work that explores choreography not only as it relates to the female body, but also in the way it relates to the movement of the camera. In Strange Fruit, for instance, the dancer moves through fields and trees with camera in hand,  capturing her performance from a personal perspective rarely witnessed by audiences.

Clitandre has studied at UQAM, Concordia, the École de Design, and the Université Paris 8. Her work is centred around the ways we represent ourselves virtually, especially through the use of mobile technology. Clitandre was excited to share her video walking tours of Paris and Brooklyn, formatted to be played on an iPhone. On the Studio XX web site, Clitandre explains her desire to “infiltrate everyday spaces, leaving my trace via various mobile distribution supports.”

Both presentations exemplified digital media’s potential to be a platform for new directions in feminist artistic expression. The audience discussion each presentation prompted was evidence of the energy of this project, and the widespread interest in Montreal in its continuance.

The next Femmes br@nchées salon takes place on February 27 at Studio XX (4001 Berri). Visit studioxx.org for more details.

—Sheehan Moore

The post Techno feminism appeared first on The McGill Daily.