Research Library

The Open Ears Festival 2018 featured a Triple Bill curated by Ben Grossman with performers: Ballantyne/Harms Duo, Sound of the Mountain, and Nakamura/Taxt Duo, about their practice and the role of improvisation in their work.

Drawing on the theoretical and philosophical discourses of Jane Bennett, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi and Timothy Morton, Teresa Connors proposes a series of thinking-in-the-making moves that considers the use of computer vision and data mining as co-creative and emergent devices within non-linear audiovisual installations.

Currents is one of several interactive audiovisual installations in development by IICSI postdoc Teresa Connors that explores the environment of Newfoundland. Emerging from a meshwork of materials that includes ocean data-sets, live streamed wind data, a heart rate monitor and audiovisual material captured off the east coast of Newfoundland, Currents combines these expressive actants to explore nonlinear processes within an immersive experience.

Video documenation of THE CROSSINGS PROJECT – a community music and multi-media event and performed to a sold-out audience in Guelph on Saturday evening, May 26, 2018. The intention of this endeavour was to tell the story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (approximately 1526 – 1867) and the subsequent establishment of a Black community in Guelph, Ontario.

IICSI Researchers, Kevin McNeilly, Sara Villa, Rob Wallace, and Paul Watkins specializing in the intersections of music and words gathered at the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium 2018 to discuss the synergetic relationship of improvised music making and poetic composition.

In Why I’m Here, director João França provides a glimpse into a magical world where musicians of diverse ages and abilities come together in an inclusive and supportive environment to explore the possibilities of improvisational collaborations.

Watch the highlights of Wolf Lake Tones – a night of improvisational exploration of the interconnection between the human and the non-human, between language and the environment that happened May 18, 2018 at Silence in Guelph.

On May 18, 2018 at Silence Guelph, poets Madhur Anand, Gary Barwin, and Phil Hall were joined by musicians David Lee (double bass), and Georgia Urban (saw), as well as singers Megan De Roover, Shannon Kingsbury, Brian Lefresne, Liane Miedema, Sue Smith, and Carey West (all as voices of birds), for an improvisational exploration of the interconnection between the human and the non-human, between language and the environment.

A short video documenting the culminating performance of the 2018 Guelph and Cambridge Drum Clubs, directed by Richard Burrows and in partnership with KidsAbility.

How do we engage with these dissonances or alterities in our expectations?
How do we, as facilitators and pedagogues, resist a more utilitarian urge to maximize what might appear to be group agreement in the space, at the cost of the outliers? Might we, as guides through these spaces, have an obligation to address these outliers in these moments of tension?
And, what does this teach us about our facilitative practice and how we approach difference?