Sabbatical Talks: Dr. Bill Leeming & Dr. Cindy Poremba

Please join us for presentations by Dr. Bill Leeming and Dr. Cindy Poremba highlighting the innovative work and research they’ve accomplished during their recent sabbaticals. 

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

3:00-5:00

MCC 525

113 McCaul Street

Cindy Poremba:

Capture Matters: Postmedia and the Real Image

In their post-sabbatical presentation, Cindy will offer a preview of their manuscript-in-progress: Capture Matters: Postmedia and the Real Image. The holographic recording, the mocap performance, the in-game photograph, the deepfake-- all involve elements that appear captured from the actual world. But they are complex images, combining “created” and “captured” processes that are traditionally understood as distinct. Across all forms of digital media, representational modalities are rapidly converging, mutating into hybrid forms where it is impossible to untangle recorded, synthesized and constructed elements. But despite this destabilization, capture persists. From immersive documentary to cinematic videogames, creators maintain a vested interest in the affordances of capture, and emerging practices take advantage of capture’s new transformability. Capture has found new ways to instance itself within digital postmedia contexts, motivated by rhetorical currents we still find compelling. But in doing so, it has become a multiplicity of captures, assembled within distinct creative contexts each enacting capture in their own way. Capture Matters looks at the new ways capture comes to matter, using new materialist rhetoric to tease out the ways in which the entities evoked by capture are used to do powerful, playful, provocative, and sometimes problematic things. It invites creators and audiences to envision capture in radically new ways— not only to create new forms of hybrid capture, but as part of an essential renewal of our relationship with captured images.

Biography:

Cindy Poremba is an Associate Professor in Digital Futures at OCAD University (Toronto/Tkaranto), and Co-Director of OCAD’s game:play Lab. Dr. Poremba has written and presented extensively on topics relating to game art and curation, capture in postmedia practices, and interactive documentary. They have maintained an experimental gamemaking and curatorial practice for almost two decades with a particular interest in captured media practices, and emerging technologies. Their award-winning game, curation, and “New Arcade'' work (independently and as a member of the kokoromi collective), has been featured in both game and digital art exhibitions internationally.

Bill Leeming:

On Shaping Expectations of Life with Endemic COVID-19 and Other “New Normals” 

Talk Description: Three years ago, I published a paper in a topical collection of the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. The journal had solicited proposals for questions about the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic for ongoing study by historians and philosophers of the life sciences. My contribution compared the use of the term “new normal” as a rhetorical figure of speech in reports and analyses of policy announcements during the pandemic with some earlier uses of the term concerning other attention-grabbing events associated with the consequences of anthropogenic environmental misuse (e.g., extreme hydrology, climate variability) and a wide range of inegalitarian social arrangements (e.g., systemic racism, widening gaps between the rich and the poor). Two years later, during my sabbatical, I set about exploring: (1) how new normals seemed to be converging to produce impressions that we were reaching tipping points and, in some cases, points of no return and (2) how then current approaches to looking at normalcy were limiting what we could expect of the future. One year later and owing to the research and writing done during my sabbatical, I realize that I, like so many other academics, had mistakenly thought about the spread of COVID-19 only in terms of being a pandemic. This line of thinking has generally been premised on the idea that epidemics and pandemics come and, sooner or later, go. But now we are having to come to terms with the current medico-scientific understanding that COVID-19 has transitioned to endemic disease status. And while it is now commonplace to speak of the COVID-19 pandemic as being over, medical science is announcing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to have become a well-established contagion to be monitored and treated in similar ways to a variety of other seasonal respiratory illnesses.

In this talk, I will use Mieke Bal’s idea on the movement and migration of “travelling concepts” to show how models and images of the SARS-CoV-2 virus “travelled” from science to everyday life in ways that, I will argue, successfully helped us to live with the virus during the pandemic. I will then talk about how different conceptions of new normals are now competing to shape our expectations of what our future will look like. This is a competition which both includes and downplays endemic COVID-19 as a new normal. Furthermore, if time permits, I will talk about how my current research on new normals is influencing new lines of my research and what I am thinking, since recently turning 70, about design for “aging in place” in an age of extreme hydrology, climate variability and other new normals.

Biography:

Bill Leeming is a longstanding member of the OCA, OCAD and OCAD University community, with an AOCA (1977) and teaching for over 40 years (since 1983). After receiving his BFA (NSCAD, 1979) he worked for more than a decade in varying aspects of the printing industry. With the coming of the “Desktop Revolution,” he decided to pursue studies in technology adoption at the graduate level in the Sociology Department of York University. After completing his MSc (1992), Bill went on to complete a PhD (1997) on medical specialization of medical imaging technologies in Medical Genetics in Canada. He then went on to do post-doctoral studies at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester comparing patterns of specialty formation in Medical Genetics between Canada and the UK (2001-2003). After the formation of the Social Science stream (SOSC) at the then newly established OCAD University, he moved from teaching in the Faculty of Art to take on a tenured position in what is today called the Faculty of Arts & Science. Since 2021, he has also been teaching in Design for Health at the graduate level. 

Bill now lectures in a range of subject areas including the social sciences, science & technology studies, and methods. His research of the last twenty years has mostly focused on technology adoption in science and technology. But most recently, he has taken on additional research interests regarding the influence of “new normals” on the dynamics of design for “aging in place.” His writings have been widely published in an assortment of refereed journals including Public,Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social History of Medicine, Social Science Information, and Science Communication. Financial support for his research has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine.