15-20 Minute Paper
Glen Lowry and M. Simon Levin,
Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Biographies
M. Simon Levin is a Sessional Lecturer within Critical and Cultural Studies and Dynamic Media at Emily Carr University and has published a curriculum on Contemporary Public Art and pedagogical insights on practice based research. He has been artist in residence for the Vancouver Parks Board, the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery and at the International Art Space, Kelleberrin, Australia.
Glen Lowry, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He has published widely on contemporary Canadian Literature and Culture—literature, photography, film, and television. A senior research in Emily Carr’s Social and Interactive Media Research Centre (SIM), Lowry focuses on new media platforms that link scholars, artists, and audiences across cultural and geographical distances.
Abstract
This co-authored 15-20min talk looks at Maraya (2007-2012), a multi-platform, collaborative visual art project and teaching platform. Taking its name from the Arabic for mirror or reflection, Maraya was designed as a vehicle for a multi-sited dialogue on the transformation of urban space in the 21st century. Maraya sets out to bridge the cultural divide between two sites separated by vast geographic and cultural differences: Vancouver, Canada and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. To this end, the Maraya team has drawn on research and expertise from artists, academics, and designers across a range of disciplines and institutional affiliations to help detail a creative critical description of a unique and emergent cultural landscape. As the project documents and contextualizes the movement of an increasingly popular urban form—high- density, residential urban waterfront real estate that was designed and marketed to wealthy off-shore investors interested in purchasing leisure properties—it provides an innovative means for both mapping an unfolding cultural space or a set of social spaces and speaking back to top-down urban planning.
Developing out of collaboration between cultural theorist (Lowry) and visual / media artist (Levin) and our recent experience of co-teaching a multi-cited (Vancouver, Comox, Dubai) course, this talk will focus on questions of student engagement and activation. The course in question was designed to challenge artificial distinctions between form and content. This hybrid, blended learning course was built around real-time dialogue across two dispersed Emily Carr communities. In keeping with the particular goals of its dual-sited nature, the course used the Maraya platform to provide opportunities for the students to collaborate across a mediated network and to use visual practice to help think through the problems / possibilities of online collaboration. This talk will focus on affordances provided by this type of dual-sited, collaborative approach and the challenges faced.