"To See or Not to See: Cyborgs, Veillance, and Materiality"

Provocations with:

• Chris Hables Gray (author of The Cyborg Handbook, Postmodern War, The Cyborg Citizen, and Peace, War and Computers, Cultural Studies of Science and Technology at the Univ of California)
• Caitlin Fisher (Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture and Director, Augmented Reality Lab, York University)
• Steve Mann, Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Technology & Society (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto)
• Suzanne DeCastell (Professor and Dean, Faculty of Education at UOIT)

Sponsored by the OISE Visiting Scholars Award, OISE Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education, Technoscience Research Unit, and Knowledge Media Design Institute

Pre-event readings:

• The Posthuman Condition "Cyborging the Posthuman: Participatory Evolution" in The Posthuman Condition, ed. by Wamberg, Jacob and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Aarhus, DK, Aarhus University Press, pp. 27-39, 2012.
• Existential Technology, Leonardo 36(1) pp19-25, 2003 (Recipient of the 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence)
• Through the Glass, Lightly, IEEE Technology & Society, 31(3), pp10-14, 2012
• Wearable Computing, A first Step Toward Personal Imaging, IEEE Computer 30(2), pp25-32, 1997

Pre-event musings:

• Caitlin: Pet Quadcopter
• Steve: Why I find Augmented Reality offensive, regardless of its alleged usage

Panelist Bios:

• Chris Hables Gray lectures at the University of California at Santa Cruz and California State University at Monterey Bay in Cultural Studies of Science and Technology. His particular interest is in how information technologies shape contemporary war and peace making and the politics of our ongoing cyborgization. His book publications include The Cyborg Handbook, Postmodern War, The Cyborg Citizen, andPeace, War and Computers, all with Routledge Press.
• Caitlin Fisher's primary research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments. Current research interests also include digital archiving, lifelogging, data visualization and experimental game structures for storytelling. Professor Fisher was awarded a Canada Research Chair in digital culture in 2004. She is a co-founder ofthe Future Cinema Lab , dedicated to the exploration of new stories for new screens, and director of the Augmented Reality Lab in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York. In the AR Lab, she is working to construct and theorize spatial narrative environments and build expressive software tools for artists.
• Steve Mann is widely recognized as "the father of wearable computing" and "the father of AR", a more than $200 billion industry. Mann is General Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, under the theme "Veillance: Wearable Computing and Augmediated Reality in Everyday Life". He is the inventor of he EyeBorg camera (Canadian Patent 2313693), http://wearcam.org/TheEyeborgMan.pdf, named one of the 50 best inventions of the year by TIME. He is also the inventor of the hydraulophone, a public water feature that is a fun and playful musical instrument similar to a woodwind instrument but using pressurized water instead of air. He has been featured by news organizations including AP News, New York Times, LA-Times, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, WiReD, NBC, ABC, CNN, David Letterman, CBC-TV, CBS, Scientific American, Discovery Channel, Reuters, Rolling Stone, and BBC. His award winning documentary cyborglog ShootingBack, and the ideas from his recent book "CYBORG: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer" (Randomhouse Doubleday, 2001) inspired a 35mm feature length motion picture film about his life (http://wearcam.org/cyberman.htm), "Canada's most important film of the year", according to POV.
• Suzanne DeCastell, Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, has published extensively on educational philosophy and theory, literacy and new media studies and technology, gender and digital game studies. Books she has co-edited include Literacy, Society and Schooling, Language, Authority and Criticism, Radical Interventions, and Worlds in Play. She is the founding President of the Canadian Games Studies Association, and is also the founder and continuing senior editor of its journal, entitled Loading. In 2000, she was the recipient of the Wired Woman Pioneer in Technology and New Media Award, Women in the Spotlight, and BC Research Partnership Award. In 2004 she was awarded the YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Education: Learning for Life. http://news.uoit.ca/archives/2012/04/uoit-announces-new-faculty-of-education-dean.php
• Megan M. Boler is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice in Education, OISE/University of Toronto; and Associate Faculty of Knowledge Media Design Institute. Her books include Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008) and DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media with Matt Ratto, (forthcoming 2013, MIT Press). She is the recipient of two major research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council: the first 3-year project, "Rethinking Media, Citizenship and Democracy: Digital Dissent after 9/11," used mixed-methods to examine the motivations of producers of "digital dissent". Her current funded 3-year project focuses on the intersection of social media and social movements, with focus on women activists' digital media practices are redefining participatory democracy.
  http://www.meganboler.net/
  Megan Boler, Associate Chair
  Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education
  OISE/University of Toronto