As part of our annual lunchtime media arts lecture series at the BC, we are happy to confirm Andrea Zeffiro for November 4th, 2013. Zeffiro is a researcher and writer whose work intersects the cultural politics and practices of emerging technologies, contemporary media histories, feminist media studies, and multidisciplinary research methods. Over the last 10 years, Zeffiro has worked as an ethnographer within a number of transdisciplinary research formations alongside artists, designers, social scientists, computer scientists, engineers, and medical doctors. She holds a Doctorate in Communication Studies from Concordia University, and from 2011-2012, she was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Interactive Arts + Technology, Simon Fraser University. Prior to her academic pursuits, Zeffiro spent a number of years drafting and implementing garment-purchasing policies for the public sector while channeling her creative energies towards AMBUSH: a line of clothing designed and created from second hand garments.
Locative Praxis
My talk will focus on mobile artivist practices, specifically the manner in which artists have adopted mobile communication devices as tools not only for interaction, but also reaction, that is, as instruments to facilitate political and cultural dissent. I will use the occasion to workshop what I have termed ‘locative praxis’: a conceptual framework that articulates a politicized dimension of experimental and location-based media production through which the dialectic of practice and reflection, at the intersection of social action and intent, can further an understanding of the spatial and socio-political dimensions of a space/place.
Andrea Zeffiro will be speaking from 11:30am to 12:30pm, in the ATLAS building, room 311.