Category: Conceptual Framing

  • Media ecology

    Media ecology is a field of study that looks at how technologies – including bio-technologies – relate perceptual systems to the world and, indeed, shape and are shaped by the perceptions, experiences and behaviors of those systems. The term was popularized by Neil Postman, who emphasized that media ecology involves the study of the role…

  • Umwelt

    The notion of Umwelt, developed by the biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll, is essential to understanding our approach to mosses. Umwelt, a German term that can be translated as “own world” or “perceptual environment”, refers to the specific set of meaningful relationships between an organism and its environment, as perceived and experienced by that…

  • Research creation

    Research-creation (R-C) is an academic approach that integrates artistic practices and theories into scientific processes to generate new knowledge. It lies at the intersection of creation and research, and mobilizes reflexive material practices to this end. This research modality is in the process of being institutionalized in institutions such as the Université de Montréal, and…

  • Conceptual and methodological framework

    CRITICAL MAKING RESEARCH CREATION UMWELT MEDIA ECOLOGY

  • Critical making

    Critical Making is a term originally popularized by Matt Ratto, which refers to methods that combine technical manipulation and fabrication with critical thinking. This approach considers that directly and practically manipulating technical objects is a form of thinking. Critical Making distances itself from approaches that focus solely on the instrumentalization of artefacts, by avoiding reducing…

  • Mosses

    Mosses are the residual scum, the thread memory rising from the moment their algal ancestors rose from the shores of a receding primordial ocean. Bryophytes, their scientific name, means what grows, multiplies and proliferates; from the Greek brúon, “moss”, and the verb brúo (as in embryo), to grow in abundance, to ferment, and phutón, “plant,…