Tex(t)ech: A Collaborative Translation

Tex(t)ech is an interactive laboratory that will bring together artists, technologists, media practitioners and writers to translate across medias and mediums, work collaboratively and explore ideas of narrative, textual movement, performance and sound action.

Participants will undergo narrative and content development exercises, and have access to a variety of audio and visual equipment and facilities.  The emphasis will be on collaborative learning and exchange, facilitating professional and creative development.

The laboratory will run on Saturday March 5, 12 and 19, 10am-4pm (lunch break 1pm-2pm) and culminate in an evening performance in early April.

All participants must be prepared to work collaboratively with at least one other participant to produce pieces that are 5 minutes maximum in length. Those interested are invited to submit a two-to-three sentence description of their project ideas to Kurtis Lesick, kurtis.lesick@acad.ca, stating what type of work they wish to do and what type of media they wish to involve. The laboratory will partner up participants and projects and will explore a maximum of 10 projects.

Facilitated by Oana Avasilichioaei & Kurtis Lesick

Oana Avasilichioaei

Some of the strands in Oana Avasilichioaei’s work forage into geography, public space, textual architecture, multilingualism, translation, and collaborative performance. A collaborative book with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra, a dialogic work on authorial experiments and translational impossibilities, came out in 2009 (http://jacketmagazine.com/32/k-avas-moure.shtml). In 2008, Montreal artist Thierry Collins produced a short film based on Avasilichioaei’s feria: a poempark (http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=yQ11gBLPCWw). Avasilichioaei’s recent projects include transformations of text into performative, aural work, SPELLES (a chapbook/CD), The Islands (a translation of Les Îles by Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir, upcoming 2011), “The Mapping Issue” (co-edited with Kathleen Brown for Dandelion Magazine), and a traversal of the linguistic borders of Paul Celan’s early Romanian poems. Though she typically lives in Montreal, she is the current writer in residence at the University of Calgary.

Kurtis Lesick

Kurtis Lesick is an artist, writer, and creative consultant. His work integrates a background in philosophy, over ten years experience as an archaeologist and anthropologist in Canada, England, and Mexico, and blurs genres between writing painting, video, digital media (web, mobile, gaming), installation and performance. His work hinges on the exploration between the physical, tactile world and the creation of social knowledge focusing on fragmented narrative, immersive interactive experience and issues in historical process. Kurtis has worked with several leading organisations including Parks Canada, Canadian Heritage, National Film Board of Canada, Horizonzero.ca, Banff New Media Institute, and Union of BC Performers. He has spoken internationally on a variety of topics in social theory, cultural criticism, and philosophy, and has published on the materiality of gender, cultural resources in Canada, and prehistoric ‘design’.  Kurtis teaches in Media Arts + Digital Technology at the Alberta College of Art + Design and is the director of the Creative Environment for Emerging Electronic Culture (CE3C).

Presented by CE3C