Conference that examines the intersection of Literature, Science and Art

An academic conference that examines the intersection where literature, art and science collide is taking place throughout downtown Kitchener.

Three hundred delegates from around the world are expected to converge on Kitchener when the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts holds its 25th annual conference Sept. 22 through Sept. 25.

The conference is hosted by the Critical Media Lab, a cross-disciplinary, research initiative co-founded by the English department and arts faculty at the University of Waterloo which develops new media projects that explore the impact of technology on society.

Marcel O’Gorman, the media lab’s director, said Kitchener beat out Washington, D.C. for the annual conference because of its partnership with the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA), which opens across downtown Kitchener on Friday and continues through Oct. 2.

The international conference and international biennial exhibition of art in public spaces are two of many arts-related events taking place throughout downtown Kitchener during the month of September.

Marketed under the banner of KitchenerON, the unique collaborative venture includes the International Multicultural Platform for Alternative Contemporary Theatre (IMPACT, Sept. 21-25), Kitchener Ontario Independent Music Festival (KOI, Sept. 17) and the Rethinking Art & Machine (RAM, Sept. 15-Jan 22) exhibition at the Themuseum.

In addition to KitchenerON, the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony launches its new season Saturday with a program of modern American composition.

Meanwhile, a couple of exhibitions, The Limits: Tracing Time and Seeing Space and We All Fall Down, open Sept. 23 at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Convergence, an exhibition of five site-specific works, opens Tuesday at the Communitech Hub in the Tannery.

O’Gorman confirms this is only the second time the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts has held its annual conference in Canada. It visited Montreal about 20 years ago.

It’s quite a coup for Kitchener considering the conference usually takes place in such locations as New York City, Indianapolis and Atlanta.

Unlike conventional academic conferences which are confined to university campuses or hotels, this conference will span the downtown area.

“It’s a city event,” asserts O’Gorman.

The conference will have eight panels running simultaneously with three or four speakers in each panel. The panels will be conducted at the Delta hotel, Themuseum, Artery gallery and Kitchener City Hall.

“Anything goes,” O’Gorman says in reference to the panel discussions, “They are diverse and kind of crazy. . . cornucopias of research interests and methods” spanning science, technology, anthropology, medicine, engineering, social sciences, humanities and the arts.

The conference’s two plenary speakers are Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers (Sept. 22, 7:30 p.m.) and French philosopher and Bernard Stiegler (Sept. 23, 7:30 p.m. The plenary lectures at Themuseum are open to the general public.

The conference includes a multi-media exhibition, Pharmakon, which will be held in the Critical Media Lab and adjacent Artery gallery, featuring 10 artists including Kitchener’s Paul Roorda in addition to Kiki Benzon, Brian Cantrell, David Clark, Alan Egan, Jennifer Gradecki, Brad Necyk, Stephen J. Oscherwitz, Aphrodisia, Maria Whiteman and Colleen Wolstenholme.

O’Gorman says the term pharmakon pertains to something that “both cures and kills;” for example, “nuclear radiation which is both a toxic element and a form of cancer treatmen  

Source: TheRecord.com