Maria Lantin

Catherine Richards - Principle Investigator

Catherine Richards is a visual artist in old and new media art. Her work explores the volatile sense of ourselves as new information technologies shift our boundaries.

Her many international exhibitions include: Sydney Biennale, ISEA, A/V Festival, ACM SIGGRAPH, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, V2, The Banff Centre for the Arts, SPECTROPIA, National Gallery of Canada, ZKM.

Awards received include the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts prize; fellowships include the National Gallery of Canada; the unique residency AIRes at the National Research Council of Canada; grants include AT&T Canada and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology.

She is professor, Department of Visual Arts and University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa.

Maria Lantin - Co-investigator

Dr. Maria Lantin is the Director of Research at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. For many years she has been joining her love of Computing Science with her belief in the innovative potential of the arts. A circuitous route led her from obtaining her PhD in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University to leading the Visualization Research Lab at the Banff Centre’s Banff New Media Institute (BNMI). Working primarily in teams, she has had the joy of bringing to life many artist projects involving digital technology, and continues this practice at Emily Carr where the Intersections Digital Studios (IDS) provides an ample playground for experimentation.

She has been playing with stereoscopic 3D images and applications (both creative and applied) since 2000. Starting with Mainframe Entertainment where she worked on the first IMAX stereoscopic animation (that never made it to the big screen but was still amazing), to working on photogrammetry software at IDELIX Inc, to running a stereoscopic CAVE at the Banff Centre, she has been experimenting with S3D in many forms. Her interest is in experimental and interactive forms of media. She likes people that reconstruct things. Working with her immensely talented team at Emily Carr, she has had the privilege of building a Centre that is curious, investigative, and actively engaged with the local creative communities.

Maureen Matthews - Consultant

Maureen Matthews is the Curator of Ethnology at the Manitoba Museum. She is an anthropologist with a long journalistic background as an award winning CBC radio documentary maker. She has built her anthropological practice on journalistic projects centred around supporting native languages and speakers and has used audio to emphasize the value of native languages and the wisdom and humour of native speakers. Her theoretical work has a dual Ojibwe and anthropological focus bringing together strands of Ojibwe philosophical and metaphorical thinking with contemporary anthropological work on the nature of personhood and the animacy and agency of objects.

For the last three years, Maureen has been working at the Manitoba Museum developing collaborative exhibits about aboriginal issues in Manitoba, most recently “We Are All Treaty People” with the Treaty Relations Commissioner of Manitoba, James Wilson. Prior to working at the museum, Maureen prepared the academic papers which will be used to support a UNESCO World Heritage Site bid on the East side of Lake Winnipeg. The bid is the joint project of five native bands and two provincial parks andincorporates 4.3million hectares of intact boreal forest. Her work involves providing detailed evidence to back up the assertion that the Ojibwe people of the region have a uniquely valuable ecological and cultural relationship with their boreal forest homeland.