Atmosphere 2011 - Mediated Cities

Janine Marchessault (BA(Concordia), MFA, PhD (York)) is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications, 2005) and co-editor of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2007); Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (Routledge, 2000); and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 1999). She is a founding editor of the arts journal Public: Art/Ideas/Culture and a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada. As Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, Dr. Marchessault is investigating how the information society is redefining the artist's role and shaping urban contexts. Her work develops new research methods that use advanced media technologies to interpret the cultural ecologies of cities, with the ultimate goal of proposing new planning and policy strategies. She is director of the Visible City Project + Archive, which examines new practices of media art in a variety of urban contexts. She is co-investigator on York University's Future Cinema Lab, funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, a digital media research facility devoted to ‘new stories for new screens.’ She has two book projects in progress: Ecstatic Worlds: 20th Century Utopian Film Projects examines collective experiments with film and media driven by aspirations for universality; Urban Mediations: Art, Ethnography and Material Culture, which she is co-editing, situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies.