Montreal Cultural Calendar

w/ Dr. Meredith Bak, Dr. Caetlin Benson-Allott, and Pat Bonner. Respondant: Dr. Haidee Wasson. As film moves to television and television to our pockets, the material conditions of everyday media consumption appear once again to have changed. But not only are past and present media practices more varied, unpredictable, and historically-rooted, they also challenge the (still dominant) visual-centricism of spectatorship studies. Indeed, our sensory experiences (of sound, touch, smell, etc.) are shaped and stimulated by diverse material forms, emotional attachments, and expressive rituals. Drawing on cultural history, media archaeology, and ordinary media stuff, this panel reconsiders the present focus on smartphones, social media and streaming by exploring transformations in material media cultures since the 1980s: toy voice devices, comfort viewing, and interactive video. Together, these talks examine the cultural politics of media consumption in recent decades. Presentations: Meredith Bak - Talking Back: Mediating the 90s Child's Voice; Caetlin Benson-Allott - The Material Culture of Comfort Viewing; Pat Bonner - Video Kids: How Home Video Transformed (Canadian) Children's Television

Third presentation of the Design & Computation Arts Speaker Series featuring Zherui Wang. Zherui Wang is a designer and building technology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. His work focuses on devising architectural methods for cooling and climate-response design for extreme heat while being mindful of material use. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E program, his PhD research explores the design integration of structural form-finding and building thermal mass performance, informed by architectural geometry, materials science, and life cycle thinking. He is a co-author of Hydroculus, an evaporative and radiative cooling roof prototype that was exhibited in the Venice Architecture Biennale and received a Holcim Foundation Award for Sustainable Design and Construction. Previously, Wang was an Academic Professional Researcher at CHAOS Lab in Princeton. He has practiced in design roles at Barkow Leibinger Architects and served on the design faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt Institute, and State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was named the 2020-21 Reyner Banham Fellow. Wang holds a BArch from Pratt Institute, a post-professional MArch from Princeton University, and a graduate certificate in Energy Policy from the Penn Kleinman Center.