BLUE Research Gallery
a sampling of BLUE research through the years
Adam Ghadi-Delgado
Unbuilding manifesto and design proposal
This research project is a proposal to look at destruction (not deconstruction) as a form of architecture and as a form of place-making, as a tool to make.
Rasha Lama
B21 Spatial Design Plan: narrate the creative process through space
Our community is growing, which means more shoes by the door and whiteboards full of ideas. With more gatherings, we’re starting to feel like we’re “running out of space.” The issue is not physical space but useable space. How do we maximize our space’s potential to gather more people while letting the space express ourselves? This is the intention for the spatial design project: craft a story through our space about the people brought together by B21’s creativity, innovation, and exploration.
Adela Kwok
"NATURE": Made by Man
My project seeks to bridge the distance between humans and nature using an experimental film format. The film will aim to convey that this gap is man-made and has been maintained, for the most part, to feed capitalistic needs. People living in urbanized societies have popularized certain symbols to associate with nature. These symbols are socialized through the media we consume, the political parties in power and through the marginalization of alternative views. This, in turn, leads to the construction of a cognitive image regarding a nature that already contains pre-conceived requirements (ex. green, trees, birds etc.). This is important because the way we conceive nature directly affects our agency and response to environmental cues. Film is a good way to explore this topic because it is equal parts exposition and exploration. Through film, we can construct the same configuration of nature we see today and deconstruct them at the same time to reveal their fictionalization and biases. This leaves room for alternative understandings of nature as well as the marginalized communities that support them.
Cassiel Moroney
Moodscape: Topographies of Emotion in Virtual Reality
The aim of the project was to develop a virtual reality application that would generate a dynamic landscape in response to the player’s emotional input. In part it was proposed as a technical challenge, to explore the capability of current technology to measure emotion. It also was meant to produce a final product that could serve at once as art installation, cathartic echo chamber, and emotion-directed gameplay.
Jason Blakeburn
Representing Nothing: Virtual Reality and Plato’s Chôra
Opening Scene – Above an endless seascape surrounded by dark storm clouds. The camera begins a slow descent. You hear the sound of waves growing louder as you descend. A voice begins to recite the tone poem Speaking the Chôra.
Second Scene – You drop through the ocean into a grey space. The ocean above you. Hints of cloud around you. Still descending. The waves turn to droplets. You pass through a sphere. A black box looms beneath you.
Third Scene – You fall into a black box. The droplets turn into the sound of cicadas thrumming. White lines react to your movement, creating odd geometries. As you descend, a surface comes into view. 2 mirrors and between them a projection surface, showing a live video feed of you in real life wearing your VR headset. The mirrors capture the image of the real, warping it into a mise en abyme, an infinite recursion.
Eloïse Chakour
An Exploration of Higher Dimensional Objects
In order to develop a framework in which to gain a more intuitive understanding of the objects with more than three spacial dimensions, a ratio β was defined and computed for the three n-dimensional regular polytopes, as well as for various radially symmetric objects. A closed-form expression for β was found for all objects. From this, it was found that the number of dimensions of a shape can be determined from only this β and the general geometry of an object. Therefore, it was possible to redefine a dimension in terms a single quantity, which depends only on two lengths. A possible relationship between β and the symmetries of various families of shapes was suggested and explored, but has not been proven.
Cecilia Dong
Sensorial Visualization in Virtual Reality
The aim of this project is to create an immersive experience of synaesthesia that bridges the gap between people’s visual and auditory sensation. With the ability to ‘see the shape’ and ‘feel the texture’ of the music while listening, I would like to share this amazing experience with other people.
Morgan Sweeney
Magic of the Mind Podcast
Learn about your mind through fantasy stories and conversations with female scientists! Part 1: The Fantasy Story. Each episode follows the story of Eve, a sixteen-year-old scribe traveling the Forgotten Realms of Dungeons and Dragons in search of a place to call home. Written into the plot of each episode is a different topic in cognitive science, that is explored in detail in Part 2. Part 2: The Interview Released simultaneously with developments in the fantasy story are interviews with female scientists who study the topics explored in each episode. In the interviews, the writer explains the theories she wove into the narrative, and the scientists expand on what these look like in the real world.
Matthew Morvan
Modelling Memories for Change
My project starts with the intuition that as evoked in song lines, memories have flexibility and direction. We see memories as images scarred by the passage of time, continually rewriting new versions of past events to explain and suit the interests of the present. A desire to anchor what is fatally in motion, the desire to possess the presence of what is forever absent, willfully constructing a suspension of disbelief which will forge the illusion of reality from a stream of immobile representations. “Atemporal photography” stitched together with a soundtrack - static drawings labeled with a narrative.
Patrick S Timmer
Idiosyncrasies of Us
I entered this fellowship with the urge to do or make something; this was my non-negotiable, the anchor for my project. My initial proposal was to make a short film where several people took turns sitting in front of a camera, doing nothing, for a challenging period of time. This was an intuited idea (one that “comes to you” fully formed). I was quickly confronted with the limitations of film and other media, as well as the difficulty of resolving terms such as ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ in terms of human behavior. In an attempt to transcend these issues I intuited the idea that was eventually realized on 7 July 2020 as the in-person facilitation. After conceiving of this facilitation I was faced with the necessity of articulating the idea and its contents to the Building 21 community, a task that I was not quite adept at accomplishing. From here on my fellowship became an inquiry into how to accomplish such a task, turning my investigation to the nature of intuited ideas and the creative act, as well as the act of differentiating the contents of an intuited idea. To achieve this end I compiled my complete, unedited journals made during over the course of the fellowship, totaling seventy-seven pages, into a document alongside an introductory essay.
Bior Ajak
Refugees of the Future
My project started as a study of the refugee settlement and management policy in Kenya. The goal was to explore the idea of reinventing refugee settlements to become centers of social, economic and financial freedoms for the refugees. Refugee camps in Kenya, for a long time since their establishment, have had refugees depend on aid and handouts from donors, the United Nations and partners. One generation after another, the refugees have been living on food rationing, with little to no room for development of human resources as essential capital. This is in addition to the harsh climatic conditions in which refugee camps are set up that hinders crop cultivation and self-reliant agriculture. Dependency of any kind is not sustainable and therefore, even though the refugees are not in physical harm in the camps, they are not free to determine their economic and financial freedoms. This is what I refer to as a limbo state, a perpetual state between fear and freedom.
Cordelia Dingle
Montreal 2070: What does a post-consumption urban-system look like?
First, we must define what we mean by design, second, we must define what we mean by post-consumption, and third, we have to define what we mean by urban-system. Design, according to the Oxford dictionary, is the general arrangement of the different parts of something that is made. How do we want to arrange our city? What values do we hold that will affect the blue-print? Does good design increase human empathy? The adjective ‘post-consumption’ (as in post-consumption school, post-consumption workplace, etc.) is the idea that in the future, to follow the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report guidelines and the recommended trajectories, we must decrease our consumption in many sectors. It’s much more complicated than that, but yet the simple reality that growth cannot be unlimited on a closed-system like Earth feels ignored by policy-makers and government officials. This is disheartening to regular citizens who feel that they have simply become a number, customer #456723445. The goal is that by 2070 the hierarchy flattens to allow for community agency.
Helen Tucker
Experiencing Relevance: A Spatial Exploration of Treaties in Ontario
My project began with a question put to me last summer, in the context of an Indigenous cultural awareness exercise at my workplace. The moderator asked us – a group of law students specializing in Indigenous issues – to think about what benefits we, as non-Indigenous Canadians, derive from historic treaty relationships. This was a new way of thinking about Crown-Indigenous treaties. When we think of treaties at all, we tend to regard them as purely historical contracts, or as deals which were unfair to begin with, or at least as only benefitting the Indigenous parties who most frequently resort to the courts to enforce their treaty rights. The relevance of historic treaties to current issues seems negligible. Nonetheless, all of the land in Ontario is subject to historic treaties formed between the Crown and Indigenous peoples between the late-18th and early-20th centuries, and for many members of the Indigenous nations who entered into these treaties, they continue to have great spiritual and legal significance. Rather than representing outdated contracts, treaties are symbols of what was meant to be a mutually beneficial relationship of coexistence. In light of the tragic ways in which the relationship went wrong, this relational view of treaties is being revisited by legal scholars as one pathway towards reconciliation. With this relational approach to treaties in mind, I undertook my work for Building 21 with the intent of using that question – how do we, as non-Indigenous Canadians, benefit from historic treaties – to investigate ways of raising awareness of treaties and their ongoing significance.
Lauren Jelinek
Blurry Cities: the perception and place of refugee camps in an urban world
My project started with looking at how urban planning fits, or how it could fit, into refugee camp-cities, which are large-scale refugee camps with urban characteristics. By the end, it resulted in an exploration into why it is that we don’t even think of urban planning in refugee camps, and why they exist as these urban spaces that are not often treated like or perceived like the other urban spaces we know. There is a disconnect between how one views refugee camp-cities and cities like Montreal – however, they both contribute to the wider world, and they have their own complex inputs, outputs, and networks. Through the progression of these ideas, I decided to label refugee camps as blurry cities, and to discuss what this term even means.
Alyssa Coghlin
Tides Between Bodies: empathy, (ex)change and trusting the moving process
My exploration of the empathetic interplay within therapeutic relationships was paved by gathering and wandering; a journey of mapping the connections, intimacies, intricacies and images of inter and intra-actions. I experimented with gesture and movement practices to understand the wholistic complexities of empathy, and I found myself on a wildly tangential and intricately intertwined exploration of my own self in a moving process.
