Video: Ali Shamas Qadeer, Lecture (LOL)
On Monday, December 2, 2019 at 7pm, Plug In ICA and School of Art, Graphic Design at the University of Manitoba presented The browser as…, a lecture by Ali Shamas Qadeer as part of Labour of Love: On Digital Economies in the Arts, a series of lectures, screenings, and workshops.
The browser is a canvas, a window, a building, a forest, a swamp, a desert, an undersea network, a security camera, a prison cell, a book, a placard, a road sign, a printer, an everything. Shamas Qadeer’s talk addressed the backstory and possibility of the web browser as a medium for making things and intervening in others.
Ali Shamas Qadeer is a designer and educator based in Toronto. He works in web, print, and web and print. After completing a BA in philosophy and religious studies at McGill University, he developed an independent design practice in New York City before returning to school to complete an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. His work focuses on algorithmic formmaking, unorthodox toolmaking, and the disciplinary and economic structures that design practices buttress. After returning to Canada in 2014, Ali joined the faculty of OCADU where he is an Assistant Professor in the graphic and industrial design programs. In his teaching practice, Ali champions a critical approach that always refracts through a practice of formalism and making.
Labour of Love or LOL took the “public course” as a platform for engagement, a program highlighting the various ways in which the digital is interrogated, explored, celebrated, pushed to its limit, reworked, re-invented by artists, scholars, curators, writers and others. LOL encompassed a full array of events, delving into such topics as coding, circuit bending, VR, AI and AR, gaming, scanning, and 3D printing. Divided into two streams, a lecture and screening series, and workshops, Labour of Love at its most general examined the relationship between the economics of labour and the digital arts as it contends with the conditions of racial capitalism. As a research platform, we aimed to build an understanding of the digital by presenting artists who invent new trajectories through various technologies.
All lectures and screenings are free and open to the public.
Associated Programming:
Labour of Love: On Digital Economies in the Arts
This program was made possible through the Digital Strategy Fund: Digital and Intelligence by the Canada Council for the Arts.