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s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Nonsense Lab was dubbed the
unofficial name of the studio space that hosted Sean Smith for the
inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western
Ontario’s Department of Visual Arts during 2011-2012. The title is a
tongue-in-cheek homage to the Sense Lab, a program space for
research-creation founded by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in
Montreal. This blog originally documented Sean’s engagement with
students in the elective Visual Arts course “Toward a Kinoderm
Aesthetics,” other activities and initiatives with the UWO and
broader London communities while in residence during the fall 2011
semester, and progress on work for the exhibition D S NFORMAT ON:
Threnody from the Vision Machine, held January 12-26, 2012 at the
ArtLAB Gallery, John Labatt Visual Arts Centre. Today it continues to
share emergent processes with various networked communities, as well
as offering a rough curatorial exercise of inspiring artworks that
engage similar thematic trajectories. Much of Sean’s current work
emerges from the Department of Biological Flow, his ongoing
experimental dialogue of research-creation with Barbara Fornssler.
Spanning performance, installation, text, image, poetry and motion
capture, their consideration of biological flow develops processes to
a state at which they have just ceased to be fragile enough for
one’s imagination to take over and build upon the framework. While
the focus of their practice often concerns the aesthetics and politics
of surveillant optics in urban spaces, they also intend to bring a
more multisensory approach to their processes of research-creation –
along with generous helpings of humour.