A co-institutional lab at York and Queens Universities, The Peripheral Visions Co-lab specializes in collaborative research creation at the intersection of critical theory and media arts worldmaking. Our diverse, creative team includes faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and community members. Our work is supported by a tool library with computers, mirrorless and 360 cameras, green screen, vr headsets, sound equipment, ipads with 3D scanning, and costumes. Our goals are to:
- mobilize the powerful frameworks of Indigenous, crip, queer and feminist thought, together with experiential, embodied, and land-based knowledge, to address critical problems related to social justice, colonialism and the environmental crisis
- Engaged in nuanced, critically informed storytelling that centres perspectives that have historically been marginalized
- Work collaboratively with marginalized communities to amplify their stories and voices
- train highly qualified personal to mobilize the tools of media arts in storytelling for social change that is both grass roots and theoretically informed.
Led by Mary Bunch, Canada Research Chair in Vision, Disability and the Arts (York), and Dolleen Tisawii’ashi Manning, Queens National Scholar of Indigenous Knowlege, Language and Culture, our co-lab is affiliated with Sensorium, a research centre for creative inquiry and experimentation at the intersection of the media arts, performance, and digital culture at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, and with VISTA, a $22M collaborative program funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund that expands and integrates the potential of visual neuroscience, computer vision, arts and humanities to tackle 21st Century challenges, as well as Queen’s University’s Cultural Studies Program and Department of Philosophy.