Hexagram forges ties in Europe
Hexagram, the Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies, has signed cooperation agreements with the University of London’s Goldsmith’s College and Rotterdam’s V2 Institute.
Rosemary Mountain, Scientific Research Director for Hexagram and Assistant Chair of Concordia’s Music Department, said these agreements are “the tip of the iceberg.” She expects more international partnerships in the coming months.
Hexagram is a consortium of more than 70 university artistic creators and researchers, over half of whom are based at Concordia. They work with 300 graduate students on multidisciplinary projects in the media arts.
The agreements will allow Hexagram and participants in the British and Dutch institutions to share research, funding, infrastructures and installations.
Mountain said the dozens of researchers involved in Hexagram have their own contacts in countries around the world. They will meet soon to decide which to pursue to develop similar partnerships to the ones just announced.
“All kinds of people want to collaborate with us,” Mountain said. Centres that share Hexagram’s multi-disciplinary approach will be given priority.
Goldsmith’s College explores research and creation in media technologies, and has recently added an MSc in Arts Computing to their program. The V2 Institute in the Netherlands was founded in 1981 and is dedicated to arts, technology and social studies.
These agreements will help Hexagram determine how to share and manage intellectual property in such partnerships. It’s an area that is unfamiliar to artists, so they need protocols.
In the interim, informal relations continue. Mountain said she was unable to participate when colleagues at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, recently extended an invitation. Instead, she suggested they work with dance professor and choreographer Michael Montanaro (see the story about him in this issue), another Hexagram researcher. He travelled there last month.
Hexagram has local and federal partners, including research foundations, government departments, public media and private partners like the Cirque du Soleil and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. It occupies facilities in Concordia’s EV building, at the corner of Ste. Catherine St. between Guy and MacKay Sts., and on the Loyola campus.