Network Investigator: Paula Gardner

Contact Information

• Associate Professor, Liberal Studies
• Ontario College of Art & Design OCAD
• mailto:[email protected]
• http://www.ocad.ca
• http://www.mobilelab.ca
• http://www.mobilelab.ca/portage
• http://www.mobilelab.ca/biomapping
• http://www.paulagardner.ca

GRAND Projects

• Confronting Pain Redefining Mobility
• Play And Performance In Game-Based Interfaces
• Digital Infrastructures

Biography

Paula Gardner, PhD, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Studies, OCAD, is a media, science and technology scholar and mobile experience art creator. Gardner has co-led two mobile art projects including: Portage, a Canadian Mobile Experience and Alter Audio, of the Mobile Digital Commons Network at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Gardner works in interdisciplinary teams including engineers, designers, artists and social scientists , in highly collaborative process, employing methods of iterative and participatory design, and critical ethnography. Her projects link a wide range of technology —sensors, servers, hardware and a range of communication devices—via varied forms of connectivity from SMS to Bluetooth, wifi and cell networks. These creations, deeply informed by critical theory, media studies, and science and technology studies craft unique forms of interaction, bridge the continuum between analogue and digital technologies, incite new forms of usage and new users and query subjectivity --particularly the relationship of subjects to public media technologies and augmenting technologies. Her most recent project, Portage; The Canadian Mobile Experience, created an mobile-interactive city “newsbox,” a range of musical instruments operated by varied analogue and digital means, and a 2-camera installation where motion is the film editing tool and bodies create film narratives in 3-d spaces but viewable on mobile phones. Gardner’s most recent project, Biomapping: mobile interventions in self-computation and spatial aesthetics allows subjects to map their perspective and bodily data, intervene in its processing algorithm, and then compute a map of self via 2-D or 3-D map forms.

Gardner’s most recent published work addresses the gendering of depression through online advertisements and promotions (Canadian Journal of Communication), practices of subjectivity and social interaction made possible via mobile art (Together Elsewhere; anthology), and mobile methodologies and aesthetics (Interpraxis, anthology). She is currently completing a book on the topic of risk, democracy and depression, and a documentary film on the American asylum policy since 9/11/01. Her work can be found at paulagardner.ca, http://www.mobilelab.ca/alteraudio/mdcn.html, and mobilelab.ca/portage.