Maritime Inter-disciplinary Arts Seminar MIDAS Webinar-FR and SJ

Event Details:

The Maritime Inter-disciplinary Arts Seminar (MIDAS) Webinar will feature Dr. Heidi MacDonald and Dr. Dann Downes - UNB Saint John.

Late 19th century Women’s Suffrage Agitation in the Maritimes and Newfoundland - Dr. Heidi MacDonald 
To date, the only regional approach to women’s suffrage is the chapter in Catherine Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, first published in 1950. Cleverdon claimed, “Nowhere has the traditional conservatism of the Maritime Provinces been more apparent than in the securing of political rights for women (156)." Part of why Cleverdon and some other historians have described the suffrage movement in Atlantic Canada as lacklustre and conservative is because they emphasize the immediate years before most women obtained suffrage in Nova Scotia in 1918, New Brunswick in 1919, PEI in 1922, and in Newfoundland in 1925. This paper argues that a greater emphasis should be placed on the late 19th century campaign in each province. Such an emphasis would demonstrate the intensity of the movement. 

Bespoke, Communal and Virtual: Circuit-bending as Creative Practice and Social Inquiry - Dr. Dann Downes
This paper outlines a program of research creation I have been developing over seven years of experimentation in DIY music and electronics. In particular, I am interested in the complex relationships between amateur, professional and academic participants in Do-It-Yourself/Do-It-Together communities and the ways that home-made musical devices lead to cultural and commercial ends.
The presentation will be organized the three sections. First, the notion of reductive, circuit bent musical devices will be explored in relation to what Coudry and Hepp call the materiality of communication and I have described as interactive realism. Second, the process of researching communities of circuit-benders, experimental musicians and sound artists requires a level of engagement that forces one to rethink the embeddedness and ethical collaborations necessary for a sufficiently coherent and robust ethnographic treatment.
Finally, the very idea of circuit-bending as a contrast to the mass-produced, the digital and the complex requires a “pivot” in the Covid period when workshops, festivals and live performances are impractical, if not impossible. I will conclude with an example of a recent work that reroutes the circuit-bend and takes the role of the human in electronic music online.

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