McGill's Building 21: Thinking beyond the acknowledged, the recognized and the comfortable.: Recent Episodes
Building 21
McGill’s Building 21 is an experiment in a new way of learning.
From quantum physics to poetry; from neuroscience to geography; from philosophy to immersive realities; from the microcosm to the campus, Building 21 is a space where one can explore, play with, manipulate, bend, break and probe the multi-faceted aspects and dimensions of ideas, knowledge and thinking.
www.building21.ca
Every story need a listener. Going from personal trauma healing to building a more peaceful and just society.
In March, we had the pleasure of a talk from Michael Lapsley, founder of the Institute for Healing of Memories in South Africa. Here we present the introduction of his talk; for the whole event, including questions from students, please visit our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxtHb7K3bPw
On March 27, 2024, Michael Lapsley visited us at B21. Here is the partial recording of his talk with our students -- if you'd like to hear students' questions, check out the full video recording on our YouTube channel.
Every story needs a listener. Going from personal trauma healing to building a more peaceful and just society.
The Institute for Healing of Memories (IHOM) seeks to contribute to
lasting individual and collective healing that makes possible a more
peaceful and just future.
Since the 1990s, they have facilitated workshops and events that enable
people from different racial, religious and social backgrounds to reach
a better understanding of themselves and of each other.
Their work has grown out of South Africa’s unique history and our need
to remain attentive to how our divided past can impact on us both
individually and as communities and as a nation.
They believe that when personal stories are heard and acknowledged,
individuals feel healed and empowered and dignity is restored; at the
same time, bridges can be built across communities and a common path
forged based on mutual understanding and shared values.
In part 1 of this series, we discussed what it means for a human to grow up. But we're not the only organisms who develop and grow older. And some of the others have much more extreme changes in their lives than even the most awkward of adolescences.
Dr. Morgan Jackson and Viola H. Ruzzier discuss insect development, memory, and what growing up means for this very different group of beings.
"All children, except one, grow up."
Thus begins the book Peter Pan, the story of the only boy who never grows up. But for the rest of us, what does that term mean, exactly? At what point have you grown sufficiently "up" to be considered an adult? What does the process entail? Is it a good thing or a bad thing (or both)?
Thank you to Souren Vahdatfarimani and Paul Yachnin for their insightful thoughts on the subject.
In many ways, our lives are entirely dependent on others, both human and non-human. We constantly interact with coworkers, friends, partners, family, and complete strangers. But how exactly do all these different relationships affect us?
Listen to what B21 community members Shuting Wang, Arkana Fuentes-Pilafidis, Nakiya Noorbhai, and Viola H. Ruzzier think about the importance of others in the first B21 podcast episode of the year.
The idea of a soul, of the intangible something that makes up a person, has existed for millennia. But souls aren't confined to people -- we talk about soulful food, soulful music, soulful art, and we can describe both people and inanimate things as soulless.
But are we referring to the same concept every time we say the word "soul"? Is one person's definition different from everyone else's? How do religion and spirituality play into this? Can souls outlive people?
Join operatic tenor and McGill professor John MacMaster, archaeology student Katrina Kosyk, and B21 program assistant Viola H. Ruzzier for a fascinating discussion on the soul.
La question du sublime se pose depuis des milliers d'années. Nous le cherchons dans les paysages, les arts, les mathématiques. Nous le trouvons entre la beauté et la peur, le connu et l'inconnu.
Mais qu'est-ce que le sublime, exactement? Quand peut-on le ressentir? Peut-on en faire l'expérience ou simplement l'entrevoir? Réside-t-il à l'intérieur ou à l'extérieur de nous?
Rejoignez une discussion sublime et animée avec Ève-Marie Marceau, Antoine Poulin, Sarah Ambroise, et Viola H. Ruzzier, pendant laquelle nous essayerons de décortiquer ce sentiment vertigineux.
Welcome to Part 1 of our new miniseries, Matterless Matters! In this series we'll be discussing matters that maybe don't matter too much, but are fun and surprisingly deep anyway.
This first episode will ask the following crucial questions: Are mermaids fish or mammals? Why do zombies need to eat, given that they're already dead?
You can find the written version at https://building21.ca/matterless-matters.
Narrated by Dr. Maria Morrison, German professor at McGill University.
How do we define language? What is the difference between language and other types of communication? Is music a language? How does language shape our way of thinking? Join us for this follow-up to one of our latest I'm Not Sure discussions.
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "alien"? Is it something threatening? Something unknown? Something different? Join us along with Prof. Samuele Collu and Vincent Laliberté to dive into this surprisingly ancient question.
What if there were no cars in cities? What if we used hypothetical questions to solve real problems? What if asking these questions made us happier, more empathetic people? Join us for a thoughtful celebration of two of the most freeing words in the English language: "what if?"
Jion us for a in-depth discussion on what creates rich and beautiful learning environments.
David Peña-Guzman is Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. In his latest book, When Animals Dream, Dr. Peña-Guzman wonders whether humans are the only dreamers on Earth. What goes on in the minds of animals when they sleep? When Animals Dream brings together behavioral and neuroscientific research on animal sleep with philosophical theories of dreaming. It shows that dreams provide an invaluable window into the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals, giving us access to a seemingly inaccessible realm of animal experience.
Radical Futures: Foundations for a Better World will not explore solutions, since solutions already exist. Instead, it will ask: what are the conditions we must create for humanity to change and adapt? What foundations, what values and beliefs, could be at the heart of a better society? In the second part of this podcast, we discuss one particular foundation which has been at the heart of recent Radical Futures talks: spirituality. We ask what spirituality is, whether it could serve as a foundation for a better world, and how spirituality could be manifested in a society.
With David Jhave Johnston, Viola Ruzzier, and Claudia Raihert
Radical Futures: Foundations for a Better World will not explore solutions, since solutions already exist. Instead, it will ask: what are the conditions we must create for humanity to change and adapt? What foundations, what values and beliefs, could be at the heart of a better society? In the first part of this podcast, we lean in closer on six foundations suggested by members and friends of the B21 community: communication, multiplicity, balance, flexibility, regeneration, and creativity. We discuss the differences between these foundational principles and their implications on a larger-scale, only to let the listener decide which foundations are compelling enough to pursue.
With Claudia Raihert and Viola Ruzzier
Angus Fletcher has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature. He is a professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. His research employs a mix of laboratory experiment, literary history and rhetorical theory to explore the psychological effects—cognitive, behavioral, therapeutic—of different narrative technologies.
Are mermaids fish or mammals? Join Dr Chris Buddle and Dr Ollivier Dyens of McGill University, along with Dr. Sylvia Gilbertson from Hacksford University, department of cryptozoology, and our very special guest, Mermaid Claudia, to discuss this important and controversial topic.
A playful conversation to discuss serious issues such as environmental degradation, taxonomy, our need for authority over nature, etc.
With Claudia Raihert, Viola Ruzzier, Chris Buddle and Ollivier Dyens
Can a machine write beautiful poetry? Is an AI program capable of creating an artwork that is sublime? Is art just a series of recognizable patterns? And if so, what does it mean?
Join us in exploring these questions.
With Viola Ruzzier, Claudia Raihert, Ollivier Dyens and the Building 21 community
Leah Price is an American literary critic who specializes in the British novel and in the history of the book. She is Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University and founding director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. She has written essays on old and new media for The New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Boston Globe.
Her most recent book 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Books The History and Future of ReadingM' won the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award in 2020
Antonio Zadra is Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at Université de Montréal where he is director of the Dream Laboratory. Antonio Zadra is also a researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine and co-author of the recently published: ‘When Brains Dream’.
For much of his adult life, Antonio Zadra has been interested in all kinds of questions about dreams, from why our memories for dreams are so fragile, to how dreams relate to waking life, to do dreams have a function. He is also interested by specific kinds of dreams and has conducted numerous studies on lucid dreams, nightmares and recurrent dreams.
Interview conducted by Ollivier Dyens, Anita Parmar, Viola Ruzzier and Ezelbahar Metin
Frédéric Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in Ethics, Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of Tasmania.
As a researcher, he explores the ethics of novel implantable brain-computer interfaces operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the effects of such interfaces on an person's sense of control, autonomy, agency and self, most specifically, when these technologies are used to treat dementia, epilepsy, severe depression, Parkinson’s, etc.
Meet Harvard professor Gabriella Coleman, author of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, and Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking who discusses the history, values and principles of the hacking community, and its complicated but fascinating relationship with democracy and governance.
Join us in conversation with Dr. Ed Finn, professor at ASU and founder of the Center for Science and the Imagination. Dr. Finn explores how we can reassert our active agency and imagination in an age of passive technology. Find out how the Academy can be a site of radical futurist re-imagining, particularly through interdisciplinary thinking that combines approaches from the sciences, technologies, and humanities.
Dr. Finn pushes for a privileging of curiosity, creativity, and permission to disrupt the ‘tyranny of the average’ and he asks us to imagine a culture akin to a ‘Centaur Match’ in Chess games in which teams of humans collaborating with AI’s compete to create, in his words, the most ‘beautiful’ version of the sport.
In this segment, Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal, current Chief Growth and Strategy Officer at Panda Health, and former Director of the Steinberg Center for Simulation and Interactive Learning at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, sits down with us to discuss the seemingly disparate relation between beauty, synchronicity and innovation in healthcare. A gastroenterological surgeon by training, Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal now leads multiples ventures in the digital health, healthcare innovation, and education sectors.
Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal recalls how a singular experience at the ballet led to a newfound appreciation for the instrumentality and force of beauty and synchronicity. He began questioning what a “well-choreographed system” looks like in the context of clinical care delivery and healthcare systems. How can the concept of beauty, of choreography, synchronicity translate to a beautiful, harmonious experience in medicine and healthcare?
Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal also questions the tie between beauty and innovation – how can innovation embody or translate beauty and synchronicity? Drawing on conceptual examples, notably that of Brownian Motion, Dr. Aggarwal encourages us to think of systems-interactions as cumulations of “creative and unintended collisions.” Out of the seeming randomness of systems, we may find the space for creative and innovative interventions.
Interview conducted by Salome Henry
Jonathan Ledgard is Director of Rossums, a new studio that seeks to identify technology opportunities for poorer communities. He was Director of the Future Africa Initiative at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) until 2016. Since 2012, he has led a consortium of leading roboticists, architects, and logisticians that seeks to build the first Droneport in the world in Africa in 2016.
Jonathan Ledgard spent two decades as an award-winning frontline foreign correspondent for The Economist. His second novel, Submergence, a New York Times book of the year, is presently being adapted for Hollywood by Wim Wenders.
Join us in conversation with Dr. Sha Xin Wei, Founding Director of the Synthesis center at Arizona State University and founder of the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University in Montreal. Dr. Sha’s work explores the intersection of technology, philosophy, and experimentation. Combining ideas from Heraclitus to Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Sha constructs experimental environments that, by curating novel forms of experience, encourage multidisciplinary thought.
Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill University.
He was Director of the international project, Early Modern Conversions (2013-2019). Before that, he directed the Making Publics project (2005 to 2010). His ideas about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, “The Origins of the Modern Public.” In 2009-2010, he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America.
For the past eight years, he has been working on higher education practice and policy. He led the project, Transforming Graduate Studies for the Future of Canada, which brought together 26 universities to consider ways of making the PhD better. Dr Yachnin was asked to project himself in 2070, see the world as healthier than it is, and imagine what may have done right.
David Krakauer discusses the differences between Complementary Cognitive Artifacts, collective amplifiers of human reason, and Competive Cognitive Artifacts, collective analogs and competitors of human reason.
David Krakauer's research focuses around a series of fundamental questions. 1. How did intelligence evolve in the universe? 2. What is the relationship of intelligence to fundamental physical and biological laws, to include entropy production, the arrow of time, and natural selection? 3. How do collectives of adaptive agents generate novel ideas and come to predict and understand the worlds in which they live? 4. How do ideas evolve and how do they to encode natural and cultural life? 5. What is the relationship of organic to inorganic, cultural, and institutional mechanisms of computation and representation?
An immersive artist and journalist, Francesca Panetta uses emerging technologies to innovate new forms of storytelling that have social impact. In her previous role at the Guardian, Francesca pioneered new forms of journalism, including interactive features, location-based augmented reality, and most recently virtual reality, where she led an in-house VR studio.
At the intersection of journalistic reporting, scholarly sources, and artistic expression, Francesca’s work ranges in subject matter — from an exploration of solitary confinement in prisons in the United States (“6x9”) to a child development-based story allowing viewers to see the world through a baby’s eyes (“First Impressions”).
Francesca has received numerous awards from all over the world, touring the White House, Tribeca, Cannes, Sundance, and more. She was a 2019 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
The Radical Futures Project, conceived in the Spring of 2019 at McGill University's Building 21, seeks to explore what it means to alter the means by which we may imagine the future. This two-part podcast episode recounts the activities of the project, including interviews with science fiction writers, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and philanthropists; creative writing exercises; and an exploratory seminar that was ultimately interrupted by the ultimate Radical Injunction: the global pandemic which has arguably altered our relation to the future forever. As a retrospective piece, this broadcast traces a through-line across the project's myriad voices and formats. Voices include Damian Arteca, Ollivier Dyens, Jonathan Ledgard, Alexander Weinstein, Ed Finn, Amit Ben-Eliyahu, David 'Jhave' Jhonston, Rebecca Brosseau and Khando Langri.
This two-part podcast was produced by Damian Arteca
Sounds and Music from Bensound.com and Freesound.org
The Radical Futures Project, conceived in the Spring of 2019 at McGill University's Building 21, seeks to explore what it means to alter the means by which we may imagine the future. This two-part podcast episode recounts the activities of the project, including interviews with science fiction writers, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and philanthropists; creative writing exercises; and an exploratory seminar that was ultimately interrupted by the ultimate Radical Injunction: the global pandemic which has arguably altered our relation to the future forever. As a retrospective piece, this broadcast traces a through-line across the project's myriad voices and formats. Voices include Damian Arteca, Ollivier Dyens, Jonathan Ledgard, Alexander Weinstein, Ed Finn, Amit Ben-Eliyahu, David 'Jhave' Jhonston, Rebecca Brosseau and Khando Langri.
This two-part podcast was produced by Damian Arteca
Sounds and Music from Bensound.com and Freesound.org
Refik Anadol is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence. Anadol’s body of work addresses the challenges, and the possibilities, that ubiquitous computing has imposed on humanity, and what it means to be a human in the age of AI. Anadol's research practice is centered around discovering and developing trailblazing approaches to data narratives and artificial intelligence.
Residing at the crossroads of art, science, and technology, Anadol’s site-specific three-dimensional data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many virtual and physical forms. Entire buildings come to life, floors, walls, and ceilings disappear into infinity, breathtaking aesthetics take shape from large swaths of data, and what was once invisible to the human eye becomes visible, offering the audience a new perspective on, and narrative of their worlds.
Alexander Weinstein is a celebrated speculative fiction writer (Children of the New World; Universal Love). Informed by his origins as a realist writer, and a longtime preoccupation with the role of technology in society, Weinstein imagines how the most essential elements of our lives (love, friendship, meaning, and so much more) may become distorted, mediated or intensified in futures that are most all-too-imaginable. Tune in to hear a writer’s vision of a world not so far away, and what he thinks is most worth holding onto as we navigate ever-accelerating change.
Alexander Weinstein is the author of the short story collections, Universal Love and Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" and a best book of the year by NPR, Google, and Electric Literature. His fiction and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing.
Listen in to the introduction of the Radical Futures project, presented as an interview with project Co-Leads Damian Arteca and Prof. Ollivier Dyens and hosted by Rebecca Brosseau. Ollivier details the history and founding of Mcgill University’s Building 21, and the motivation behind the Radical Futures initiative.
Inspired by a desire to re-invent the way in which we interact with the future, Radical Futures aims to reimagine tomorrow not as a static ground towards which we fall, but rather as a field of potential constrained only by our modes of thought and action.