The Pain Lab will be participating in the annual SFU Surrey Open House on Thursday, February 29. The event takes place 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Visitors can view our walking virtual meditation project and talk to some of the Pain Lab researchers. Details on the Open House can be found at www.surrey.sfu.ca/openhouse.
PainLab member Terry Lavender is moderating a discussion series on technology and medicine this spring.
The discussions are part of Simon Fraser Universitys Philosophers Cafe, and take place the third Thursday of every month at Barclay Manor in Vancouvers West End. The first talk, Technology and the Elderly: Privacy versus independence, took place in January. Further talks in the series are:
Thu, 16 Feb 2012 7:00 p.m.: Medicine in the cloud
Thu, 15 Mar 2012 7:00 p.m. Pulling the plug
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 7:00 p.m. Health technology: Is it worth the cost?
For more information about the Philosophers’ Cafes, click here.
Mount Qaf, a multimedia performance installation created by the Pain Labs Mark Nazemi and Amir Ghahary, attracted a lot of attention at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011, held in Hong Kong in December 2011.
The piece expresses the aesthetic dimensions of Sufism and electronic music culture, according to Ghahary and Nazemi. According to the SIGGRAPH catalogue description:
Mount Qaf is an audiovisual performance installation and a spatial/temporal structure which expresses the aesthetic dimensions of Sufism and electronic music culture. The experience combines generative digital art based on animating Persian patterns with eastern architectural motifs including Muqarnas, in syncopation with an ethnic electronic soundscape encountered through multi-channel acoustics. By re-imagining the traditional aesthetics of Sufism through the lens of electronic art and digital culture, the visual music journey of Mount Qaf sacralizes a nostalgia for the ancient past as well as reverence for an expectant technological future.
As children of parents who immigrated from Iran, the artists are therefore participating in a space reminiscent of their spiritual heritage while remaining clothed in the fabric of their technological upbringing. In the culture of Persian Sufism, the sense of place which emerges from visual and acoustic aesthetics reflects the alam-i-mithal, or the transcendent Imaginal Realm. To this end, spiritual cultures have always fashioned tools and instruments intended to sacralize space and affect a sense of identity and belonging. Today, electronic and digital media constitute an emerging palette with which the notion of sacred space can be explored. In this way, this multimedia performance installation invites viewers to experience a novel cultural space and consider the mystery surrounding the transcendent sense of home.