CHANGING VIEWS ON
RESEARCH: A DIALOGUE
WITH MARIA LANTIN /cuew tower

Before coming to Emily Carr to start up IDS,
Lantin led the Visualization Lab within the
Advanced Research Technology (ART) Labs at
the Banff Centre, and she has an impressive
knowledge of the interactive new media.
Consequently, Lantin is well aware of the
unique challenges involved in reformulating
her work in relation to practices and processes
creative inquiry. It is clear that she is excited
about her work at Emily Carr and the potential
to transform the “art school” context into a new
space of creative and critial inquiry.

“The opportunity to go

into an art school was an opportunity for

me to define for myself what it
means to be a researcher.”

For Lantin, the Emily Carr art and design
research context is a space of possibility.
Deciding what and how to publish in this new
research environment, thinking about how “to
integrate the practice and the research,” as
Lantin suggests, is vital to understanding of
the transformation of twenty-first century
universities. The contributions of artists and
designers have the potential to positively affect
broader thinking about research methodologies
and new modes of knowledge production and
knowledge mobilization.

Recognizing that the question of “art and
design research” asserts an unstable monad
that points to a disparate cluster of practices

“It was a very conscious decision
for me to merge into the art world...The
innovation with digital media was happening

and contexts; it is, nevertheless, a key point
of entry into the transformation of academic

with artists. Recently, I had the privilege

of sitting down to video tape a conversation
with Maria Lantin, the director of Emily Carr’s
ground-breaking Intersections Digital Studio
(IDS) and new Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) Centre
of Excellence. Lantin’s particularly blend of
energy and enthusiasm for contemporary art
practice and background in Computer Science
allowed her to speak eloquently to emergent
areas of cross-disciplinary practice between
creative practitioners (artists, designers, media
makers) and more conventional academics.
Taking her PhD in Computer Science into
new areas of creative practice research, Lantin
has built a strong reputation for working with
artists to develop and code visual projects.

Something of a refugee from the more obvious
climes of the Computer Science Department,

Lantin has worked inside the university and out.

practices across disciplines and institutions.
Trans-disciplinary collaborations among artists,
designers and other academics, such as those
staged with IDS and 83D, reshape knowledge
production (and consumption) in this age

of digital media, or what Communication
theorist Henry Jenkins calls an age of “media
convergence.” As Lantin’s work demonstrates,
creative practice research is vital to ongoing
discussions that are reformulating connections
throughout the university, not only within
Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, but

also across the fields of Science and Applied
Sciences.

In our conversation, Lantin and I touched on
the opportunities and expectations one faces
working with artists. Careful to avoid the pitfalls
of an art/scholarship binary, Lantin reflected on
her Computer Science training and the larger
institutional context within which she sees this