See the cross referenced projects for more on the Mapping Controversies projects and network.

In February 2006, one of Gapminder’s founders Hans Rosling gave a TED talk that demonstrated the most effective aspect of Gapminder’s data visualisation, that is, how data changes over time. In a graph that displayed UN statistics of the number of children per family juxtaposed with life expectancy for a number of countries, Rosling takes us through the changes from 1962 to 2003 like a sportscaster calling a horse race as countries represented by animated, colour-coded dots that grow and shrink as they move across the axes.

The Gapminder site offers both static and dynamic materials in the form of PDFs and clickable flash presentations/applications, but the main draw is Gapminder World, where you can create your own animated data-visualisation by investigating whichever countries and using whatever parameters that interest you.

Established by Erin Manning in 2004, the SenseLab is an international network of artists, theorists, researchers, dancers and writers who work together to explore the active passage between research and creation, promoting theoretical and artistic exploration of the sensing body in motion. The SenseLab is physically based in Montreal with space at the Society for Art and Technology . Part of the research agenda of SenseLab is to understand moving bodies and bodies in motion as relational bodies– “the senses are not seen as pregiven biological apparatuses, but as veritable technologies of life that continuously reinvent what the body is and can do, through its interactions with its designed environment and the technical objects populating it.”

The SenseLab interconnects a range of initiatives that each involves the collaborative participation of various members of its network. Bodies-Bits is a bi-monthly speaker series that provides a platform for international presenters to reveal insights into their research-creation works in progress. A series of thematically focused annual events with the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction aim to explore various modes of participation that view thought as a laboratory for creative practice and creative practice as a platform for thought. The 2009 event titled Society of Molecules connected ‘molcules’ of three to ten people as each simultaneously set up and executed a single aesthetico-political action within and between individual locations in eighteen different cities worldwide.

An interdisciplinary book series conceived by Manning and Brian Massumi and spawned from concepts examined during these annual events (also sharing the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction) is published by MIT Press. The SenseLab also publishes Inflexions, an open-access online journal aiming to promote experimental practices that combine research and creation in such a way as to foster symbiotic links between philosophical inquiry, technological innovation, artistic production, and social and political engagement.

The global political climate is rapidly changing, shaped by phenomena such as globalism, terrorism and violence, migration, displacement and postcoloniality. Researchers at the CCAP are investigating cultural responses to each of these issues, identifying in particular the new forms of visual art emerging in this global context. The CCAP encourages research in both the theory and practice of art, and it runs a program of exhibitions, conferences and publications addressing diverse forms of political and social engagement.

The Centre facilitates the formation of research clusters, comprising staff and postgraduate students, and of national and international networks that bring together those working at the cutting edge of art and politics. The CCAP has links with a number of international institutions and its members are currently working on collaborative research projects with scholars in South Africa, China, Germany and the Netherlands.