My name is Robert Gill and if this is the first stop on your visit to my website, thank you and welcome. I am an educator and designer living in Toronto and my core ambition as a teacher is a product of three energies: a desire to share what I know about reading images and the designed social world; a curiosity about developing what I am going to call a mobile and creative visual methodology for understanding our experience of this designed world; and a striving for (its necessarily difficult and interminable work) truly open and democratic and open learning spaces where difficulty (yeah, more difficulty) is addressed rather than avoided. In another tone, I am known to my friends as the communicator of an avid, enthusiastic and even boisterous passion for all things art and design and I want to communicate that too. You will find a more competencies-focused list below. I hold a degree in art and design from a small community college in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, 1984 and a PhD in Sociology from York University, Toronto, Canada, 2000. I teach a hybrid collage of visual culture studies, popular culture studies and design studies in a larger framework of social and cultural theory and methodology. My current primary research interests are focused on museum and curation studies and the designed experiential spaces of an imaginary migrant queer portrait gallery. I have taught a very wide range of courses below. I can be contacted by email at: assemblagenator@gmail.com
Key competencies: i have a very broadand in-depth knowledge of social and cultural theory and methods and can introduce anyone to the core ideas: i can make big, macro, abstract concepts in these fields accessible through dynamic and interactive presentations; i have very in-depth knowledge of contemporary issues in design, art and popular culture and have developed engaging ways of exploring the way diverse audiences experience these fields of expression through participation and participatory spaces and platforms; I am very comfortable teaching in anti-oppression environments (queer feminist anti-racist) and i am able to hold and facilitate discussions that are difficult or even volatile; i am an empathic reader and editor of written and creative projects; i am very detail oriented reader of texts and can quickly assist in grasping big picture and assisting in project clarification and development; i greatly enjoy the group critique space of the design studio and bring all of the above to this process.
My current research competencies, interests and goals: i was on sabattical from late august 2016 to late april 2017 during which time i made excellent progress on a new research project. This current and ongoing project is called museotopia: keywords for the design of a queer museum and i have determined that i will need various levels of fluency in the areas of research theory and methodology listed below. areas in this regular font i am already comfortable with because they were keystones of my phd research; areas in blue bold some require some in-depth work and i will apply for research leave for those; items in pink are core research areas in which am fluent; the list is in alphabetical order. antiracism and postcolonial theory and pedagogy; architecture; art theory including art reception or art user theory; contemporary art; branding especially cultural branding; cultural theory; curation; design studies; fashion; museum studies; participatory culture; popular culture; queer theory and feminist methodologies; screen theory (cinema studies minor as undergrad); social media studies; spatial design / spatial media; theories of space and subjectivity; transmedia/convergence theory; user design / ux theory; website design
ten courses i have taught that showcase these competencies, interests and goals: in over twenty years of teaching in the University I have designed and delivers a very wide range of courses (a complete list is available on request). below I have listed the ten i consider the most important ones that reveal my skills.
Popular Culture as Communication: The summer 2017 version of this course explores, critically but also creatively and playfully, the idea that the assemblagist spatial/experiential/visual methodologies found in design, collage, mashup, re-mixing and moodboarding – in concert with the anti-essentialist methodologies found in feminist, queer and anti-racism thought -- are the most relevant methodologies for the study, making and re-making of the ‘texts’ of contemporary visual culture. We will explore the idea that this re-making is a particularly important practice of creative resistance in the dangerous and perhaps even fascist conjuncture in which we find ourselves. We now all live in a social space where no coherent, fixed idea or horizon of democracy can be assumed by all. We live, instead, in a social space fragmented by forces of instability, displacement, migration, worker-precarity, racism, the new rise of a white- and apparently heterosexual-male hegemony all mixed in a ubiquitous post-truth trans-mediascape of branding and other sensory- and subjectivity-mediating factors. This course is designed to help us think about how this mediascape appears and feels and is inhabited by each of us in specific but also socially located and mediated ways. The logic of this course is structured on four inter-related layers or platforms of inquiry: 1) an exploration of the importance of space and its mediating effect on our experience and subjectivity. We will explore some examples of spatial, experiential, visual and other types of design as cultural forms of increasing significance. We will see that design is a very important way of organizing communication and experience in contemporary life; 2) an exploration of some theories of the visual and of the gaze and their specific relevance to images and spaces of nation, gender, sexuality and race constructed in contemporary hip hop culture; 3) an exploration of the creative and possibly radical art-making and design techniques of assemblage, collage, remixing and mashup. We will look at the historical and the contemporary relevance of these techniques to critical cultural practice; 4) an exploration of the continuing and emerging ways that transmedia participation, relational aesthetics and curation might provide spaces for new types of social encounter and political engagement. We will explore the idea that publics are constructed spaces through which we move and by which we are changed.
Design Theory and Criticism: xx
Design and the Public Sphere: 3Qs: what is an image, what is a museum, what is the public sphere? the idea here was to do as above plus actually go into a museum space and integrate the learning materials into the museum itself: students attended an exhibition at the very outset of the course and then went back to the studio and created their own learning space as a space to develop a brand-strategy for the gallery. We explored the idea that the public sphere isn’t ready-made space we enter into but a space we must actively construct around us for specific communities and intersections: we also explored the idea that the public sphere is constituted of multiple publics and that these publics are “virtual and emergent” to use Michael Warner’s terms (Warner, 199x: xx). As such the very notion of the public sphere was questioned; this becomes especially important when we understand the key role design and designers have played in shaping publicity. to achieve this the course was based on a collaborative studio production model of work; Some of the broader aims of the course included: exploring some of the design issues that emerge when we look at curating in a public art gallery (dev); questioning the idea of a single 'public sphere' in favour of a critique of public space for the multiple and contested ways that 'publics' and 'identities' get constructed and can be explored and of the role and possible role of design in this; we explored the idea that designers are very well placed to address a range of issues about culture and community in this context; We also looked at the idea of 'relational aesthetics' and the idea of 'post-production' curating which shifted our thinking about art and design from the production of single-authored- to group-authored texts. Some of the practical dimensions of this collaboration were: an initial visit to a public gallery, an audit of the galleries mission and curatorial history and the exploration, envisioning and critical making of proposals for future projects for the gallery in the form of collaborative and studio-based projects. When I say 'studio-based' here I mean something specific: students formed temporary studios to complete the project: one of the tasks was to form a studio identity that responded to the brief. The course required that students consider visual culture in the broadest sense, bringing art, design, popular culture and other cultural forms, spaces and practices into focus through a consideration of some of the strategies being explored by contemporary curators.
Self, Society and Design: des cult spa in des school for xx
Design and Contemporary Culture: large lect w TAs …
Mediated Identities: This seminar-style communications studies course …