Contemporary Digital Art

Conservation, dissemination and market access

Sara Diamond

Dr. Sara Diamond is the President of OCAD University, Canada’s “university of the imagination.” She is a computer scientist, digital media artist and historian, and director of the Visual Analytics Lab at OCAD University, with funding from NSERC, SSHRC, Mitacs and the Ontario Research Excellence Fund. She is an appointee of the Order of Ontario and the Royal Canadian Society of Artists and a recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for service to Canada. She is the winner of the 2013 GRAND NCE Digital Media Pioneer Award. Diamond served on the 2011-2012 Council of the Canadian Academies’ expert panel on the State of Science & Technology in Canada. She sat on the board of the National Centre of Excellence GRAND. Before her tenure at OCAD University she founded and led the Banff New Media Institute, an incubation, digital media research centre and think tank (1995 – 2005).

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Comparative Models:
Banff New Media Institute and the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute

The Banff New Media Institute brought together artists, designers, scientists, engineers, social scientists, digital media firms and related industries for fifteen years (1995 – 2010) in an intensive experiment known as “the Banff Method.” Over the last ten years graduate programs, research centres and incubators have grown exponentially within the university environment in Canada and abroad, formalizing approaches to digital media research and incubation with support from institutional, federal and private sector funds. OCAD University’s iteration within this context are the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute and Imagination Catalyst. This talk will outline and compare features of both environments and suggest methods of engagement that draw on the possibilities of informal and formal structures.

Link to the PDF presentation (2.4MB)