Research in Focus is a YFile series that explores the vibrant research landscape of York University’s Organized Research Units (ORUs).
These centers of research excellence serve as dynamic hubs where interdisciplinary experts collaborate with partners to tackle some of the globe’s most pressing challenges. Each edition invites readers to explore the transformative work undertaken at York University through a Q-and-A with ORU directors.
This edition explores the mission and impacts of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and features director Taien Ng-Chan, associate professor in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD).
Q: What is the mission of your ORU and its core areas of research?
A: Sensorium was established in 2013 with a mandate to develop as a nationally leading and internationally recognized centre for cross-disciplinary, state-of-the-art digital media research and creative activity. As a site for co-creation and shared critical reflection, Sensorium serves as a catalyst for examining how diverse media platforms enable multi-sensory perception and embodied experience, along with new modes of social engagement. Bridging disciplines and diverse communities, Sensorium researchers, artists and scientists explore networked connections between people, sentient environments and ecologies of place.
Today, Sensorium is a well-known research centre for creative inquiry and experimentation at the intersection of the media arts, performance and digital culture, and is recognized at York and beyond as a hub for new modes of social engagements through diverse, emerging media platforms. Sensorium’s primary aim is to serve as a site for co-creation and shared critical reflection for students and faculty across AMPD and beyond.
Q: How does your ORU foster collaboration and partnerships to enhance research impact?
A: As a connecting thread between the many performance spaces, sound stages and labs/studios in the Faculty, Sensorium is a central node around which many AMPD researchers coalesce, regardless of the type of technology used or the form of artistic practice. Frequently, our research-creation projects require us to form collaborative teams sharing expertise and material resources that cannot be found in one department alone.
Sensorium is well positioned as a guide or technological wayfinding for students and faculty members looking to get engaged with new technologies. For example, in new immersive dance works, choreographers need access to sensors, data display systems and software development, requiring a collaboration with faculty expertise in both computation and media arts. Sensorium facilitates these collaborations through networking events and promotion of faculty research, helping to connect future collaborators who may form teams based on shared interest and resources. Sensorium facilitates high-level conversations about research-creation as a methodology, about the role of the arts in communities and about the ways in which artists can lead broader cultural conversations about technology and its impact on our everyday lives.
Q: What real-world challenges is your ORU working to address and how does it align with York’s institutional priorities?
A: In the last few years of the pandemic, digital literacies and access to digital connectivity became social determinants of public health. This period has played witness to a pivotal moment in digital culture – in the pervasive integration of digital assets and virtual platforms into our every day lives. Such networked and augmented media have disrupted private and public modes of communication, as well as our access to traditional media outlets and public discourse in the social, cultural and political sphere. The urgency of environmental and socio-political strife in the world, and the ineffectiveness of unilateral approaches to mitigate these tensions, have brought a societal recognition that multi-disciplinary approaches are required to effect societal change, change behavioural attitudes and promote flexibility between policy-making, scientific innovations and grassroots information sharing.
Sensorium works to address these issues and challenges by regularly cultivating research opportunities in all six strategic development areas outlined by York’s Strategic Research Plan (SRP) 2023-28. Our research grants, exhibitions, talks, symposia and other events engaging arts-based research at the intersection of creativity, social and ecological justice, and digital technologies specifically advance its core “Research Areas of Strength.” These include: “Illuminating Cultures and Creativity,” “Building Healthy Lives, Communities, and Reimagining Futures,” “Reaching New Horizons in Science, Technology and Society,” and “Pursuing Justice, Equity and Sustainability.” Our researchers engage trainees and community partners in experimenting with “Digital Cultures and Disruptive Technologies” and do so through “Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research Innovation.” Further, through numerous grants, social justice-based symposia and public events, Sensorium positions itself as a leader in using the arts to imagine and model “Indigenous Futurities,” “Climate Action for a Sustainable Planet,” and “Social Justice, Peace, and Equitable Relations.”
Q: What innovative approaches or methodologies distinguish your ORU’s research?
A: Sensorium is committed to bolstering research-creation, arts creation and knowledge mobilization activities unique to AMPD as well as artistic inquiry across Faculties, effectively building bridges between communities of practice and research. Its position as a Faculty ORU emphasizes its participation in research and performance creation activities unique to AMPD, and also shapes its distinct identity among the array of ORUs present at York.
Synergies across research, teaching and administrative leadership at AMPD allow it to function as an agile interlocuter between the Faculty and the communities of practice external to it whilst playing a supportive role to research conducted herein. In this way, it is vital for the ORU to function as a platform for interdisciplinary thinking and ideation, as well as a public-facing showcase of the research-creation and performance-creation activities going on within AMPD.
Sensorium researchers bring critical expertise, experimentation, innovation and new ways of thinking to a larger dialogue inside and outside the academy about the arts as strategic cultural capital and a site for addressing and effecting social change. This ability to transcend institutional walls and join critical conversations is a hallmark of the excellence and potential for research-creation here.
Q: What accomplishments or upcoming projects can you highlight and how do you see your ORU shaping the future?
A: Sensorium plans to pursue an ambitious slate of events and grant proposals for the upcoming year that will enable us to continue developing international and cross-ORU partnerships that expand Sensorium’s profile as an interdisciplinary research centre. Among others, these initiatives include the following:
- Two exhibitions featuring the work produced by the Connected Minds Artist-in-Residence (Ar Ducao and Gala Hernández López) during their residency in Fall 2025 coinciding with the Connected Minds Conference. Each exhibition will highlight innovative, EDI-focused approaches using artmaking as a means of engaging with emerging technologies in an ethical way. We are also very excited to be welcoming a new artist(s)-in-residence in the second year of this program in Fall 2025.
- Successful Connected Minds Team Grant titled Creative Collectivities: Rehearsing Equitable Futures through Participatory Technologies, $1,488,199.96 with principal investigator Laura Levin, and co-principal investigator Michael Wheeler. This project investigates how participatory technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) shape collective behaviour, identity and civic engagement, especially among underrepresented communities. Through co-creation with equity-focused theatre companies, it explores how performance can critically test and reimagine digital tools to foster more inclusive and ethical forms of social connection.
Sensorium researchers have sought to remain at the cutting edge of such media developments, developing new forms of expression, performativity and multi-sensory content, developing digital strategies for interactions that are both physical and telematic, biological and technological. With the onset of machine learning and AI that are catalyzing major shifts in artistic practices, data-based workflows, dynamic and interactive media, virtual stages, gamification etc., how might this shape the ways we experience the world through our senses and how might the coupling of biotechnology provide new affordances and sensations for creative play? Sensorium will look to play an important role in these conversations, building on the interdisciplinarity of our programming, increased collaborations with partners at York (inter-ORU collaborations, inter-Faculty teams through the interdisciplinary clusters), while continually finding opportunities to be dynamic contributors to the discourses on an international stage.
Learn more about Research & Innovation at York University.