Day Zero: Voight-Kampff | Pre-Festival Social and Screening @Electric Perfume | July 12th 2017 | 8pm – 11pm | PWYC
FEATURING VIDEOS BY
Peter Rahul is a Toronto based artist who uses specializes in vintage video synthesis. By exploring the limits of obsolete video technology, unknown functions, and special FX arise. Rahul intuitively mixes feedback loops and geometric patterns to create a unique form of animation. Rahul has crafted his own sensibilities with the presentation of live video through VJing across Toronto. His art practice has taken the form of stage design, sculptural video installations & VHS mixtapes.
Marta Di Francesco is a London based visual artist, exploring new aesthetics, merging poetics with code. She is interested in the implication of digital identity and its fragmentation, questioning it through digital bleed, time displacement and through the sculptural quality of time in 3D aesthetics. Her work has been screened and exhibited in several festivals and venues in Canada, U.S., Europe, and Asia and featured in publications like Taschen, WIRED, The Creators Project, Prosthetic Knowledge, and POSTmatter.
Tillmann Ohm is a media artist from Germany with a special focus on the interaction between art and future technologies. With his background as a photographer, Ohm established his art studio in Berlin in 2010. He studied Fine Arts at Bauhaus-University in Weimar where he worked as a research assistant, held hacking workshops and received awards and funding for his art projects. Ohm is currently preparing the first AI curated exhibition for artistic robots.
Udit Mahajan is an experience-interaction designer, creative technologist and new media artist based in New York, with a background in electrical engineering from India. He is interested in the use of design and technology for multi-modal digital and physical interactions, narratives, experiences, and interfaces. He graduated from MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design in May 2016 and since, has been working as Experience Designer at AV&C, teaching at Parsons School of Design and Learning Community Charter School, and involved in select projects with creative groups, labs and friends around the world.
Pattern Recognition | Exhibition @InterAccess | July 14th – August 12th 2017 | FREE
FEATURING
Ben Bogart is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist working with generative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaos, feedback systems, evolutionary computation, computer vision and machine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences in Canada, the United States of America, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. He has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre (Canada), the New Forms Festival (Canada) and at Videotage (Hong Kong). His research and practice have been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts. Ben holds both master’s and doctorate degrees from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Henry Driver has shown both internationally and across the UK, exhibiting at Tate Liverpool and Tate Britain. He was shortlisted and exhibited for the global Aesthetica Art Prize 2016. Recently, he was selected for alt_Barbican a new major project by the Barbican and The Trampery, through this he will be exhibiting at MUTEK, Montreal, 2017. Driver is based in the UK.
Jordan Shaw is an artist and creative technologist who was raised and is currently based in Toronto. He’s a recent MFA graduate of OCAD University’s Digital Futures program, where he was awarded the Best Exhibited Work in his program’s graduate exhibition. Over the duration of Jordan’s career he has had work exhibited internationally in Australia, Canada and the United States at a range of art, culture and technology conferences and festivals.
Samantha Fickel grew up in the Niagara Region of Southern Ontario. She attended OCAD University where she majored in Sculpture and Installation with a minor in Integrated Media. It was here that she took her first electronics class and has been do-it-yourself hacking ever since. Fickel moved to Chicago to attend SAIC where she received her MFA in Art and Technology Studies. During this period of study Fickel combined her love of sculpture with her interest in electronics to create work that attempts to unravel her relationships with technology. Fickel is currently working and creating out of her studio in Chicago.
Paolo Pedercini (aka Molleindustria) was born in Northern Italy and is currently based in Pittsburgh. He is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Execute! From Scene to Screen | Screening
@Artscape Youngplace | July 14th 2017 | 9pm – 11pm | $15
FEATURING VIDEOS BY
Spaceballs, Trond Michelsen, Rrrola (Jan Kadlec), Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad (Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones), Strobe, Stewart Smith, Hack’n’Trade, Shape, Peter Burr + Mark Fingerhut + Forma
Signal / Space | Performance @Artscape Youngplace | July 15th 2017 | 8pm – 11pm | $15
FEATURING PERFORMANCES BY
Culture making and Iconoclast for over a decade, Tasman Richardson has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. His practice is a criticism of media spectacle. He operates in three formats: video collage using the JAWA method (The manifesto he authored in 1996), fully immersive media installation, and live a/v performance. His solo installation Necropolis at the MOCCA (2012) and Karsh-Masson (2015) received wide critical acclaim and he recently exhibited his synchronized dual channel atari glitch installation Janus at TAF, Athens (2016) and Calgary’s Particle and Wave festival (2017). This past January he curated The New Flesh (Music Gallery, Toronto), a selection of media performers that abandoned their identity and bodies in favour of abstract expressionist electronics, showcasing the machines and signals as the focus. His most recent work Sands Stand Still (2017) is exhibiting at the Canadian Clay and Ceramics Gallery in Waterloo until August. He is based in Toronto.
foci + loci evolved in 2010 by exploring the topological treatment of time and space afforded by game engines. Taking their fascination with the malleability of virtual space and pairing it with their interest in electroacoustic improvisation led the duo (Tamara Yadao and Chris Burke) to design spaces that could be “played” as instruments. foci + loci have received a NYSCA grant for 2013 to develop their full-scale game art performance installation Bal(l)ade. Tamara received an American Composers’ Forum grant in 2014 commissioning the music for foci + loci’s Another Kind of Spiral, which premiered at Cluster Festival 2015 in Winnipeg with a performance at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris following soon after. Among others, they have performed and exhibited their work at Babycastles, CultureHub, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, Museum of Arts & Design NYC, Peter Kirn’s Handmade Music series and John Zorn’s avant-garde music space, The Stone. They are excited to return for this year’s Vector Festival with the next evolution of their work.
Gabe Knox is a sound designer and composer living in Toronto. His passion for sound and technology has led to a diverse resume of interesting projects, from feature films to composing electronic music to DJing dance parties. Notable credits as a Sound Designer or Re-Recording Mixer include “Tower” (dir. Kazik Radwanski), “Hotel Congress” (dir. Nadia Litz), “Brother Frank” (dir. Iris Fraser-Gudrunas), and “You Are Here” (dir. Daniel Cockburn). Since 2015 he has been the Senior Sound Re-Recording Mixer at Vice Studios Canada.
Daniel Zabawa is a multi-disciplinary amateur artist living in Toronto. Born near Edmonton in 1978, he was classically trained in piano performance from a young age and studied music and visual arts, culminating in dropping out of OCAD after one year to study anything else. He received a BSc and MSc in computer science from the University of Toronto studying the complexity of computational models and formal systems of logical proofs. His current projects are concerned with algorithmic composition, mathematical visualization, and drawing birds.
Local Host | Online Exhibition
vectorfestival.org | July 13th – August 12th 2017
Local Host IRL | Exhibition
@Black Cat Artspace | July 13th – July 16th 2017 | 12pm – 6pm | FREE
FEATURING
Within her works Tanja Vujinović explores the relationship between consciousness and technology through digital animism and contemplative play. virtual machines. Since 1997 her works have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, such as the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, the Museum of Contemporary Art – Denver, Kunsthaus Meran, the Medienturm International Forum in Graz, the Cornerhouse Gallery in Manchester, the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, MMC Kibla Maribor and Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana. Her works have been presented at festivals, such as ISEA2009, The 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Ars Electronica Linz, Kinetica Art Fair in London, the Spor Festival in Arhus, the Zeppelin Sound Art Festival in Barcelona, FILE – Electronic Language International Festival in Sao Paulo and FILE RIO in Rio de Janeiro, among others. She is based in Slovenia.
Born in Toronto and raised in Nova Scotia, Hannah Epstein (AKA hanski), is of mixed Latvian and Ashkenazi ancestry. She has studied philosophy, folklore, religion and art, extracting narrative processes that inform an eclectic practice, spanning textile to video games. She recently completed her MFA at Carnegie Mellon University and is based in Toronto and LA.
Alex Myers grew up with one foot in Nebraska, the other in California, and half of his heart in The Netherlands. He has been making and breaking things for a while now. Myers likes connecting disparate thoughts. He creates surrealistic scenes by exploring the potentials of data transmutation. Cutting, chopping, and stretching forms and thoughts until they’re barely recognizable and is based in the US.
Zev Farber is a Toronto based multidisciplinary artist, educator and arts administrator. He holds a BA in Music from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Visual Art from York University. He has been actively exhibiting and performing works since 2007, and will be presenting a new work commissioned for the Varley Art Gallery’s yearlong exhibition Present | Perfect | Continuous in September. Zev teaches interactive and generative media at OCAD University and also runs their Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers.
Sagan Yee is an animator and occasional videogame perpetrator based in Toronto. Her past collaborations with makers and other artists have involved the use of vans, knives, laser pointers and dog shock collars. She is currently Executive Director of the Hand Eye Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the exploration of games as an art form and means of creative expression.
Jasmeet Sidhu is a Toronto based artist who was born in New Delhi, India. He immigrated to Toronto at the age of 7 and later attended the Ontario College of Arts and Design University, receiving a BFA, majoring in Drawing and Painting and specializing in Digital Painting and Expanded Animation. Jasmeet brings a unique combination of animation and painting in his works and looks to expand the field of analog technology into a digital one while commenting on themes of the digital and self.
Elders by Alex Myers at Loop Hole Gallery @Loop Hole Gallery | July 1st – July 31st 2017 | Dusk till Dawn | FREE
FEATURING
Alex Myers grew up with one foot in Nebraska, the other in California, and half of his heart in The Netherlands. He has been making and breaking things for a while now. Myers likes connecting disparate thoughts. He creates surrealistic scenes by exploring the potentials of data transmutation. Cutting, chopping, and stretching forms and thoughts until they’re barely recognizable and is based in the US.
Art on the Screens | Screening @Celebration Square Mississauga | July 24th 2017 | 8pm – 10pm | FREE
FEATURING
Jan Swinburne is a Canadian visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice makes use of traditional and digital media. Swinburne approaches all media from a painter’s sensibility and this drives her aesthetic. At times her work mutates into large-scale, site-sensitive installations and projects. An experimental approach to art is central to her practice. Jan Swinburne’s work has been exhibited locally and select works have been exhibited internationally. Her work resides in various public and private collections.
Robert Seidel began his studies in biology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena before transferring to the Bauhaus University Weimar to complete his degree in media design. His projections, installations and experimental films have been shown in museums like LACMA Los Angeles, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, ZKM Karlsruhe, Nabi Art Center Seoul, Museum of Image and Sound São Paulo and MOCA Taipeh as well as numerous of festivals (Prix Ars Electronica, onedotzero, DOTMOV, IFF Rotterdam, EMAF), galleries, magazines, books and TV programmes worldwide. His works have been honoured with various prizes, including the KunstFilmBiennale Honorary Award and Prize for Best Experimental Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.