2016 Artists

Dan Browne is a Toronto-based filmmaker, photographer and multimedia artist whose works explore patterns, nature, and sensory perception through dense and kinetic forms. Dan’s films and videos have been presented at over one hundred festivals and venues worldwide, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, EXiS, Festival du nouveau cinema, and TIFF Cinematheque. His media work memento mori (2012) received the Jury Prize for Best Canadian Work at WNDX Festival of Moving Image, First Prize at Athens International Film + Video Festival, the Deluxe Cinematic Vision Award at Images Festival, and was featured as a live A/V performance at MUTEK. Dan is currently a PhD candidate in the York/Ryerson Communication and Culture program where his research focuses on intersections between art, technology and embodiment.
danbrowne.ca

Castle If is the moniker of electronic composer Jess Forrest. Equipped with a small, yet powerful arsenal of analog synthesizers, she crafts retro futuristic “library pop” inspired by the strange sounds of synth pioneers such as Mort Garson, Bruce Haack, and Bernard Fevre. She currently resides in Toronto, Canada, where she cares for an extensive collection of houseplants. In January 2016, she completed recording a full length sci-fi concept album.

Elenore Chesnutt is a video artist and writer from Toronto, Ontario.

COLL.EO is a collaboration between Colleen Flaherty and Matteo Bittanti established in 2012. A visual artist trained as a painter and a sculptor, Colleen Flaherty uses her craft and woodworking skills to create works that invite the viewer to engage with art in a tactile, tangible way. She received her M.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and her B.F.A. Cum Laude, with emphasis in Painting and Drawing, Minor in Music from San Jose State University in 1999. Her work has been presented in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Pienza, Italy. In 2012 she started COLL.EO with Matteo Bittanti. Co-founder of Random Parts, an artist run space in Oakland, Flaherty lives and works in Northern California. Matteo Bittanti is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco and Milan. His work lies at the intersection of videogames, toys, cinema, and the web. Bittanti’s conceptual pieces have been presented in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, Mexico, Scotland, Australia, France, and Italy. Since 2012, he has been collaborating with Colleen Flaherty as COLL.EO. As a scholar, he conducted fearless research at UC Berkeley, fought technological determinism at Stanford University, understood the difference between critical theory and hypocritical theory, social practice and social justice as an Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts.
colleo.org
colleenflaherty.com
mattscape.org

Kathleen Daniel, a.k.a. Kathleen Realness, makes surreal digital collages, neo-soul music, and video animations about the needy and the greedy. Check out her video and music label Duh Real.
duh-real.com

Adam Donovan is a hybrid media artist working in the area of science, art and technology. His artwork incorporates Nonlinear Acoustics, robotic sculpture, Game Engine Environments and camera tracking. His work is often inspired by his personal attachment to machines and the intangible aspects of physics we experience every day. Donovan explores these phenomena by amplifying their effects to create new mediums and experiences.
adamdonovan.net

Karl Fousek is a Montreal based electronic musician. For the past several years his practice has focused exclusively on composing and performing with analog modular systems and integrating digital hardware environments with the analog domain. Early 2014 saw the release of his debut album Relative Position of Figures on Danish label Phinery and he has since maintained a steady pace of releases, remixes and performances, inspiring AdHoc.fm to call him a leader of a “new wave” in underground synthesizer music and garnering comparisons to Steve Reich, Morton Subtonick, and Keith Fullerton Whitman. A frequent collaborator, his most recent project is a live-electronics trio with Roger Tellier-Craig and Devon Hansen, which debuted new work at the 2016 edition of Montreal’s MUTEK festival.
karlfousek.com

Davis Heslep is a Yellowknife-based media artist. His practice centers on the incorporation of forgotten and obsolete technologies with new creative approaches. Since 2009, he has been employing analog broacast video mixers; creating live video projections which involve reflective materials as well an array of contemporary imaging software. Through manipulating converging and conflicting analog inputs, Davis’s projections take on a peculiar agency: morphing, bleeding and evolving, guided by the interaction of artist and signal.

Kent Lambert is a filmmaker who specializes in remixing found media–particularly old TV shows, lame movies and video games–to create ironic and humorous juxtapositions.

Kristin Lucas is a media artist who works in video, performance, installation and on the Internet. Her work explores the impacts of technology on humanity, blurring the boundary between the technological and corporeal. In her work she frequently casts herself as the protagonist in videos and performances where her interactions with technology lead to isolation, and physical and mental contamination.

Justine Lugli is a recent graduate of OCAD U in Toronto, Canada where she completed a degree in photography. Currently based in Seattle, Washington, Justine is exploring the relationship between the value of art and the labour of its creation. Subjecting the viewer to an organized system of chaos through computer generated randomness, Justine’s work illustrates the harmony of binary opposition.
justinelugli.com

A. Bill Miller, also known as ‘gridworks1’, has exhibited and screened his abstract ASCII drawings, animated GIFs, web browser-based compositions, and videos nationally and internationally. Bill also regularly performs and experiments with live audio/visuals using custom software patches in traditional gallery exhibitions as well as Art, Technology, and Music Festivals.
master-list2000.com/abillmiller/

Samantha Noseworthy is an artist from London, Ontario whose 3D prints and 2D imagery combines disparate influences such as Roman sculpture, 80s aesthetics, and corporate symbols as a means of generating critical audiovisual amalgamations that feel simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Her work plays with the vernacular of Vaporwave–a micro-movement considered to be the first global music genre which originated purely online.

Benjamin Nuel is a graduate from the School of Fine Art of Strasbourg and the Fresnoy. His thinking is currently geared towards forms of non-linear narrative, using real-time 3D and video game engines. Inspired by the mechanics and aesthetics of the war video game, his work explores the order of fascination, curiosity and frustration in anti-spectacle. There are, as in the rest of his artistic production, issues of utopia and survival, a certain taste for the drift and the desire to explore areas of friction between code and genre.

Midi Onodera is an award-winning Canadian filmmaker who has been directing, producing and writing films for over twenty years. She has over twenty-five independent short films to her credit as well as a theatrical feature film and several video shorts. Her recent works feature a collage of formats and mediums – ranging from 16mm film to Hi8 video to digital video and “low end” digital toy formats such as a modified Nintendo Game Boy Camera, the Intel Mattel computer microscope, the Tyco and Trendmasters video cameras.

Tasman Richardson is a video artist, electronic composer, and graphic designer. For over a decade he has exhibited or performed extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, North Africa and Asia. He lives in Toronto, Ontario. His work focuses on tele-presence, memory, appropriation, synesthesia, and JAWA editing (of which he is the founder).

Bear Wit­ness is the artis­tic out­put of Ehren Thomas, a Ottawa based mul­ti­me­dia artist, DJ and film­maker and founding member of A Tribe Called Red. He remixes appro­pri­ated images and sound to cre­ate video assem­blages that speak of his inter­est in the por­trayal of abo­rig­i­nal peo­ple in main­stream media. A mem­ber of the Cayuga Six Nations that com­prise the Iro­quois Con­fed­er­acy, Bear Wit­ness exam­ines not only his own his­tory but the way in which pop­u­lar cul­ture and art his­tory leave their mark on a broader indige­nous identity.

Spectral Sound System (Michael Trommer and Eric Filion) is a live, semi-improvised audio-visual performance that is intended as a response to a specific location’s audio-visual topography. It employs a research-based approach with recordings made in situ and live coding to investigate a site’s nodes of affect and the embodied responses these might generate upon the individuals who occupy its distinct time-space. A particular focus of this project is the interstitial area in which mediated tropes of emotion (generated via advertising and popular media) overlap and integrate themselves with the ephemeral mindsets of its individual inhabitants. Field recordings, spectral processing, data visualization and algorithmically-generated visuals are cross-processed and combined in a real-time, intuitive manner, redeploying the collected data in an intermedial response to the performance location’s socio-political terrain.
michaeltrommer.com
nokami.com

Brent Watanabe will continue his investigation of computer controlled gallery installation. These installations function much like immersive video games, with living, interacting characters and objects, each with their own logic, intelligence, scoring, and goals. These elements may rely on anything from simple light or sound sensors to complex custom programming, circuitry, and Internet networking. His work has been shown in galleries, museums, and film festivals internationally.
bwatanabe.com

IP Yuk-Yiu is an experimental filmmaker, media artist, art educator and independent curator. His works, ranging from experimental films to live performances and media installations, have been showcased extensively at international festivals, including European Media Art Festival, New York Film Festival (views from the avant-garde), the Image Festival, FILE Featival, VideoBrasil, Transmediale, ISEA, Hong Kong International Film Festival and more. Currently he is Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His recent works explore hybrid and computational forms of cinema that is informed by contemporary media art practices.

Curators

Amber Christensen is a researcher, librarian, organizer and emerging media arts curator. She is currently completing an MA in Cinema and Media Studies at York University and also holds a Masters of Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her research and curatorial practice explores feminist and queer feminist modes of cultural productions and collectives through investigations of the affective experience. She has curated film and video screenings for Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative (Regina, SK), Regional Support Network (Toronto), Vtape (Toronto) and is a member of the Toronto based Pleasure Dome Film and Video Curatorial Collective.
amberdchristensen.tumblr.com

Skot Deeming (aka mrghosty) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and scholar, whose work spans the spectrum of new media practice from broadcast media to computational art, videogames, and game art. He currently resides in Montreal, where he is a doctoral student in the Individualized Program at Concordia University, and a member of the TAG (Technoculture, Art and Games) Research Centre.
mrghosty.com

Clint Enns is a video artist and filmmaker living in Toronto, Ontario. His work primarily deals with moving images created with broken and/or outdated technologies. His work has shown both nationally and internationally at festivals, alternative spaces and microcinemas. He has a Master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Manitoba, and has recently received a Master’s degree in cinema and media from York University where he is currently pursuing a PhD.  His writings and interviews have appeared in LeonardoMillennium Film JournalIncite! Journal of Experimental Media and Spectacular Optical.
clintenns.tumblr.com

Martin Zeilinger is a new media researcher, curator, and practitioner. His work focuses on new media and appropriation art, creative computation, intellectual property issues, game and hacker culture, and live coding. Martin holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and is a Lecturer in Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.
marjz.net