ART ON THE SCREENS: WILD BLUE YONDER | SCREENING @ CELEBRATION SQUARE | JULY 8, 8-10PM | FREE
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, S.A.L.T.S Basel, UCLA, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York.
Henning Frederik Malz is a German artist currently residing in Winnipeg, MB. His works have been shown at a variety of places such as IMAGES Festival Toronto, Craig Baldwin’s OTHER CINEMA San Francisco, EMAF Osnabrueck and others.
Adrienne Matheuszik is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Ontario. Matheuszik holds a Master’s of Fine Arts from OCAD University, a Graduate Certificate from Concordia University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Ottawa. Her practice deals with hybridity and mixed race identity through mixed reality spaces and experiences. Matheuszik is currently exploring ideas of representation, identity and subjectivity through working with digital mediums such as augmented reality,
video, sculpture and interactive installation.
Alex McLeod is a visual artist who creates work about interconnection, lifes cycles, and empathy through the computer. Prints, animations, and sculptures are produced as gateways into alternative dimensions.
Jessie Sheng is a Toronto-based new media artist who uses a variety of media, including video, animation, electronics, sculpture, and installation to investigate how individuals understand themselves and relate to others within virtual, physical, or invisible structures of the contemporary world. She graduated from OCAD University in 2017 and has exhibited work with various organizations such as InterAccess, Xpace Cultural Centre, Trinity Square Video, and Nuit Blanche Toronto.
Leslie Supnet is a moving image artist based in Winnipeg. She uses animation and found media to create psychological narratives about loss, change, and reckoning with our rhizomatic selves. Her work has screened at micro-cinemas, galleries and film festivals internationally such as TIFF Short Cuts Canada, Melbourne International Animation Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Antimatter, amongst others. She has taught animation for various artist-run centres, community-based initiatives and at OCAD University.
FUTURE RELICS | EXHIBITION @ INTERACCESS | JULY 11-AUGUST 17 | FREE
Based in Montréal, Anna Eyler holds a BA in Religious Studies and Art History from Carleton University (2010) and a BFA from the University of Ottawa (2015). She is currently an MFA candidate in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University (2017-). Recent awards include the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2017), the Desjardins Academic Scholarship (2018), and the Emerging Digital Artist Award (2018). Eyler’s work will be exhibited at the Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, 2019) and at PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, 2020).
Aksel Haagensen an Estonian-Australian artist based in Estonia. Haagensen has participated in group exhibitions and video art festivals across Estonia and Europe. Using various media, his work focuses on combining various forms of documentary with an installation-based approach. Haagensen is currently studying in the Contemporary Art Master’s program at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
With a background in documentary, Lisa Jackson expanded into fiction with SAVAGE, which won a Genie award for Best Short Film. She is known for her cross-genre projects including VR, animation, performance art film and a musical. Playback Magazine named her one of 10 to Watch and her work has played at festivals internationally, including Berlinale, Hot Docs, SXSW, Tribeca, and London BFI, as well as airing on many networks in Canada.
Raquel Meyers is a Spanish artist who defines her practice as KYBDslöjd (drawing / crafting by typing) with technology from the past. Woven with Commodore 64 characters sets, flickering in teletext, or fed to fax machines, her world of mythical creatures and dreamlike pilgrimades is one of patience and resolve. Frame-by-frame and glyph-by-glyph, we descend into a jagged wonderland where time stands still and chaos reigns.
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is a British/Colombian artist that creates sculpture, software, online interventions, and installations, often in connection, producing and reflecting on contemporary social and computational entanglements and configurations. He received an MA from the Royal College of Art, 2009 and is completing a practice-based doctorate at Goldsmiths, University of London. He runs the popular blog Algopop on algorithms in every day life. His work has been presented extensively, including solo shows at iMal in collaboration with JODI, and Nome Gallery in Berlin. His works have been acquired by the Pompidou in Paris, and commissioned by the V&A in London, and AND Festival, Manchester. He is currently represented by Nome Gallery and is an invited resident at Somerset House Studios.
Grégory Lasserre and Anaïs met den Ancxt are two artists who work together as a duo under the name Scenocosme. They develop the concept of interactivity in their artworks by using multiple expressions: art, technology, sound, and architecture. They mix art and digital technology in order to find substances of dreams, poetries, sensitivities, and delicacies. They also explore invisible relationships with our environment: they can feel energetic variations of living beings. They design interactive artworks, and choreographic collective performances, in which spectators share extraordinary sensory experiences.
Jeff Thompson is an artist, programmer, and educator based in the NYC area. Through code, sculpture, sound, and performance, Thompson’s work physicalizes and gives materiality to otherwise invisible technological processes. Thompson earned an MFA from Rutgers University in 2006. He serves as Assistant Professor and Program Director of Visual Art & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology.
THE GREAT DERANGEMENT | EXHIBITION @ ELECTRIC PERFUME | JULY 11-14, 12-5PM | FREE
Iodine Dynamics began as a spin-off from Miskatonic University, where we developed the first games that ran and manoeuvred like animals. Now we are taking the next step, combining the principles of reuse and state of the art recycling with simple mechanical designs, retro electronics, and cutting edge software for fun and intelligence. Iodine Dynamics has an extraordinary creative team of programmers, designers, writers and crypto-furbies who seamlessly combine advanced analytical thinking with bold 80s engineering and boots-in-the-mud practicality.
Brianna Lowe is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Toronto. Her practice explores the different interpretations of how the environment is experienced through the mediation of various digital media, such as 3D animation, digital collage and video. She has exhibited in Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States, as well as virtually through The Wrong Digital Art Biennale, which is a decentralised art biennale organised since 2013 by David Quiles Guilló. She currently holds a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from OCAD University and a Post Graduate Certificate in Video Game Design from George Brown College.
Kris Pierce is an artist working in Dallas, Texas. His work explores notions of power, value, and states of consciousness in the context of our modern digital world. He has exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and public spaces, including recent solo and group exhibitions at the Hiroshima Art Center, Japan; Gallerie Se Konst, Falun, Sweden; Réunion, Zurich, Switzerland, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio; the Dallas Museum of Art; and RL Window, Ryan/Lee, New York City.
Zeesy Powers work explores how the unstated rules of society shape our experience. For over a decade, she has worked across media to create interactive works for performers and audience participants. Her recent work explores the opaque aesthetics of networked technologies, and how they hide persistent consumer surveillance. Powers was a finalist for both the 2016 and 2018 K.M. Hunter Artist Awards, the 2017 Transitio_MX award for digital art, and is a 2018 Chalmers Fellow. She lives and works in Toronto.
LOCAL HOST: POST-HUMAN MEDIA ARTS | ONLINE EXHIBITION @ VECTORFESTIVAL.ORG | FREE
John Ayliff is an independent text-based game developer and science fiction writer. Most of his work features not-quite-human protagonists such as intelligent robots, and attempts to deliver a replayable experience through procedural generation and high levels of player choice. He is originally from the UK but now lives in Vancouver, BC.
Matt DesLauriers is a Toronto-born artist and creative coder now based in London, UK. Matt weaves together art, programming and technology to build playful creative projects for public installations, print media, and the web. His interactive installations have been shown in special events around the world, including the Louvre Museum in Paris, the AGO in Toronto, Reykjavik’s 2019 Winter Lights Festival in Iceland, and Ontario Place Park’s 2018 Winter Light Exhibition in Toronto.
Droqen has been making games forever. In 2012, he released Starseed Pilgrim, his best known game. He is excited to explore new experiences that are machine-augmented and relational to other humans. Unfortunately he has not figured out how to sell scary new ideas, so he has been learning to do this while continuing to create.
Nick Montfort’s computer-generated books of poetry include #!, the collaboration 2×6, The Truelist (first in the Using Electricity series from Counterpath), and Hard West Turn. Among his more than fifty digital projects are collaborations The Deletionist and “Sea and Spar Between.” He has six books from the MIT Press, most recently The Future. He is professor of digital media at MIT, also teaches at the School for Poetic Computation, and lives in New York.
Vera Sebert works at the intersection of visual media, language, film, and computer programming. Sebert holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Fine Arts Braunschweig and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and a degree in Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2017, she was Artist in Residence at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen. She is the recipient of the 2018 Hannsmann-Poethen Grant for Literature (2018) and is the 2019 Subnet Artist-in-Residence, Salzburg.
AFRICAN SPACE DREAM @ ONTARIO SCIENCE CENTRE | FREE WITH FESTIVAL PASS
Milumbe Haimbe is a visual artist interested in exploring diversity in popular culture. Her work combines drawing, illustration, video, and 3D modeling. She has exhibited her work at FOCUS 10 – Art Basel in Switzerland, and is an alumnus of the Art Omi International Artist’s Residency in New York, as well as the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington DC. Haimbe exhibited in the Biennale for Contemporary African Art in Dakar, 2014, and is a recipient of the 2015 Bellagio Arts Fellowship Award, the Astraea Global Arts Fund, and the Lauréate du prix de la Fondation Blachère.
BOT IN THE WOODS | GIF @ INTERACCESS | 8PM-8AM | FREE
Sarah Imrisek is a game developer, botALLY and emerging digital artist in Toronto. Her work explores dialogue with the unconscious and love for the natural world, playing with randomness and chaotic functions to create experiences that elude perfect control and stimulate imagination and wonder. Imrisek is most likely to be found exploring the ravines or photographing back-alley graffiti when not at her computer.
ROADKILL | GIF @ TRINITY SQUARE VIDEO | JULY 11-14, 10AM-7PM | FREE
Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s, both in Canada and Internationally. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. Recent exhibitions include “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum, NY, “Wetland” at the Museum of the Moving Image, NY and “The Great Code” at Transfer Gallery, NY. For the month of March, 2016, her work “Mountain Time/Light was displayed on 45 Jumbo monitors in Times Square, NYC, every night as part of the Midnight Moment program curated by Times Square Arts. Lorna Mills is represented by Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and DAM Gallery in Berlin.
CANADIAN ABSTRACTS | GIF @ ARTSCAPE YOUNGPLACE | JULY 11-14, 8AM-9PM | FREE
Jordan Shaw is an artist and creative technologist who received his MFA from OCAD University’s Digital Futures program. He has been internationally exhibited in Australia, USA, and Canada. His work spans mediums ranging from strictly digital and algorithmically generated to interactive physical environments and installations. Through his work, he explores themes relating to the influence of technology in culture and the predefined expectations society has about their relationship with computers, technology, and the future. These ideas often manifest themselves by exposing the hidden and unseen aspects of the technology and the digital environment around us. This happens by trying to visualize the hidden interactions between people, technology, data collection methods and the digital systems that exist in our world.
FUTURE PERFECT PERFORMANCE NIGHT @ SMALL WORLD MUSIC CENTRE | JULY 12, 8-10PM | $15
Raquel Meyers is a Spanish artist who defines her practice as KYBDslöjd (drawing / crafting by typing) with technology from the past. Woven with Commodore 64 characters sets, flickering in teletext, or fed to fax machines, her world of mythical creatures and dreamlike pilgrimades is one of patience and resolve. Frame-by-frame and glyph-by-glyph, we descend into a jagged wonderland where time stands still and chaos reigns.
Jenn Norton is an interdisciplinary artist using stereoscopic interactive video, installation, sound, and kinetic sculpture, working intimately with the technologies she employs, marrying formal and intuitive processes. Her imaginative compositions of disjunctive imagery are bound together in post-production, rendering familiar landscapes, objects, and activities strange to reframe longstanding expectations. Norton has exhibited nationally and internally, winning numerous awards for her work, including the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency Program at La cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France), and the OCADU Integrated Media Medal. She is a PhD student in the Fine Arts program at York University.
Tasman Richardson has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. His practice uses primarily video collage using the JAWA method (The manifesto he authored in 1996), fully immersive media installations (Necropolis, MOCCA 2012), and live a/v performances. His most recent works include performances featured at X Avant festival Toronto, screening at Impakt festival Utrecht, and performance at IAF festival Tokyo. His themes to date have been a critical response to the spectacular, emotionally potent illusion of media culture, which he dubbed contemporary necromancy or death culture. In spite of this, he has debated on behalf of video as a living art in our nation’s capital and enthusiastically teaches workshops on scavenging and generative live glitch art.
INTRO TO 3D MODELING: DIGITAL SCULPTING WITH RHINO | WORKSHOP @ INTERACCESS | JULY 13, 11AM-2PM | $45 PASSHOLDERS / $60 REGULAR
Jaimie Howard is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary architect and artist who is invested in the process of discovery through making. Howard’s work often involves a dichotomy between form and material, and how space can be influenced by both. Jaimie recently completed a Master of Architecture at the University of Toronto where her thesis and most recent work involved a process of research, writing and object making surrounding the issues of waste on a global, local, and conceptual scale.
ESCHATOLOGICAL AUTOPSY: THE ACT OF SEEING THE END OF THE WORLD WITH ONE’S OWN EYES | SCREENING @ RYERSON UNIVERSITY | JULY 13, 8-10PM |$15
Anxious to Make is the collaborative practice of Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez, two commissioning bodies. Our focus is on the so-called “sharing economy” and the contemporary artists “anxiety to make” in the accelerationist, neoliberal economic landscape. While Anxious to Make’s physical existence takes many shifting forms, it often manifests as series of video commissions, downloads, online generators, workshops, net art interventions, and sweepstakes. Anxious to Make believes in absurdist extremes as way to examine contemporary realities.
Media artist, curator, arts administrator and educator Christina Battle (Edmonton, AB) has been an active member of a number of communities including Toronto, San Francisco, and Denver. She has a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Ryerson University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and is currently working toward a PhD in Art & Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario. With a practice founded in a DIY ethos she sees culture as being entirely dependent on it if it hopes to remain current and progressive. With organizing an active and critical part her practice, Christina has organized events and curated screenings that have traveled across North America. She is a contributing editor to INCITE Journal of Experimental Media. Her current collaborative project includes SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE with Serena Lee.
Thirza Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 they have been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, Hot Docs in Toronto, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany where their short Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I” Statement won honourable mention. Their work has also screened at galleries including the Mendel in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg. They completed their BFA majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and their Masters of Arts in Media Production at Ryerson University. In 1999 they were an artist in residence at Videopool and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg, where they completed Through The Looking Glass. In 2012 they were an artist in residence at Villa K. Magdalena in Hamburg, Germany, where they completed Boi Oh Boi. In 2015 they were commissioned by ImagineNATIVE to make 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99. In the summer of 2016 they began working on a 2D video game called A Bipolar Journey based on their experience learning and dealing with their bipolar disorder. It showed at ImagineNATIVE and they are planning to further develop it. They have also written three feature screenplays and sometimes does performance art. They are of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently reside in Toronto.
John Greyson is a Toronto film/video artist whose shorts, features and installations include: Fig Trees (2009, Best Documentary Teddy, Berlin FIlm Festival; Best Canadian Feature, Inside Out Festival); Proteus (2003, Best Film, Diversity Award, Barcelona Film Festival; Best Actor, Sithenghi Film Festival); The Law of Enclosures (2000, Best Actor Genie); Lilies (1996 – Best Film Genie, Best Film at festivals in Montreal, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, San Francisco); Un©ut (1997, Honourable Mention, Berlin Film Festival); Zero Patience (1993 – Best Canadian Film, Sudbury Film Festival); The Making of Monsters (1991 – Best Canadian Short, Toronto Film Festival, Best Short Film Teddy – Berlin Film Festival); and Urinal (1988 – Best Feature Teddy, Berlin Film Festival). He co-edited Queer Looks, a critical anthology on gay/lesbian film & video (Routledge, 1993), is the author of Urinal and Other Stories (Power Plant/Art Metropole, 1993), and has published essays and artists pieces in Alphabet City, Public, FUSE, and twelve critical anthologies. An associate professor in film production at York University, he was awarded the Toronto Arts Award for Film/Video, 2000, and the Bell Canada Video Art Award in 2007.
Geoffrey Pugen works with performance, narrativity and documentation. His practice explores relationships between real and staged performance, the actual and the fictional, the natural and the artificial. Pugen conceptualizes and renders situations that examine shared perceptions of how history, documentation, and simulation intersect. This approach elicits self-referential, uncanny worlds that de- and re- assemble ubiquitous narratives. His work is at once a playful and disarming invitation to these worlds, where the human self becomes an appendage of collective simulation, and objects take on qualities of consciousness. Inspired by the interpretive communities of art, sport, theatre and the documentation thereof, Pugen is interested in thinking critically about the perceptual and political conditions underlying the performance of shared meaning. Thematically, Pugen’s work confronts technologically induced transformations of the body, the impact on nature/culture, and the relationship between the virtual and the paranormal. His work is mostly project based and my aesthetic transforms through investigating, borrowing and occupying genre and cliché, exploring the myriad ways we communicate and interact with technologies.
Claire Scherzinger depicts the uncanny as a way of resisting systems of power and considering better ways to live within western civilization. Scherzinger is an interdisciplinary artist, working with drawing, painting, gaming engines and podcasting to develop the core of her practice, which is the process of building new worlds. Although she uses different mediums, she approaches her practice with the internal logic of a painter. Scherzinger has a BFA in drawing and painting and creative writing from OCAD University and an MFA from the University of Victoria. Her work has appeared in exhibitions across Canada and internationally in venues such as Mulherin Toronto and Mulherin New York; Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s Newfoundland, Forest City Gallery in London, ON, and she was a purchase prizewinner of the 2015 Royal Bank of Canada funded Painting Competition. Upcoming exhibitions include solo projects at YYZ in Toronto and the Varley Art Gallery in Markham, ON. She is also the host of the art podcast Overly Dedicated and is in the process of developing a new fictional series podcast titled ARCA-45672 with the support of the University of Victoria. She currently lives and works between Seattle, WA and Victoria, BC.
Tom Sherman is a video artist and writer. He is also a performance artist, appearing in nearly all of his videos. Much of his work is text-based. He incorporates his own writing into his video work with voice-over commentary. Nature, death, human-machine relationships, and communication are major themes in Sherman’s work. Sherman received a BFA from Eastern Michigan University. He immigrated to Canada in 1972, settling in Toronto. Through A Space Gallery, he completed his post-graduate work. He contributed regularly to CBC radio, worked as a writer and music video producer for TVO, and co-founded Fuse magazine. Although he teaches in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University, he considers the south shore of Nova Scotia his home.
BIO-SONIFICATION: NON-HUMAN COLLABORATION | WORKSHOP @ MOCA | JULY 14, 1-4PM | FREE
Tosca Terán, aka Nanotopia, is a Toronto based multidisciplinary artist. Born in San Francisco, California, Tosca relocated to Canada in 2001. Working with metals, computer coding, and animation since the mid-eighties, Tosca was introduced to glass as an artistic medium in 2004. Through developing bodies of work incorporating metal, glass, and electronics, Tosca has been awarded scholarships at The Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck Glass School and The Penland School of Crafts. Her work has been featured at SOFA New York, Culture Canada, Metalsmith Magazine, The Toronto Design Exchange, and the Memphis Metal Museum. Most recently, Tosca has been awarded residencies at Gullkistan Centre for Creativity, Nes artist residency Iceland, The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists and the Ayatana SciArt Research Program in Ottawa. Tosca founded nanopod: Hybrid Studio maker space in 2005. Continually exploring new materials and tools, Tosca started collaborating artistically with Algae, Physarum polycephalum, and Mycelium in 2016, translating biodata from non-human organisms into music.