*I will be waiting* is a browser-based work that uses Street View technology to capture the frozen timeless shores of the remote north. Despite the real-world imagery, Gkikas recontextualizes Street View to create a dreamlike atmosphere that no matter which direction you go, you always end up in the same place.

Dimitris Gkikas is a Berlin-based new media artist and designer from Athens, Greece. Gkikas manipulates and reconceptualizes found materials from the internet, such as GIFs, stock images, and videos. In doing so, he redefines their primary context and displays new sides of them. His work has been exhibited in festivals such as Electronic Language International Festival (FILE), Zukunftsvisionen, Transmediale Vorspiel, and The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale.

**Descriptive Overview of the Visuals**

To avoid repetition, this description assumes you have read the synopsis and artist bio. Because the piece is interactive, and the way the visuals behave as they do is not always clear, this is a general idea of the visuals and interactive possibilities. 

This interactive piece, such as Google Maps, shows a semi-opaque circle with a dark grey “chevron” that is movable using a computer mouse. A semi-opaque, white “x” seems to indicate where one should click, and “Copyright Google 2013” is superimposed faintly on the sky in numerous views. The user can click anywhere on the screen to indicate where you would like to go/see next. At some point, the chevron can be pointed far into the distance. At other times, it disappears when the user hovers on distant points.

The image is predominantly a vast, fairly flat expanse of snow-covered land defined by a straight black line of the horizon, at two different times of day. The first is twilight, the second, the sun is high in the sky. It is ambiguous to the describer if clicking on a certain area or an amount of time on the site defines the time shift. 

The terrain is dotted with rocks. Snow collects around them, creating a low and uneven terrain. The first images, highlighted by the sun on the horizon, highlights the rocks and snow with glints of light and shadow. When the sun is overhead, the terrain is evenly lit. Puffy white clouds float above. The available images and locations appear to have been photographed in 360 degrees from a central point. 

User interaction: If clicking straight ahead, the image goes briefly blurry as if rushing towards that point, however the image lands on the same (or almost the same) image as where you clicked from, most of the time. There are a few views that rush ahead slightly further.

If one clicks and drags the screen left or right, the vast landscape changes slightly. Going clockwise, as the sun sits on the horizon, are low grey clouds, tire tracks, a single pole or tower held by 4 wire ‘stay’s’. Attached near the lower quarter of the pole, appear to be two silver-coloured cylindrical canisters. 

Visual descriptions written by Audio Describer Kat Germain with community consultant Christine Malec.
www.katgermain.com

Online is the new IRL

I will be waiting

In *Abra*, Hiba Ali enters a conversation with Amazon’s customer-obsessed mascot, Peccy. Their discussion about working-class labor, surveillance, and bubbles (economic, social, and soap filled) literally paints the video orange. Ali contends that orange is the contemporary color of labor and surveillance, and as such is racialized and classed.

Hiba Ali is a digital artist, educator, scholar, DJ, experimental music producer and curator based across Chicago, Austin, and Toronto. Their performances and videos concern surveillance, womxn of colour, and labour. She studies Indian Ocean geographies through music, cloth and ritual. They conduct reading groups addressing digital media and workshops with open-source technology. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queens University, Kingston, Canada. They have presented their work in Chicago, Stockholm, Toronto, New York, Istanbul, São Paulo, Detroit, Dubai, Austin, Vancouver, and Portland. She has written for THE SEEN Magazine, Newcity Chicago, Art Dubai, The State, VAM Magazine, ZORA: Medium, RTV Magazine, and Topical Cream Magazine.

**Descriptive Overview of the Visuals**

The film is shot in a studio-type setting with an orange backdrop. It starts with two orange-gloved hands hitting metal rods together, for about 30 seconds. 

The sole human character is a person of Afro-South Indian, Indo-Arab and Pakistani descent. They wear a full-coverage, orange bodysuit - from collarbone, to fingertips, to toes, and an orange bathing cap that covers their neck. Their face is the only skin that shows, and at the beginning of the film, they paint their face orange. They also wear a fluorescent yellow, orange, and grey reflective vest.

There are several audible cues to visuals on screen. 

When the beat poem/song lyrics are heard, a text appears at the bottom of the screen as the character continues to paint their face orange.

Subtle exhales: Soap bubbles of different sizes appear and float around the orange character. 

Computer-generated voice: an animation of the Amazon Corporation's mascot “Peccy” appears. It is a stout oblong blob with slight protrusions for arms and legs. It has large oval eyes with big black irises. Its smile is a curved arrow - the same arrow on Amazon packaging. As Peccy speaks, the orange character kneels on an orange floor and arranges metal rods. Their arms duplicate, arranging more rods than is possible for one person. Bubbles float around them. 

As the orange character taps the rods, Peccy is slowly crushed. It flickers, shrinks, and disappears.

Visual descriptions written by Audio Describer Kat Germain with community consultant Christine Malec. 
www.katgermain.com

Abra

A drone-shot video of a whale beaching itself. A baby whale bleeding from its side. Spam and eggs on a cooker. Watching a horse drink from underwater. Angela Merkel trembling uncontrollably at a public event. A Ukranian politician thrown into a garbage bin by protesters. Slacklining between two cliffs over monster waves. Ramen flushed down the toilet.

A totally generic video with ripped stock and news footage meant for showing on Best Buy TVs. Then coronavirus hit.

Jennifer Chan makes art as social commentary on humanity, pulling from stock photography, music videos, baby animals and amateur fan videos to cast empathetic commentary on universal questions of desire, love, equality, taste, violence and suffering. She also makes websites, sculptures, installations, editioned objects. Chan had solo shows at Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Images Festival, Transmediale, Future Gallery, and Galleri CC. Her work is distributed by VTape and VideoTage.

Enigma

*surface waltz* is a physical exploration of the gap between physical movement and online, digital gestures. The work explores the desire to connect, replicate, extend, dance, and bend. The cursor's movements are tracked to the artist's hand, where it is made to navigate a physical space and engage in a physical gesture. Upon bending, there is breaking, and the line where physical movement becomes digitally augmented or fragmented is blurred. The two tools hover together and work to extend the other in a fragile dance.

Ronnie Clarke is an emerging artist based in Toronto, Ontario. Clarke's work blends elements of choreography, dance, movement, collaboration, video, and installation. She is interested in how language is manifested, translated, and mediated in the digital age. She explores the poetics of digital spaces; using movement she investigates how technology plays a role in our interactions with others. She earned her BFA at Western University in London, Ontario.

surface waltz

*Porosite* is a short video piece that exploits bugs in Google Earth to drift in and out of buildings in a dense urban environment, attempting to track an unknown 'location'. Sounds of the ocean relax the viewer through navigation, not without the occasional jarr.

Hilarey Cowan is an artist, researcher, and adaptable freelancer working between video, sculpture, and performance. After several years abroad she is currently reconnecting with her prairie roots on Treaty 4 Territory, while examining her place and voice as a settler within Canada's colonial history and reality. Her work explores ideas around labour, care, alienation, networks, geography, and touch. 

Porosite

*2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com* queers and indigenizes traditional dating site advertisements. Using a Butch NDN "lavalife" lady (performed by director Thirza Cuthand), 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com seduces the viewer into 2 Spirit "snagging and shacking up" with suggestions of nearby pipeline protests to take your date to, and helpful elders who will matchmake you and tell off disrespectful suitors. It's the culturally appropriate website all single 2 Spirit people wish existed. Following up on her video "2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99," this work examines the forces of capitalism through envisioning a "financially unfeasible" service for a small minority community.

Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally. Her work has also exhibited at galleries including the Mendel Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Canada, and The Walker Art Center. She completed her BFA majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and her Masters of Arts in Media Production at Ryerson University in 2015. She has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium, and 7a*11d. In 2017 she won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. She is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. She is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.

**Descriptive Overview of the Visuals**

This film is a series of scenes, each with one of four characters, filmed in their homes. The scenes are edited back and forth. 

According to the filmmaker, “All characters are Indigenous, I think all are Cree to be specific”. They all have dark brown hair and dark eyes unless otherwise noted. They all appear to be in their 20’s or 30’s and have varying body types. Elwood and Judith are Cis-gendered. 

Characters in order of first appearance:

Lindsay Nixon, who plays “Woman #1” (the Two-spirited person looking for love), is non-binary and goes by They/Them Pronouns. They have long hair and wear clear-framed glasses. They wear a light blue tank top. In the beginning of the film, they stand staring out the window of their house. Later they sit at a red table using a laptop, surrounded by windows that look out to greenery. Thirza Cuthand, who plays “Host” (and the person on the phone) is non-binary and goes by she/her pronouns. She has very short hair with bright red bangs. She wears a red t-shirt and black shorts, and has several tattoos on her left forearm, and near her knuckles. 

She lies on a bed and is bathed in red light. Above her, hanging on the wall, is a dreamcatcher with two deers at the centre.

Elwood Jimmy, who plays “man” has short hair with a part on the right. He wears a dark blue t-shirt and jeans. He sits on his couch on his laptop.

Judith Schuyler, who plays “Woman #2” (the date), has long dark hair and wears all-black, with a logo down her long sleeves. She wears sunglasses and carries a potted, red flower, and gives it to Woman #1. 

During the date, Woman 1 and 2 sit at the red table.

Credits:
Woman #1 Lindsay Nixon
Woman #2 Judith Schuyler
Man Elwood Jimmy
Host Thirza Cuthand
Royalty Free Music from Bensound

Visual descriptions written by Audio Describer Kat Germain with community consultant Christine Malec.
www.katgermain.com


2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com

Pewdiepie is the most famous YouTuber. He is known for his gaming play-throughs, meme reviews, media commentary, and controversial video slip ups. His lore is highly documented, his fandom is dedicated and heavily invested. Pewdiepie also sells a luxury gamer chair which is commercially successful due it to being highly memed. Pewdiepie's chair is often used as a stand in for the YouTuber himself and holds a symbolic presence. In my video, I cosplay as his gaming chair come to life and exploring the internet for the first time. I interact with the fandom by inserting known jokes, memes, and sound effects associated with Pewdiepie.

Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based video performance Jewish-Iranian Anthro Plane. Ben David creates worlds and characters that explore concepts such as anthropomorphism, cosplay, and performative personas. Ben David's characters' origin stories are established via video performance and are performed on a ongoing basis through her online presence. Her characters inhabit alternate universes but also interact with each other and already established nostalgic universes such as Pokemon and Spider-Man. In addition to this, Ben David is also a character know as "MBD" who feuds with the many manifestations of herself and the art world. 

Pewdiepie's Chair Chapter 1: Monika's Revenge

*American Mall* is a news feature that gamifies the decline of malls. Illustration and art direction by Steph Davidson, code by James Singleton, written by Kim Bhasin, Patrick Clark, and Steph Davidson, and edited by Aaron Rutkoff.

Steph Davidson is a 2D and 3D illustrator and designer from Toronto, living in New York. She works at Bloomberg in the Special Features department.

American Mall

Created in isolation during the coronovirus quarantine, this work re-enacts the Aldous Harding music video *The Barrel*. Thematically, the original song and video evoke a spirituality in dialog with nature. Having personally retreated from the city to the eastern edge of the world in an effort to escape the pandemic, my interaction and self-reflective re-portrayal of the original video work signals a personal realignment with a journey that ventures into the wild, sketching out a new dialog with the natural world, and drawing up what I can. It is a magic ritual shot in one take and edited in AfterEffects.

Hannah Epstein is an artist working in textile and digital media (AKA Fyberspace). She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2017) and a BA in Folklore & Religious Studies from Memorial University (2009). Raised in WASPy Nova Scotia, Epstein is half Latvian and half Ashkenazi Jew. Considered a “mischling” (Hitler’s term to describe children of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish parents), Epstein considers her body as proof of sexual power over concepts of racial prejudice. As a folklorist turned artist, Epstein is devoted to reimagining the iconography of popular culture, highlighting the cultural negotiation between bottom-up (folk-to-commodity) and top-down (institution-to-mashup) storytelling. She is currently represented by Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles.

Double Barrel

As Jord Farrell embarked upon a cross-Canada roadtrip to start a new life, he left behind friends without knowing if he would ever see them again. His feelings best expressed themselves in this game, which he made in the three hour trip it took for him to get back home. *Our Hearts Will Meet Again* is a pure outpouring of feeling.

Jord Farrell is a prolific artist who has made over 500 artworks, 200 games, and more than one hundred of short stories. After dropping out of university, he spent the next 5 years making art and games until
his skills had risen to a level that matched his taste. Disciplined, driven, and hungry for pushing as many limits as he can, Jord is an artist worth keeping an eye on.

Our Hearts Will Meet Again

In his tiny one room apartment, *Otaku Boi* plays video-games and fights his inner-demons. This short animated film is an adaptation of the *Otaku Boi LIVE* stage show and uses a mix of animation techniques, performance, chiptune music, and a giant puppet with a screen for an eye. This work was created at the Tama Art University's Department of Graphic Design, Tokyo.


Director & Animator: Fay Heady
Starring: Claudio Sanzana
Music: Fay Heady, Oni

Fay Heady is an animator, director, musician, and artist born in Dublin, Ireland to an Australian mother and Irish father. She studied animation at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and Tama Art University Tokyo. Since 2013 she has curated the annual Fay's Film Festival, a programme of international animated shorts which has screened in Amsterdam, Kobe, and Osaka. Fay is also the host of arts & culture TV show Future Vision Amsterdam, which broadcasts on SALTO 1 TV in Holland and youtube.com/TheChibbychannel online. Fay currently lives in Tokyo where she creates new animated works.

OTAKU BOI

Eshu Elegbara is the god of crossroads, the gatekeeper between the realm of men and that of the gods. He knows all languages and is fluent in Cosmic. If you need a favor from the gods, Eshu is your deity. But he is unreliable and loves to cause mayhem. He is full of riddles. Each question you ask him receives four answers. For every gateway that closes behind you, four portals open in front of you. Such are the ways of Eshu. Will you make it past Eshu's mischief, or are you doomed to ride on the bus of no destination for all of eternity? Play the game and find out.

Milumbe Haimbe, also known as Artistrophe, was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a BArch from the Copperbelt University in Kitwe, Zambia and also holds an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway. Milumbe is a visual artist interested in exploring diversity in popular media and culture. Her work combines several mediums including drawing, illustration, video and 3D modelling. She represents a wide intersection of cultural minorities and believes that this intersectionality places her in a prime position to lend her voice to the communities that she represents.  She has exhibited her work in numerous shows, including FOCUS 10 Art Basel, and is an alumnus of the Art Omi International Artist's Residency in New York, as well as the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. She also exhibited in the 2014 Biennale for Contemporary African Art in Dakar, and is a recipient of the 2015 Bellagio Arts Fellowship Award, the Astraea Global Arts Fund, and the Laureate du prix de la Fondation Blachere. In 2019, Milumbe attended a studio residency with the Ontario Science Centre and MOCA Toronto. That same year, she also participated in Vector Festival 2019. 

Eshu Elegbara: God of the Crossroads

*momimsafe* is an active live-stream of Amay Kataria's home studio space, where the artist spends the majority of his time in this post-COVID era. The work was developed in response to the COVID-19 lockdown, with an urgent need in mind: to be visually and physically accessible to his friends and family globally, especially his mom who has been concerned about his safety and health during this time. 


Kataria also presents an interactive virtual printer, which prints messages sent through momimsafe.live in real-time. This simulacra allows the participants to explore the entire stream of messages received during this work. 

Amay Kataria is currently an artist in residence at Mana Contemporary in Chicago. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Art & Technology Studies. He was invited as a visiting artist at the Ethereal Summit, ThoughtWorks, and Bellas Artes Outpost. He has participated in group shows at the Electromuseum, Ars Electronica, TIFA India, Art Center Nabi, ThoughtWorks, and Experimental Sound Studio. Kataria is an upcoming artist in residence at Sandnes Kommune in Stavanger, Norway and was awarded the media arts residency at Art Center Nabi in Seoul, South Korea. 

momimsafe

Inspired by the classic NFB short film Canon (directed by Norman McLaren & Grant Munro), Zeotrope is a 360° video experimental romp that will keep your head spinning. The title refers to the zoetrope device that is circular in shape, analogous to the viewing experience of a 360° video, which places viewers within a virtual sphere. This project takes advantage of the medium’s attributes, creating a moving canvas with no border. Shot during the 2020 pandemic, Samuel Kiehoon Lee plays a character caught in a cycle of exiting without leaving. During the lockdown we want freedom to roam and explore more than ever. However, Lee's character loops constantly—in one door, then out another—always remaining within the same place.


Artist-filmmaker Samuel Kiehoon Lee, born and raised in Toronto, spent 12 years living in Seoul where he shot the feature film GYOPO, which recently premiered at the Toronto ReelAsian International Film Festival (garnering a 4 star review from NOW Magazine). He is currently completing York University's MFA in Film, where he is developing his thesis project Hallway. Lee is also a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Director’s Lab. A collection of Lee’s experimental works were showcased on the CBC’s The Exhibitionists, where Lee was a featured Artist in Residence. Lee’s recent 360° video Zoetrope is his first foray into the world of VR art-making.

**Descriptive Overview of the Visuals**

To avoid repetition, this description assumes you have read the synopsis and artist bio. Because the piece is interactive, and the way the visuals behave as they do is not always clear, this is a general idea of the visuals and interactive possibilities. 

Samuel Kiehoon Lee's unnamed character is a university-aged Korean-Canadian with a slender build. He wears black framed glasses and his straight black hair is in a high ponytail. He wears a black suit, dark red button down and black socks with no shoes. He wears a silver band on the middle finger of his right hand.

The piece is filmed in a hallway in a house, at the top of a light wood staircase. The hall floor matches the light wood of the stairs and bannister. The stair landing and light yellow hall are in a t-shape, with five light yellow doors. Some of the brass-coloured, round door knobs are on the right, some on the left. One door at the end of the hall on the right has a black dot where the handle would be. 

The camera axis remains the same, but by using a computer mouse, the user is able to manipulate the view in all directions. 

The first view is at the top of the stair landing. Samuel’s character comes up the stairs and walks past the camera.

The rest of the piece, depending on where the user directs their view,  involves Samuel’s character tiptoeing in and out, forwards and backwards, through the doors, which he closes behind him. Sometimes he peers out of the door before continuing.

Visual descriptions written by Audio Describer Kat Germain with community consultant Christine Malec.
www.katgermain.com 

Zoetrope

*Cloud Gazer* is an immersive, phantasmagoric piece that explores how the illusionary aspects of projection can alter the architectural components of space. Images of a skyline are projected into the upper corner of a room to create a temporary reality where interior and exterior environments are fluid. This piece contains environmental system and textures, but has no depreciatory dimension, and, is only modeled from our perceptions of nature. The immersive quality and temporal openness of the projection beckons viewers to gaze upward and take delight in becoming absorbed in a display while the positioning of the work references the design of a security mirror, drawing a duality between the seduction of sanctuary and surveillance.

This work will be livestreamed on this page on Monday, July 20 from 11am-11pm EST.

Gina Luke is a multidisciplinary artist, who recently completed a BFA with honours at the University of Victoria’s Visual Arts program. Her artistic practice explores the integration of drawing with sculptural video installations. Luke uses drawing as a basis to explore abstract possibilities that can be expressed in a new media art practice. Her artwork largely explores the theme of the manipulation of the natural environment through digital animation. Her exhibition practice is based on Vancouver Island where she has also recently worked as a curator with the Victoria Film Festival.

Cloud Gazer

*Are We Having Fun Yet?* is an interactive web work that considers the confluence of art, influencer marketing, and selfies. Referencing first person shooter video games, a user is invited to traverse a digitally-modelled art gallery, armed only with a selfie stick. The works on display include digital cultural ephemera, art works with exceptional brand recognition, and politically themed original works. Using a webcam, users can snap selfies of themselves from behind or in front of their virtual iPhone, supporting their favourite digital cause, or posed with famous works of art. Centrally looming over the digital gallery is a barbed-wired panopticon tower, rigged with a jumbotron that projects the user's camera feed back at them. The game is accompanied by an original score and a sound piece composed of audio recordings of influencer marketers from podcasts, YouTube, and Instagram. The sound piece exposes the entrepreneurial ideology behind influencer culture and art careerism. It also reveals the aspirational desire that drives self-presentation on social media. Presenting ourselves digitally both articulates the self-as-brand and as a vector of clout measured by likes and follows, and the underlying potential to monetize the self or one’s digital labour. It further functions as a mechanism of alienation, articulating complex subjects as insular brands, whose thoughts, politics, and self-narrativization are levelled as relative aesthetic objects. In a context where entrepreneurialism is a dominant ideology, pursuing clout seems to be a way to build for oneself a career or presence. Influencers, artists, and individuals alike actively and passively engage in an economy that pivots on the aspirational desire of many, for the monetary benefit of few.

Cale Weir and Ben McCarthy are electronic musicians and digital artists from Toronto. While McCarthy is a victim of the rise-and grind mindset, Weir huddles safely in a carapace of irony-fostered dissociation. Compulsively online, they have amassed thousands of combined likes and follows, and with the help of credit cards and payment plans have managed not to be evicted during the COVID lockdown. They both make art about the ramifications of digital media on the labour ecology and the embodied subject.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

In a world gone wrong, what will you do to survive? There's only so much one person can do to save the world. You can however, save yourself. 

*Get Ripped 4 the Apocalypse* responds to the numerous existential fears of collapse and global catastrophe from climate change to nuclear war. The work is part loving critique of fitness culture as the cure-all for the good life, part genuine health promotion of our bodies as sources of strength in a world of increasing precarity. *Get Ripped 4 the Apocalypse* wants you to punch, kick, and lift your way to a better future uniting preppers and workout videos into a weird and sweaty bliss. 



Amelia Merhar is a Toronto/Whitehorse based artist with certifications in everything from train conducting to personal training. Over the past few years she has been exploring themes of the body, health, travel, research, and knowledge translation. Humour is part of her approach, whether in video, performance, music, or sound art. Recently her video works have screened at Available Light Film Festival, Dawson City International Short Film Festival, Brave New Works and End of Days Film Festival. She is presently a PhD Candidate in Human Geography at University of Waterloo, researching in the embodiment of transience among touring musicians in Canada. 

**Descriptive Overview of the Visuals**

The film starts with a series of still, colour photographs or drawings of disasters. The majority of the film is hand-held footage of three women working out in a dump, using various features and objects to work out in, with, or on. 

The 25-second opening sequence includes: The planet earth with a fiery hole, several images of meteors raining down on grey sky scrapers. They have holes in them, and on fire. U.F.Os hover above a city, one beams a light down on a building with fire and smoke. Huge waves. A fire ball in the midst of burnt trees. A person in a vintage gas mask, a pile of old computers, a finger reaches towards a red button, the vertebrae of an animal on the ground, and a pile of construction refuse - in the distance a tree line. Three women in work out clothes stretch in the area between the trees and the pile. 

The three women have differing body sizes and cultural backgrounds. They wear 80’s tight-fitting work out gear with a belt or fanny pack, sweat bands, sunglasses, and running shoes.

They stretch on a dumpster, throw tires, lift wheel rims, use various objects as kettle bells and hold pipes as they jump in slow motion off of a hill in front of a pile of refrigerators. 

For their snack, they pluck purple flowers from a stalk and eat them. 

Occasionally a honey-yellow/ brown medium-sized dog is shown chewing on a stuffed lion or a stick. 

Visual descriptions written by Audio Describer Kat Germain with community consultant Christine Malec.
www.katgermain.com 



Get Ripped 4 the Apocalypse

In the beginning, there was nothing. You can get nothing easily.

Since completing his studies in film production at Concordia University, Roberto Santaguida's films and videos have been shown at more than 300 international festivals around the world. He has also taken part in artist residencies in numberous countries, including Iran, Romania, Germany, Norway, and Australia. Roberto is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship, and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.

The Universe According to Dan Buckley

An interactive web-based queer ASMR piece using acoustic close-ups to show how the sum of the parts of a queer body (visible and audible) is read subconsciously in order for queerness or gender to be perceived. This work brings those body parts (hair on the upper lip, legs) and accessories of queer life (sequins, queer books, latex gloves) to the foreground. The work addresses how the digitization of human connection (all the more relevant during the COVID pandemic) is mediated through the touch of mouse clicks and how audio, through calming sensual whispers, can bring us (queer bodies) a sense of interconnection in an ever more isolating world.

Additional clips by: Ann Antidote & Lun Ário, Mishann Lau & K.I., Mimi Monstroe, and Harvey Rabbit.

Having grown up in an immigrant family with positive encouragement to try everything, and with the economic necessity to use whatever is at hand (including a home photography darkroom), Juli Saragosa was determined to become an artist from an early age. Moving images became the passion of this eternally curious DIY experimenter. Saragosa's short films been shown at festivals in Milan, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Tunis, and Irkutsk. In 2005, Saragosa's Amoré won the Best Canadian Film award at Toronto’s International One-Minute Film Festival and in 2011, it won the Jury Prize for Experimental Film at the Toronto Underground Film Festival. From 2013-2015, Saragosa was involved as an artist in the international Performigrations project where they became interested in the interactive potential of video and audio. 

Let Me In

*An/Other* is a short 3D interactive game for social change about a typical day.

Jordan Sparks is a multimedia artist, designer, and educator that uses games and media to entertain and inspire social change. Sparks has a Masters in Media Production and BFA in New Media. Amongst his diverse range of projects, Sparks is widely known for his game An/Other and research on games for social change. As an educator, Sparks has engaged thousands of people across Ontario through the Hand Eye Society and several other organizations/institutions such as the Royal Ontario Museum, Sheridan College, and Ryerson University. Sparks aims to expand the public perception of games by delivering engaging, thought-provoking experiences.

An/Other

*232henley* is a playable 3D sketch of the house that artist Lee Tusman lived in throughout most of his childhood. The work is an attempt to capture the artist's memory of the place even as it fades further and further away in his memory. As he has been confined to a small space under COVID-19, Tusman meditates on home and remembering the places most important to him. In *232henley*, this memory doesn't include all of the events and milestones of the artist's family that occurred in this space as much as the feeling of the space itself. All sketches were created in Tusman's notebook and photographed with his phone, as access to other cameras and equipment remains difficult while staying inside.

Lee Tusman is an artist, programmer and educator interested in applying the radical ethos of collectives and DIY culture to the creation of digital art, its aesthetics, and methods of open-source distribution. His artistic output includes interactive media, video art, net art, experimental videogames, sound art, websites, twitter bots, and pirate radio stations. He enjoys working collaboratively and prototyping projects around self-identity, mistranslation and new methods of communication in contemporary internet culture. He is an organizer at Babycastles videogame art space and an educator at Purchase College where he currently teaches New Directions in Virtual Space.

232henley

Qirou Yang's hometown of Donghai, China is the site of the artist's childhood memories as well as an example of the 'ghost zone' phenomenon, in which new housing developments outnumber their demand, eroding ideals of home and community as these units sit vacant.* How to be Satiated in the Dark* is a docu-fictional project that Yang began producing in the summer of 2019. By tracing her dream, family history, and deepest fragmented subconscious memories of her childhood home, Yang reveals her psychological belonging to her provenance. By photographing and constructing photographs from her hometown, Yang creates a virtual replica of Donghai's ghost zone. The process of virtually moving within the abstract and pixelated computer-generated buildings resembles uncertain longing: Yang wanders in the familiar yet detached space which exists as an anchor in her life. *How to be Satiated in the Dark* focuses on delivering a story that provokes the viewers’ phenomenological contemplation between their self-perception and their living space.

Qirou Yang is a Toronto-based multimedia artist, who originally came from the south of China. Her practice, which is mainly research-based and process-oriented, is mostly driven by tracing her personal memory and self-perception, aligning the metaphoric narratives and place, and exploring the contradiction between living environment and societal context. In her MFA thesis project How to be Satiated in the Dark, she expands her practices by utilizing photogrammetry, SFX, and 3D animation. Through tracing her dream, memory of living experience at her childhood home, and family history, she creates a docu-fictional project that not only navigates the social context of the “ghost zone” in her hometown, but also reveals her psychological belonging that is attached to her provenance.

How To Be Satiated After Dark

Documentary + participatory performance by Ayodele Hudlin, Natalie Logan, Julie Reich (Bile Sister), and Daniel Rotsztain, featuring designs by Renika Hall, Lana Kuidir, and Diseiye Thompson.

In search of the ultimate expressions of COVID-inspired trends, looks, and styles, COVIDFASHION presents a short documentary featuring street interviews and conversations with fashion designers, culminating in a live interactive pageant and dance party on Thursday, July 23, 2020. 

Hosted by fashion designer Ayodele Hudlin, and with an original musical score by Julie Reich, the documentary explores how people across Toronto—from downtown to uptown, on main streets and in malls—have adapted their lives and style to the new world where not keeping your distance is the ultimate faux pas. Woven into the street style interviews, the documentary will feature COVID-inspired garments created by three Toronto fashion designers—Renika Hall, Lana Kuidir, and Diseiye Thompson—accompanied by short interviews with each designer exploring the concepts behind their creations. 

Live performance Thursday, July 23, 2020 | 8pm-9:30pm EST
Featuring crowd-sourced COVID-inspired fashions and a virtual dance party with Bile Sister aka DJ Garbage Body



**Ayodele Hudlin**, owner of Zipette, is a designer of women and girls fashion and graduate from George Brown College Fashion Arts Program. Zipette offers interchangeable styles that focuses on minimization and sustainability, while bringing quality and fun to girls dresses. Zipette has gone on to participate in marketing events like The One of A Kind Show and The Bump to Baby Show. Ayodele is a member of DMZ, one of Canada’s top start-up mentorship programs for entrepreneurs in technology and fashion at Ryerson University. Ayodele is an advocate for the community and has a passion for teaching children sewing as an art and craft so they can integrate it into their lives and are able to express themselves freely. Working with Artstarts over the years, she has collaborated with other talented artist to present The Colour Wheel Project at Nuit Blanche 2019. Ayodele hopes to inspire others through her work and provide a platform for people to express themselves through fashion and art.

**Natalie Logan** is a documentarian and visual artist who specializes in light sensitive recording media from digital cameras to analog holography. In addition to completing an Honours BA at the University of Toronto she has a Masters in Fine Art from Ryerson University in Documentary Media. Natalie has been a longstanding Research Assistant at Ontario College of Art & Design University’s PHASE Lab (Prototype Holographics for Art and Science Explorations). Outside of academia, Natalie has studied with notable artists and filmmakers such as Paolo Soleri and Werner Herzog. She has participated in international holography residencies such as August Muth’s Light Foundry in Santa Fe and Guillermo Heinze’s Light Kitchen in Germany. As a freelance documentarian Natalie has worked with many arts organizations some of which include InterAccess, Gardiner Museum, Power Plant, CBC Arts, Mercer Union and Evergreen Brickworks.

**Julie Reich**  is a multifaceted producer/composer. As a musician, Reich’s alias is Bile Sister, and performs with large acts such as King Cobb Steelie and Lust for Youth. Festivals include NXNE, POP Montreal Festival, and Big on Bloor. DJ performances include AGO’s First Thursdays (DJ Garbage Body). Releases include Faucet (Healing Power Records), a 7” (Personal Records), and upcoming record TBA. Reich tours internationally as backup singer in New York’s Chandra, performing recently at Primavera Sound and Rough Trade Records. Reich produced and composed the soundtrack for indie video-game Disconicon (Laura Dobson, 2018) and is composing the score and sound design for video-game, SEED (Brendan Lehman). She produced/composed the score for upcoming documentary, Trappist Symphony (Kenn Fisher, Natalie Logan), and is producing/composing the documentary score and sound design for *There is No Coming and There is No Going* (Zeesy Powers).

**Daniel Rotsztain** is the Urban Geographer, an artist, writer and cartographer whose work examines our relationship to the places we inhabit. The author and illustrator of All the Libraries Toronto and A Colourful History Toronto, Daniel’s work has also been featured in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and a regular segment on CBC Radio's Here and Now. As a frequenter of libraries, malls, and strip malls, Daniel's projects seek to understand and support the diverse settings of the city’s public life through walking tours, residencies, and landscape interventions. He is the co-lead of plazaPOPS, an initiative to recognize and enhance strip mall parking lots as community gathering spaces in Toronto's inner suburbs.


COVIDFASHION AUDIENCE SUBMISSIONS:

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COVIDFASHION

*Goose Cakes* is an attempt to learn more about the geese in our proximity in order to gift them a cupcake specific to their dietary needs and wants. 

This work will conclude with a live-streamed artist tour, talk, and goose feeding on Monday, July 20, 2020, where the geese will be presented with a deconstructed corn bread tartar. Fuh and Lynch will begin their tour at the north west corner of High Park, and follow the shore of Grenadier pond towards the park's main goose settlement. All are invited to follow online via Instagram live: [@interaccessto](https://www.instagram.com/interaccessto/) and [@hearth.garage](https://www.instagram.com/hearth.garage/).

This event is presented in partnership with Hearth alongside their wiki exhibition [*view recent changes*](https://2020.vectorfestival.org/exhibition/2), exhibited as part of Vector Festival 2020: Online Edition.

Monday, July 20, 2020 | 2pm-3pm EST


Simon Fuh is an artist from Regina living and working in Toronto. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto, where he recently received the Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Recent exhibitions include Eternal Wish Radio, Down the Rabbit Hole, 330g, Saskatoon; unscheduled arrivals, Bunker 2, Toronto; Ibid., Ibid., Regina; and The Greatest of All Time, Flux Gallery, Winnipeg. 

Rowan Lynch is an arts worker and artist from Hamilton, based in Toronto. They are a graduate of OCADU’s Criticism and Curatorial Studies program and the 2018 recipient of OCADU’s medal in Criticism and Curatorial Studies. They have staged independant projects with the Hamilton Audio Visual Node (HAVN), various OCADU Galleries, and Xpace Cultural Centre, and have worked with Art Metropole, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, the Peripheral Review, and 8eleven gallery.


Goose Cakes

The state of the world forces three artists to become unpaid interns inside their own virtual reality project. Their fantastical new employers drop the worst crisis they have ever suffered right onto the new intern’s live/work cubicle desks. They must now stop a wild brand on a rampage or suffer the consequences of a changing world around them. Join us for this VR performance, occurring in VRChat and streamed to Twitch, about a place, and an app, called ‘Intern Purgatory’.

Thursday, July 16, 2020 | 7pm-9pm EST

**Intern Purgatory: A Covid-19 VRChat Story**
**Performance by Tough Guy Mountain (Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, and Iain Soder)**

Tough Guy Mountain is a Toronto-based art collective making interactive performance art about unpaid internships. Working together since 2012, they have created video games, musical theatre, and gallery exhibits in which audiences explore a fantasy world of corporate serfdom. The collective has exhibited their work and performed across Canada and the United States.

Intern Purgatory: A Covid-19 VRChat Story

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Composed and performed in self-isolation using saxophone, clarinet, interactive electronics, and video, *False Positive* refers to the need for rapid and mass testing of COVID-19 and responds to the current state of artistic creation and consumption. We no longer have access to in-person collaborations and concerts and are instead driven to online platforms. We now listen and watch through compressed live streams, and are at the whim of our internet connections to determine the quality of our experiences. *False Positive* uses recordings of IRL artistic collaborations and workshops as sound samples that are processed and distorted, often beyond recognition, to reflect on the changes facing our daily lives and social interactions.

Friday, July 17, 2020 | 9pm-9:30pm EST



Canadian saxophonist and composer **Justin Massey** is a Toronto-based interpreter of contemporary music. Obsessed with creating new sonorities and textures through the saxophone, Justin searches for obscure and unexplored sounds offered by the instrument and its unparalleled potential to create visceral and emotional music. Justin collaborates closely with composers in search of these new sounds, often through electronic manipulation of the saxophone. Recently, Justin has commissioned and premiered new works for saxophone and live electronics by Carolyn Borcherding, Camila Agosto, Brian Lee Topp, Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie, and Jason Charney. He is currently working in collaboration with Camila Agosto to create and perform the five movement Paracusia series for saxophone and live electronics.

False Positive

Let's poke fun at ourselves and make light of a truly dark subject, the end of humanity—especially while staying at home during a pandemic. Perhaps this is a moment where we can reconsider how to do better for the planet. Indigenous people have always been the land and water protectors, yet colonization has attempted to diminish their numbers with the intent to destroy through cultural genocide. Part installation and part live performance, ishkwe-ayi'ii looks at the global climate crisis through an Indigenous lens and offers the question: is the apocalypse coming for humanity if we don’t fix this soon?

Created, Performed, Sound Designed and Composed by Olivia Shortt

Stage Manager: Jennifer Collins

Saturday, July 18, 2020 | 7pm-7:30pm EST

**Olivia Shortt** (they/she, Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) is a Tkarón:to-based multi-disciplinary performing artist. They are a saxophonist, vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, curator, activist, and producer. Highlights from Shortt's practice include their film debut acting and playing saxophone in acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film Guest of Honour; their Lincoln Center debut with the International Contemporary Ensemble; and recording an album two kilometres underground with their duo Stereoscope in the SnoLAB (a Neutrino Lab in Northern Ontario, Canada). Shortt is a current member of the JACK Studio working with NYC-based JACK Quartet and created a musical land acknowledgment for the students of Face The Music program (NYC) and the JACK Quartet called Mana-Hatta; they are also collaborating on a new work 'the body remembers' for the JACK Quartet. Shortt has been named a 2020 cohort member of Why Not Theatre's ThisGEN Fellowship in Sound Design and are currently being mentored by sound designer and composer Elisheba Ittoop.

ishkwe-ayi'ii

Life isn't still. Life is constant motion.
 
*is this real life drawing* and *unstill life drawing* are two back-to-back participatory live-streamed performances that reimagine the practice of life drawing. The live-stream feed is disrupted and manipulated using a variety of glitches, obscuring any definitive visual perceptions to encourage alternative modes of interpretation. Instead of traditionally ‘drawing’ what one sees, participants are invited to write what they see in order to include reflections outside of the parameters of eyesight.
  
Should they feel comfortable, participants can share their pieces with the artist and Vector Festival in what becomes a unique collaborative exercise that questions our current realities and notions of stasis. Participants can choose to submit their work under their name, or do so anonymously. Shared pieces of all mediums will be displayed on 2020.vectorfestival.org until August 13, 2020.
  
In the first session, *is this real life drawing*, a nude model acts as artist and performer, subverting masculine vantages by controlling the frame through which they are viewed. The second session, *unstill life drawing*, utilizes an array of fluctuating props to interrupt typical life drawing scenes with movement and satire. 
 
Please note that the event will involve live nudity, digitally obscured by glitches. 
 
**Sunday, July 19, 2020 | 11am-1pm EST**



**Keiko Hart** practices pronunciations of self through expressions of language, race, gender and queerness. They employ digitally mediated performances to explore in-between spaces that defy definition.


**CHECK OUT THE PARTICIPANTS' WRITTEN AND VISUAL RESPONSES BELOW:** 

![KeikoHart_Participant_Kimya_Ness_44d8c432ad](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655588/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Kimya_Ness_44d8c432ad_bf12b6ec50.jpg)
Kimya Ness

![KeikoHart_Participant_Cara_Marks_328b0325b1](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655584/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Cara_Marks_328b0325b1_d6890fd26d.jpg)
Cara Marks

![KeikoHart_Participant_Keenan_Mittag_Degala_2_3f8563d8b2](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655588/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Keenan_Mittag_Degala_2_3f8563d8b2_37a33ea8ec.jpg)
Keenan Mittag-Degala

![KeikoHart_Participant_Keenan_Mittag_Degala_1_61a0667553](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655588/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Keenan_Mittag_Degala_1_61a0667553_c65acabf8b.jpg)
Keenan Mittag-Degala

![KeikoHart_Participant_Marisa_Fulper_Estrada_3_55aa87ba3e](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655590/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Marisa_Fulper_Estrada_3_55aa87ba3e_dd52633eb2.jpg)
Marisa Fulper Estrada

![KeikoHart_Participant_Marisa_Fulper_Estrada_4_e948e122f5](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655584/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Marisa_Fulper_Estrada_4_e948e122f5_ea0df78c25.jpg)
Marisa Fulper Estrada

![KeikoHart_Participant_Marisa_Fulper_Estrada_1_1aa2eed54a](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655588/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Marisa_Fulper_Estrada_1_1aa2eed54a_dc598c491b.jpg)
Marisa Fulper Estrada

![KeikoHart_Participant_Deniz_Johns_1_5491eff521](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655584/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Deniz_Johns_1_5491eff521_60cf4dc2d0.jpg)
Deniz Johns

![KeikoHart_Participant_Deniz_Johns_2_ad8dab75fa](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655587/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Deniz_Johns_2_ad8dab75fa_be635f997f.jpg)
Deniz Johns

![KeikoHart_Participant_Anonymous_1_1a864d2544](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655584/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Anonymous_1_1a864d2544_57f36aca63.jpg)
Anonymous

![KeikoHart_Participant_Anonymous_2_0_3cd2457a39](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655584/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Anonymous_2_0_3cd2457a39_aa9e0ad5d0.jpg)
![KeikoHart_Participant_Anonymous_2_1_ad80a86a53](https://res.cloudinary.com/drp5jyrs5/image/upload/v1596655584/Keiko_Hart_Participant_Anonymous_2_1_ad80a86a53_91eff64b20.jpg)
Anonymous

<iframe src="https://editor.p5js.org/liuleslie/embed/XxCnjgbui" width="600" height="400"></iframe>
Leslie Liu

is this real life drawing + unstill life drawing

Visuals by Meghan Cheng
Music by Cheryl O (cello) and Meghan Cheng (violin)

*Luna* breaks down the distinction between performer and audience member in a live-streamed user-driven concert experience. In a time when physical distancing measures have interrupted experiences of art and live music, Luna examines the possibilities for connection and shared experiences in this interactive and abstract virtual environment. In this piece, a dark space is activated with light and colour through audio-reactive generative visuals. Using commands in Twitch chat, the audience can sample audio recorded from the unQuartet, a Toronto-based improvising string trio, creating a real-time collaborative audio visual experience.

The work consists of four 22-minute sessions: Allegro Ma Non Troppo, Adagio-esque, Rondo (or not), and Allegroish-ish. Audience members may control the sounds played in each session using the commands listed below. Each command will play a different musical gesture. Enter these commands into the Twitch live stream chat (including the hashtag) to create an audio-visual medley. 

Please note that participants must be logged into Twitch to use the chat feature

Commands:
- #cello_jump 
- #cello_creaky 
- #cello_wandering 
- #cello_longing 
- #cello_vast 
- #cello_aggression 
- #cello_ominous 
- #cello_frenzy
- #violin_shriek 
- #violin_airy 
- #violin_sad
- #violin_still 
- #violin_pluck 
- #violin_flowing 
- #violin_eerie 
- #violin_scratchy

Sunday, July 19, 2020 | 6:30pm-8pm EST


Ping Interactive is a new Toronto-based creative technology studio started by **Meghan Cheng** that specializes in blending digital and physical installations that immerse audiences in interactive sound, light and movement. Cheng has worked with artists like Sasha Berliner, unQuartet, Laura Swankey, and provided holistic services and installations for Women From Space Festival, Gallery 345, and 918 Bathurst Cultural Centre. She believes in building meaningful relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world around us through shared, imaginative experiences. Cheng is currently working to develop audio-reactive light installations for immersive concerts, gallery spaces, and public spaces. 

From Toronto, cellist ** Cheryl O** is a dedicated multi-media collaborator blending her improvisations with live theatre, dance, film, circus arts, text, poetry, painting and electronica. She is a regular performer for Contact Dance, CoExistDance, and performs weekly circus ambience performance classes at Hercinia Arts Collective, where she continues to explore the deep relationships between sound, movement, time and energy. She also explores this synergy with spoken word and poetry artists throughout the city playing both acoustic cello and with pedals and loops. Cheryl is a founding member of unQuartet; an improvising string trio creating film scores and live performances. Cheryl also receives commissions for dance and circus projects aand will be part of several granted projects for the 2021 season, including ‘TAURA’ an exciting Flamenco dance work with Sofi Gudiño, an extended dance piece depicting both the bull and the bull fighter in a female form. 

Luna

This panel brings together several artists contributing to this year’s festival, for a chance to introduce their work and discuss the challenges and opportunities of making art during a pandemic, connecting with art communities across digital divides, and other issues related to this year’s festival theme.

Sunday, July 19, 2020 | 2pm-4pm EST

Moderator: **Katie Micak** has a multifaceted arts career with a focus on emerging digital art practices. She is a co-founder of Vector Festival and of Toronto Kids Digital Festival and is currently the Exhibitions Curator and Residency Coordinator at the Living Arts Centre as part of the City of Mississauga. Micak designed exhibitions and presentations at The Phillips Collection (Washington), assisted at Art in General and the Moving Images Festival (New York), and Directed Spark Contemporary (Syracuse) and Propeller Gallery (Toronto). She holds an MFA from Syracuse University in Transmedia, and an MA from OCADU’s Digital Futures program.

**Maya Ben David** (MBD) is a Toronto-based video performance Jewish-Iranian Anthro Plane. Ben David creates worlds and characters that explore concepts such as anthropomorphism, cosplay, and performative personas. Ben David's characters' origin stories are established via video performance and are performed on a ongoing basis through her online presence. Her characters inhabit alternate universes but also interact with each other and already established nostalgic universes such as Pokemon and Spider-Man. In addition to this, Ben David is also a character know as "MBD" who feuds with the many manifestations of herself and the art world. 

**Milumbe Haimbe**, also known as Artistrophe, was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a BArch from the Copperbelt University in Kitwe, Zambia and also holds an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway. Milumbe is a visual artist interested in exploring diversity in popular media and culture. Her work combines several mediums including drawing, illustration, video and 3D modelling. She represents a wide intersection of cultural minorities and believes that this intersectionality places her in a prime position to lend her voice to the communities that she represents.  She has exhibited her work in numerous shows, including FOCUS 10 Art Basel, and is an alumnus of the Art Omi International Artist's Residency in New York, as well as the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. She also exhibited in the 2014 Biennale for Contemporary African Art in Dakar, and is a recipient of the 2015 Bellagio Arts Fellowship Award, the Astraea Global Arts Fund, and the Laureate du prix de la Fondation Blachere. In 2019, Milumbe attended a studio residency with the Ontario Science Centre and MOCA Toronto. That same year, she also participated in Vector Festival 2019. 

**Sameen Mahboubi** is an emerging art programer from Hamilton based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Mahboubi is working towards a BA in Visual Critical Studies from OCADU and previously holds a diploma in Social Service Work from Mohawk College. Mahboubi is interested in ecology, geography, urbanism, and the relationships we all share with public space. 

**Jordan Shaw** is an internationally exhibited artist and creative technologist raised and currently based in Toronto, Canada. He received his MFA from OCAD University’s Digital Futures program exhibiting his thesis project, Habitual Instinct, in 2017 during Vector Festival at InterAccess. Before that, he completed his undergraduate degree at Carleton University and Algonquin College, where his final installation exhibited at ACM SIGGRAPH.

The Virtual and the Viral: Digital Arts Practices

The events of this year have frequently been called “unprecedented.” On a scale of 0 to 100, Google Trends reports a worldwide spike in use of that term between the beginning and end of March, with interest peaking at 100 between March 22-28, 2020. Admittedly, the year has been filled with what seems to be unsolicited and surprising events. It’s difficult not to be taken aback by each new issue that arises, and for that reason, “unprecedented” seems appropriate. But while this descriptive motif fits the rhetorical bill of crisis reporting, it also fails to acknowledge the ongoing timelines of resilience and violence that underlie the seemingly anomalous. 

Related to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of matrix thinking offers a way to address how various space-time networks of systemic oppression and violence influence and develop one another. Through matrix thinking, the oft-siloed geographies and histories of racism, the pandemic, and environmental destruction can be navigated holistically. Taking the transgenerational and intersectional dimensions of community organizing into account, the “emerging” is no longer just about new acts and legacies of change, but the deep histories of organized resilience (and violence) that beget and inform liberatory strategies of the present and future. In this context, speakers Geneviève Wallen, Fallon Simard, Ashley Jane Lewis, and Syrus Marcus Ware address the multidimensional, multiscalar registers of their care and community work.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020 | 3pm-4:30pm EST

**Resource document:  https://bit.ly/304FtAI**

Moderator: **Belinda Kwan** is a Chinese-Canadian settler curator interested in exhibitionary forms of critique, pedagogy, and advocacy. Her research-based practice explores how processes of knowledge translation and legitimization produce or influence transgenerational trauma. More recently, her work has focused on how notions of scientific and mathematic ‘objectivity’ shape the socio-political imaginary. She has curated for the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts (int’l); Varley Art Gallery (Markham); Art Gallery of York University (Toronto); and Myseum of Toronto. She is a Co-Director at Bunker 2 Contemporary Art Container and a board member of Trinity Square Video (Toronto).

**Ashley Jane Lewis** is a new media artist with a focus on speculative design and tech education. Her artistic practice explores the black diaspora of the past, present and future through computational and analog mediums including science fiction, networked devices, machine learning, data weaving, food design, bio art and performance. Her award winning work has exhibited in both Canada and the US, most notably on the White House website during the Obama presidency. As an educator, Ashley has taught more than 3500 young people how to code, landing her on the 2016 Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada as well as earning her press coverage as a tech activist from outlets like Reader’s Digest, Huffington Post, and Metro News. She is proud of the work she has done with Dan Shiffman and ml5.org, a platform offering “friendly machine learning for the web” in order to lower barriers to entry into creative computing. Ashley holds a BFA in New Media from Ryerson University in Toronto and just completed a Master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunications at ITP in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

**Fallon Simard**’s memes and videos capture the conflicts created by colonialism, land, politics, and capitalism. The Anishinaabe-Metis artist creates moving and still images as an embodied and visceral response to Indigenous identity that dispels current tropes of Indigeneity. Simard’s work instead investigates intensity and burden as products of injustice(s), human rights violations, and colonial violence. In his videos and memes, Simard illustrates bad feelings and harms from different Indigenous contexts to reveal new modes and effects of colonial-capital-racial policy. Simard’s work mobilizes grief, intensity, and trauma as mitigation tools to colonial-capital policy. Fallon Simard additionally creates policy recommendations into legislation, services, programs, and organizations to advocate for the human rights and substantive equality of Two Spirit, Queer and Trans Indigenous people. 

**Geneviève Wallen** is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer. She obtained a BFA in Art History at Concordia University (2012) and a MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University (2015). Wallen's practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, BIPOC alternative futurities and healing platforms. Her ongoing research focuses on the notion of longevity as a methodology for resistance and care work in the arts. Her most recent curated exhibition, Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold (2020), was on view at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. Wallen contributed essays for C magazine and the anthology Other Places;Reflections on Media Arts in Canada, edited by Deanna Bowen. She is an Exhibition Coordinator at Fofa Gallery, a member of YTB (Younger than Beyoncé) Collective, and is the co-initiator (with Marsya Maharani) of Souped Up a thematic dinner series conceived to carve spaces for care and support building among BIPOC curators and cultural workers

**Syrus Marcus Ware** is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture, and he’s shown widely in galleries and festivals across Canada. He is part of the Perfor-mance Disability Art Collective and a core-team member of Black Lives Matter – Toronto. He has won several recognitions including the TD Diversity Award 2017, “Best Queer Activist” NOW Magazine 2005, and the Steinert and Ferreiro Award 2012. 

Image: *Mushroomed*, Catherine Lambert, 2016. @zinjanthropus13

Anti-Racist Artist Networks: Emerging Forms Of Community, Solidarity, and Care

Bringing together several contributors to this year’s live performance segment of Vector Festival, on this panel we explore the new kinds of digitally-bound performance art and participative art that are developing at a moment when computers seem to have become the only means of being in the presence of others.

Thursday, July 23, 2020 | 5pm-7pm EST

Moderator: **Katie Micak** has a multifaceted arts career with a focus on emerging digital art practices. She is a co-founder of Vector Festival and of Toronto Kids Digital Festival and is currently the Exhibitions Curator and Residency Coordinator at the Living Arts Centre as part of the City of Mississauga. Micak designed exhibitions and presentations at The Phillips Collection (Washington), assisted at Art in General and the Moving Images Festival (New York), and Directed Spark Contemporary (Syracuse) and Propeller Gallery (Toronto). She holds an MFA from Syracuse University in Transmedia, and an MA from OCADU’s Digital Futures program.

**Cat Bluemke** is a member of Tough Guy Mountain, a Toronto-based art collective making interactive performance art about unpaid internships. Working together since 2012, they have created video games, musical theatre, and gallery exhibits in which audiences explore a fantasy world of corporate serfdom. The collective has exhibited their work and performed across Canada and the United States.

**Keiko Hart** practices pronunciations of self through expression of language, race, gender and queerness. They employ digitally mediated performances to explore in-between spaces that defy definition. By creating participative and collaborative experiences, they invite spectators to (re)consider their relationships to space and narrative. Since completing their MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University in 2019, they have gone on to facilitate programming at various Toronto-based non-profit organizations. They currently act as Programs Director for Subtle Technologies where they helped found the Curatorial Mentorship Program, an initiative that actively advises and supports the next generation of curators, artists and, cultural makers in an intergenerational framework of skill and resource sharing developed to endure our changing realities.

**Olivia Shortt** (they/she, Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) is a Tkarón:to-based multi-disciplinary performing artist. They are a saxophonist, vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, curator, activist, and producer. Highlights from Shortt's practice include their film debut acting and playing saxophone in acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film Guest of Honour; their Lincoln Center debut with the International Contemporary Ensemble; and recording an album two kilometres underground with their duo Stereoscope in the SnoLAB (a Neutrino Lab in Northern Ontario, Canada). Shortt is a current member of the JACK Studio working with NYC-based JACK Quartet and created a musical land acknowledgment for the students of Face The Music program (NYC) and the JACK Quartet called Mana-Hatta; they are also collaborating on a new work 'the body remembers' for the JACK Quartet. Shortt has been named a 2020 cohort member of Why Not Theatre's ThisGEN Fellowship in Sound Design and are currently being mentored by sound designer and composer Elisheba Ittoop.

Performance in Quarantine

When we work with digital and Indigenous content we often don't consider the unique problems presented in this medium. Meagan Byrne, an Âpihtawikosisân (Métis) Narrative Mechanics Designer and founder of Achimostawinan Games will share her knowledge about working with Indigenous content in the digital industry and why it’s important to develop Protocols. Meagan is joined by Elijah Forbes, a Two-Spirit Odawa transgender man working in comics, illustration, and writing and head of the Indigenous Comics Collective; and Taylor McArthur (Nakota, of Pheasant Rump Nakota First Nation, Saskatchewan) a digital artist who works at the intersection of 3D animation, video game design, and video. 

Wednesday, July 22, 2020 | 3pm-4pm EST



**Meagan Byrne** is an pihtawikosisân (Métis) digital media artist and game designer born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. She has been creating digital interactive works since 2014 and is heavily influenced by both RPG games and all the stories she heard growing up. Her designs incorporate narrative, game mechanics, sound and traditional art and are deeply rooted in Indigenous Futurisms, language and Indigenous feminist theory. She sees her work as a constant struggle to navigate the complexities of Indigenous identity within a deeply colonized system. Meagan uses her work to explore questions of cultural belonging, the Indigenization of media and the future of Indigenous language and culture. Meagan is the current Owner/Lead Game Designer of Achimostawinan Games, an Indigenous-run and staffed video game studio.

**Elijah Forbes** (he/him/his) is an Odawa Two-Spirit transgender man working in comics, illustration, and writing. He has written for Fieldmouse Magazine and Model View Culture, shown work in physical and online galleries, and worked with companies of all sizes to create expressive and uplifting Indigenous work. Indigenous modes of gender and presentation are most important to his body of work, as well as themes of nonbinary ways of being. His most important current project is heading the Indigenous Comics Collective, a group created to make space for Indigenous voices in the convention and professional spheres. 

**Taylor McArthur** (Nakota of Pheasant Rump Nakota First Nation, Saskatchewan) is a digital artist who works at the intersection of 3D animation, video game design and video. Her developing body of work is evocative of Indigenous Futurisms and seeks to situate her Indigenous culture within both the modern and a potential future.

Image : *New World 3*, Taylor McArthur. Courtesy of the Artist. 

You Need Protocols: Working with Indigenous Culture in the Digital Realm

We have invited some fellow curators and cultural organizers to discuss how lockdown-imposed ‘social distancing’ measures are impacting curatorial practices – what are the challenges and opportunities of moving cultural events online, and how are well-known formats (from exhibitions and screenings to live drawing sessions and performances) changing in response?

Saturday, July 18, 2020 | 12pm-1pm EST

Moderator: **Martin Zeilinger** is based in Dundee, Scotland, where he works as Senior Lecturer in Computational Arts & Technology at Abertay University. He has been co-curator of Vector Festival since 2014, has joined the curatorial collective for Dundee-based NEoN Festival in 2019, and is a frequent collaborator of Furtherfield (London) and the Institute for Network Cultures (Amsterdam). Martin’s work focuses on critical intersections between contemporary art and emerging technologies such as AI and the blockchain. He is currently completing a monograph on artificial intelligence, posthumanist creative agency, and digital art.

**Sarah Cook** is a curator, writer and researcher based in Scotland. She is Professor of Museum Studies in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow and one of the curators behind Scotland’s only digital arts festival NEoN Digital Arts. Sarah has curated and co-curated international exhibitions including: Sleep Mode (2020) and 24/7: A Wake-up Call For Our Non-stop World (2019) both at Somerset House; The Gig Is Up (2016) at V2_Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam; New Media Scotland Alt-w (2014) at the Royal Scottish Academy, SSA Annual Exhibition in Edinburgh; Not even the sky: Thomson & Craighead (2013) at MEWO Kunsthalle in Memmingen; Biomediations (2013) at Transitio_MX_05, the festival of electronic arts and video in Mexico City. She is editor INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016) and co-author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010; Chinese edition 2016).

Canadian artist, **Lorna Mills** has actively exhibited her work in both 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 “Abrupt Diplomat” at the Marshal McLuhan Salon at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, for Transmediale, “DKRM” at DAM Gallery, Berlin, “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 L.A. & New York, Ellephant, Montreal and DAM Gallery in Berlin.

Image: Lorna Mills, "Well Now WTF" website, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Curating Online: In Conversation with Sarah Cook and Lorna Mills

*Ancestors: Do You Read Us? (Dispatches From The Future)* is an 8 channel video work shot in 4k. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Ryerson Image Centre, artist Syrus Marcus Ware draws on the shared language of speculative fiction and political activism to transform screen into a portal through which the next generation of racialized activists communicate with us, their ancestors, and offer us insights into the future.

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture, and he’s shown widely in galleries and festivals across Canada. He is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter – Toronto, a part of the Performance Disability Art Collective, and a PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. His on-going curatorial work includes That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel) and BlacknessYes!/Blockorama. 

Ancestors: Do You Read Us? (Dispatches From The Future)

Panels

Performances

Presented on a new custom-built online platform, this year’s festival exhibition integrates a diverse mix of interactive netart, art games, machinima and video works, live streams from artist studios, web tool hacks, and other artworks that can be experienced – in a time of lingering COVID-19 lockdown measures – digitally. Not every artwork featured in the exhibition may have been created in direct response to the pandemic, but what unites them all is their resonance with themes such as digital connectedness, overcoming isolation, building and maintaining virtual relationships, and coming to terms with the many new realities of digitally mediated, ‘socially distanced’ life online.

*view recent changes* is a collaborative project featuring works by artists Oscar Alfonso, Simon Fuh, Matt Nish-Lapidus, and Sophia Oppel, in collaboration with Hearth, a Toronto artist-run space co-directed by Benjamin de Boer, Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, and Philip Leonard Ocampo. *view recent changes* presents an assemblage that considers the ways in which the human, digital, linguistic, machinic, vegetal and animal correlate. Hosted as a wiki, a platform that allows for communal contribution, the project foregrounds lateral hyperlinking and reflects on the possibility of a digital commons. This project considers how to circumvent the individualizing, commodifying qualities of online spaces to explore positive forms of relationality and intimacy.

view recent changes

Can we move through the screen and towards each other?

*#WatchingTogether in Spite of a Dying Planet*, presents an introspective journey through the melancholy of our damaged environment. Through diverse forms of performance, video, film, and 3D animation, we are transported into new ecologies, provoking reconnection with nature and land-based knowledges. Situated in our device mediated context the ‘natural physical’ becomes yet another reality amongst the many we are shifting between. We invite participants to meet in digital presence, traversing the interconnections of online gatherings. 

This event is presented in partnership with Sky Fine Foods.

Friday, July 17, 2020 | 7pm-9pm EST

I will be waiting( return to Online is the new IRL)