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.

Online is the new IRL

*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

#WatchingTogether In Spite of A Dying Planet

Masks have become popular and expressive means of undermining surveillance technologies. In this hybrid lecture and workshop session, artists María Angélica Madero and Joselyn McDonald will reflect on the evolution of surveillance over the last century and review strategies that artists and technologists are using to resist facial recognition surveillance. 

Madero will explore the contemporary significance of masks—shielding the respiratory system from viral infection, protecting protestor anonymity, and weathering climate change-induced natural disasters—and will teach participants how to create augmented reality face filters. Joselyn McDonald will lead a tutorial, using flora and other readily available organic materials, to create masks that undermine an algorithms' ability to recognize a human face. The session will conclude with the opportunity for participants to make their own anti-surveillance masks.

This workshop is Pay-What-You-Can. Please note that the fee can be waived if it is a financial barrier to participation. Send an email to [education@interaccess.org](mailto:education@interaccess.org) and we will manually register you to the workshop. Once registered, you will receive an email with a Zoom event link on the day of the workshop. 

In this hybrid lecture and workshop session, artists María Angélica Madero and Joselyn McDonald will reflect on the evolution of surveillance over the last century and review strategies that artists and technologists are using to resist facial recognition surveillance.

Resistance Strategies in the Age of Surveillance

What do fermenting and protest have in common?  Today, amidst a crisis of injustice, activists have rallied together in the pursuit of equity and change. Against suppression and algorithmic oppression, we have had to use ingenuity and creativity to amplify our voices in ways that are both visible and unseen. Strategies of covert gathering and organizing are not new to this movement. For decades, people have designed ways to connect and mobilize outside the gaze of oppressors. For activists of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, gathering around food, fermentation, and the act of swapping recipes was a convenient guise, providing the opportunity to secretly organize in plain sight. In a pandemic that has been peppered with a growing enthusiasm for creating sourdough starters, it seems fitting to begin to unveil the long linked history between food, revolution, and technology.

In this workshop we will ferment a sourdough starter while cognitively fermenting on the swift, strategic, and seldom known history of food as a conduit to revolution. During the first workshop, we will begin a roundtable discussion on protest and our role as activists. Each day, participants will be provided feeding instructions for their starter, historical references to digest, and introspective questions to chew on and respond to. We will collectively track our progression digitally and regroup on the last day of the festival to share findings, new revelations, and of course recipes. The hope is that this exercise creates a space for self-development, reenergizes participants with the momentum needed to sustain this movement, provides the knowledge needed to create a living bio culture, and helps to reclaim the feminist and black activist history of food and technology. 

This workshop is Pay-What-You-Can. Please note that the fee can be waived if it is a financial barrier to participation. Send an email to [education@interaccess.org](mailto:education@interaccess.org) and we will manually register you to the workshop. Once registered, you will receive an email with a Zoom event link on the day of the workshop. 


Learn how to ferment a sourdough starter with Ashley Jane Lewis while cognitively fermenting on the swift, strategic, and seldom known history of food as a conduit to revolution. 

Fermenting a Revolution

Led by Indigenous video and meme-maker Fallon Simard, this workshop will introduce participants on using a mobile phone to create memes. Simard will provide an overview of his meme and video work, which capture the conflicts created by colonialism, land, politics, and capitalism, and investigates intensity and burdens as products of injustice(s), human rights violations, and colonial violence. Simard will offer a tutorial on the basics of phone editing to making meme art with found footage and photographs. There will be time alloted for discussion and studio time. Expect to laugh, discuss ethics regarding meme-making, disarm stigma surrounding mental health, and learn how to create your own meme!

This workshop is Pay-What-You-Can. Please note that the fee can be waived if it is a financial barrier to participation. Send an email to [education@interaccess.org](mailto:education@interaccess.org) and we will manually register you to the workshop. Once registered, you will receive an email with a Zoom event link on the day of the workshop. 

Led by Indigenous video and meme-maker Fallon Simard, this workshop will introduce participants on using a mobile phone to create memes.

Making Meme Art On Your Phone

In 2014, the blogging platform Tumblr existed as a cottage industry of GIF-making, with many users mastering the skill of creating GIFs from video footage of their favourite television show, anime, and Youtube videos. In this two-hour workshop, join multimedia artist Alex Jensen for a crash-course on GIF-making as he explores and shares his own queer history of GIFs and how GIF-making practices are being integrated into contemporary media art. 

As part of this workshop, participants will learn how to make animated GIFs from images and videos using the open source image manipulation software GIMP 2.1. Participants will have the opportunity to follow along and create their own GIFs and share their creations with the other participants at the end. This tutorial will focus primarily on creating GIF animations from video footage with the intent that participants explore themes of identity, queerness, and adolescence in their creations; however, participants are welcome to bring all kinds of imagery and animation projects to work on.

Content warning: This presentation and workshop contain mentions of rape and murder of a trans individual while talking about gif and internet based contemporary art works. There will also be flashing and rapid-moving videos and images that may be triggering to some participants who are sensitive to such stimuli. 

This workshop is Pay-What-You-Can. Please note that the fee can be waived if it is a financial barrier to participation. Send an email to [education@interaccess.org](mailto:education@interaccess.org) and we will manually register you to the workshop. Once registered, you will receive an email with a Zoom event link on the day of the workshop. 

Join multimedia artist Alex Jensen for a crash course on GIF-making as he explores and shares his own queer history of GIFs.

A Queer Guide to GIF-making

A to Z Experimental Chatroom visits the past, present, and future of experimental communication software. In this part-seminar/part-demo workshop, we will be learning and considering how chatrooms built during Web 1.0 and 2.0 shaped an evolution of user habits and social relations. Then we will imagine and explore alternative modes of social gathering and community organizing through prototyping and play. At the end of the workshop, we will distribute technical tutorials and resources for those interested in building their own experimental chatrooms. 

This workshop is Pay-What-You-Can. Please note that the fee can be waived if it is a financial barrier to participation. Send an email to [education@interaccess.org](mailto:education@interaccess.org) and we will manually register you to the workshop. Once registered, you will receive an email with a Zoom event link on the day of the workshop. 

This workshop visits the past, present, and future of experimental communication software. Join Xin Xin to learn how chatrooms shaped an evolution of user habits and social relations and explore alternative modes of social gathering through prototyping and play.

Resistance Strategies in the Age of Surveillance( return to workshops)

María Angélica Madero & Joselyn McDonald

Contact