QUICKLINKS
Joanna Berzowska | Philippe Blanchard | Alexis Boyle | Flávio Carvalho | Lisa Kori Chung | Line Dufour | Alexander Dupuis | | Marisa Gallemit | Maziar Ghaderi | Thea Haines | Erika A. Iserhoff | Barbara Layne | A. Bill Miller | Amanda McCavour | N O R M A L S | Wendy Ng | Marie O’Mahony | Lauren Osmond | Isabel Pedersen | Gregory Phillips | Peter Rahul | Carolina Reis | Kirsty Robertson | Phillip David Stearns | Peter Wilkins
JOANNA BERZOWSKA is the Head of Electronic Textiles at OMsignal, a wearable and smart textile platform that enables leading fashion brands to design smart apparel. She is also Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts Department at Concordia University in Montreal as well as the founder and research director of XS Labs, a design research studio with a focus on innovation in the fields of electronic textiles and reactive garments.
A core component of her research involves the development of enabling methods, materials, and technologies, focusing on innovation in composite functional fibers, soft electronics, and additive manufacturing. Joanna’s art and design work has been shown in the V&A in London, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in NYC, the Millennium Museum in Beijing, the Art Directors Club in NYC, the Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, SIGCHI, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz among others.She holds a graduate degree from the MIT Media Lab. She lectures internationally about the field of electronic textiles and related social, cultural, aesthetic, and political issues.
PHILIPPE BLANCHARD is a Toronto-based artist, animator and teacher. His diverse creative background (film production, digital visual effects, studio arts) has informed an interdisciplinary practice combining animation, installation, light shows, drawing, painting and printmaking. His recent projects include expanded animation installations at Wayhome Festival, Festival Chromatic Paris, Glendon Gallery (Toronto), Cambridge Galleries (Cambridge ON), the National Museum of Print (Mexico City) and ARPRIM (Montreal), all work featuring screen-printed imagery animated by computer-controlled coloured lighting.
Philippe Blanchard’s animation work has been shown at Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), Pop Montreal Festival, Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), The Kitchen (New York), RISD (Providence RI), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC), LACMA (Los Angeles), San Francisco Art Institute, Cal Arts (Valencia, CA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Impakt Festival (Utrecht NL), Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), the Power Plant, the Ottawa Art Gallery, InterAccess, Angell Gallery and AGYU.
ALEXIS BOYLE’s vibrant multidisciplinary practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and new media. Her work playfully explores sexualities and bodies in emotional anatomical landscapes. She earned a BFA from Concordia University and an interdisciplinary MFA from OCAD University, 2013. During her graduate studies she held the Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship as well as the Fonds de recherche société et culture Scholarship. In 2012 Boyle was artist in residence at the Banff Centre and in 2013 at South Side Studios in Glasgow. She has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, and is represented by LPM Projects, Ottawa ON. In the last decade Boyle has practiced in Montreal and Toronto. She now lives and works next to the Deschênes Rapids on the Ottawa river in Gatineau.
FLAVIO CARVALHO is a new media artist living and working in Curitiba, Brazil. He has a degree in advertising and provides editorial design services. He is 34 years old and studied specialization in Interdisciplinary Arts and Arts Education at “Universidade Estadual do Paraná” UNESPAR in 2012. Since then, he has collectively exhibited in Curitiba, São Paulo, Zagreb, Krakow, Berlin and Paris. He also held a solo exhibition early 2015, an interactive installation in Curitiba. Currently, he is producing and curating an electronic art exhibition with local artists called Ohm/zero.1 in Curitiba.
Lisa Kori Chung is an artist, creative producer and researcher working in the realms of sound art, performance, and the future of fashion. As a 2010-2011 Watson Fellow, she documented various communities that formed around technologically-based art practices. This interest in collaboration and community building, as well as bridging different forms of knowledge, has continued throughout her projects. These include Open Fit (with Kyle McDonald), an open source clothing workflow that brings pattern making knowledge into the Processing environment, Anti-NIS Accessories (with Caitlin Morris), wearables to thwart neuro-imaging surveillance, and Opera Toolkit (with Gene Kogan and Colin Self), open source software to facilitate the creation of new forms of musical dramatic narrative.
LINE DUFOUR is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, the University of Guelph of and the University of Toronto. Dufour has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the American Textile Museum, Massachusetts; Eider Gallery, Nebraska; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Kentucky and the Scarfone Gallery at the University of Tampa. More recently, one her jacquard woven piece was selected for exhibition in California for Fiber Art VII. Several publications have featured Line’s work.
More recent grants from the Ontario Arts Council enabled collaborative and community building initiatives by way of the co-creation of a textile installation in which 250 people worldwide participated and contributed. This installation is currently touring. Line is also collaborating with Erin Lewis in creating handwoven art works that integrate new media and technologies and is part of Line’s ongoing exploration of other weaving technologies, such as jacquard weaving and computerized looms.
ALEXANDER DUPUIS creates time-based works using sound, light, and movement. His practice draws on the fields of experimental music/film/animation, particularly those threads that posit alternative notions of space and time to that of our three-dimensional, linear perception. Real-time animations, cross-modal translations, and feedback feature prominently in his approach, which manifests in live performances as well as fixed-media pieces. He performs as a guitarist, as well as with instruments of his own design, and has played in various guises across the United States, Canada, and Europe. He received his MA in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College in 2012, and is currently pursuing a PhD in the MEME program at Brown University.
Marisa Gallemit is an Ottawa-based visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, assemblage + site-specific installation. After studying film at Carleton University and the New York Film Academy, her focus shifted to three-dimensions — concentrating on organic forms, somatic textures + re-purposed goods to construct monuments to our collective, subtle, human experiences.
Informed by the concept that every object carries its own history and energy, the selection process of materials for Gallemit’s work is paramount. Found objects and discarded artifacts are favoured as much for their visual markings of time and wear as for their symbolic weight; as souvenirs from a particular time period or fossils of a lived, emotionally-charged experience.
Gallemit tells stories by manipulating, deconstructing and distorting objects into sculptural compositions which mimic the corporeal, untamed forms found in nature. The goal of each reconciled assemblage is to pose two questions in equal measure: Where are we from? Where are we going?
Maziar Ghaderi is a multimedia designer, teacher and director that works with visual media and interactive technology. His work has been curated in Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, LA, Istanbul, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and the merit of his artistic practise has been recognized by The Creator’s Project (2014 & 2015), The Globe & Mail (2x, 2015), IxDA (2013) and SIGGRAPH (2013). He has also presented at the Toronto Wearables Meetup, Shopify, SummerWorks Festival, HATCH festival, The Fridge Dubai, and the Ontario Centre of Excellence.
Under the direction of Marina Abramovic, Maziar was the media producer and on-site technical assistant for the 2013 Luminato Festival’s MAI Prototype, and has directed and produced his original work, Dissolving Self for the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2014 (ISEA) held in Dubai.
In past lives, Maziar has filmed obscure shorts in Vancouver, cut limes in Montreal, sold phrasal verbs in Brazil and worn cotton diapers in Tehran.
THEA HAINES is a textile artist, consultant and designer. She holds an MA in Textile Design from Chelsea College of Art and Design, and an Honours BA in Art and Comparative Literature from McMaster University. She previously studied Textile Design at Sheridan College, was artist-in-residence in the Craft Studio at Harbourfront Centre, and a member of the Contemporary Textile Studio Co-operative. Her studio practice revolves around the use of natural dyes as an aspect of sustainable textile craft production.
ERIKA A. ISERHOFF is a multi-disciplinary artist of Omushkego/Eeyou Cree heritage and is a member of Constance Lake First Nation. Erika works to collaborate with artists, communities, and revitalize traditional Indigenous cultural practices within her contemporary art and design work and community arts projects. She is a graduate from the Ontario College of Art & Design University with a bachelor of design. She is also the Artistic Producer for Native Women in the Arts, a member of the Chocolate Woman Collective and the Co-Artistic Director of the Setsuné Indigenous Fashion Incubator.
Barbara Layne is a Professor of Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University and the Director of Studio subTela where she leads a team of graduate researchers who are combining traditional materials and digital technologies. The resulting garments and wall hangings propose new possibilities for fabric and human interaction. Layne lectures and exhibits internationally, most recently at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Columbia University (NYC), The Museo Textil de Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Festival de la Imagen in Colombia. Her work is supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council on the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec.
A. BILL MILLER, an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, earned his MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has exhibited and screened his abstract ASCII drawings, animated GIFs, web browser-based compositions, and videos nationally and internationally. In 2013, TRANSFER Gallery, a Brooklyn space dedicated to the exhibition of non-traditional digital media and Internet Art, held the first solo exhibition of his work. In November 2013, A. Bill Miller curated one of 30 international pavilions for The Wrong, a new digital Art biennale. In 2014 he released a 3 part video program on Undervolt & Co. and was invited to a two person show at TRANSFER Gallery. Bill also regularly performs and experiments with live audio/visuals using custom software patches. His performances have been done in traditional gallery exhibitions as well as Art and Music Festivals including VIA Pittsburgh in 2011, DINCA Fest Chicago in 2013, and Slingshot Athens GA in 2014.
AMANDA McCAVOUR is a Toronto-based artist working with stitch to create large-scale embroidered installations. Her most recent projects use machine and digital embroidery with the use of water-soluble stabilizer. McCavour holds a BFA from York University and in May 2014 she completed her MFA in Fibers and Material Studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. She has participated in residencies at Harbourfront Centre’s Textile Studio in Toronto, at Maison des Metiers D’art de Quebec in Quebec City and the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. McCavour shows her work in galleries nationally and internationally with exhibitions opening in early 2016 at the Craft Alliance in St. Louis, MO, The Taubman Museum in Roanoke, VA, The Olin Art Gallery at Washington & Jefferson University in Washington, PA and the Grenfell Campus Gallery at Memorial University in Corner Brook, NL.
N O R M A L S is an independent creative practice based in Paris and sourced in the ancestral art of building utopias as critical projections of society into the future. Attempting to portray a future world in the tolkieniest of ways, they act at the intersection of design and fiction by creating imaginary artefacts as well as their imaginary users.
Sometimes visual, sometimes video-based, sometimes prototyped and functional, their work covers topics ranging from the mutations of the web to parametric fashion. Their output of choice, however, is literary, which in January 2014 led the studio to release N O R M A L S 0 0 1 + 0 0 2 + 0 0 3, a first publication and glimpse at their made-up world set in motion by using all previous projects as building blocks, hyperlinked by an overarching storyline.
WENDY NG Civil engineer by day, fashion designer by night, Wendy Ng was born in Hong Kong in 1974. She founded her fashion label Dystropolis in 2009. She designs predominantly for all genders creating a dialogue on gender equality and fluidity. Her designs are characterized by futuristic lines, structured silhouette, monochromatic colours, and juxtaposing materials. Ng collaborated with technologists at Cirque-it 2015, showcased five collections at the annual FAT Fashion Art Toronto, co-produced a fashion short film premiered at FAT 2015, provided wardrobe for music video/fashion photoshoot productions, and has shown at many local fashion events. She is currently collaborating with Eric Boyd of Sensebridge for a fashion tech project awarded by MakeFashion in Calgary, exploring the concept of transhumanism. Her B.Des in Fashion Design was received from Ryerson University following her BASc from University of Toronto. She works and lives in Toronto.
Marie O’Mahony is a Professor of Digital Futures at OCAD University and Visiting Professor at University of the Arts in London. She is also a consultant, author and curator. Books include Advanced Textiles for Health and Well-being, TechnoTextiles 2, TechnoTextiles, Cyborg—The Man Machine and Sportstech all published by Thames and Hudson. Exhibitions curated include Cyborg for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Smarter. Faster. Tougher for DF, The Fabric of Fashion an international touring exhibition for the British Council and TechnoThreads for Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin. Clients include Microsoft, the Mayo Clinic, Adidas, NIKE, Stylus Fashion and Hussein Chalayan. She has also served on the Australian Government’s Textile, Clothing and Footwear Innovation Council (TCFIIC) from 2009-2011.
LAUREN OSMOND is an artist and designer working within the realm of textiles, performance, and new media. She has a diploma in fashion design from Blanche MacDonald Center, Vancouver, British Columbia, and holds a BFA with a Fibres and Material Practices major and a Theatre minor from Concordia University in Montréal. Exhibiting in galleries and festivals throughout Québec and Canada, Osmond has also collaborated on several research-creation projects showcased in international exhibitions.
Dr. ISABEL PEDERSEN, Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media and Culture, is also an Associate Professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. In 2014, Pedersen was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She is the author of Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media, which explores how wearable and implantable technologies ought to be strategized for the future that they imply.
Her Decimal Lab is funded by a Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant and she also holds a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant. Her current interests include the predictive potential of dystopian films, implications of wearable tech cultural trends, posthuman pondering, brain interfaces, and digital augmentation that promises futures that seem dramatically divergent from our current lives.
GREGORY PHILLIPS is an artist, designer, and educator hybridizing traditional material arts with new media, including advanced computer-aided design, direct digital manufacturing, data visualization, and creative coding. A graduate of George Brown College’s Jewellery Arts program, OCADU’s Material Art & Design program (BDes), and Ryerson’s Master of Digital Media (MDM) Gregory enjoys pushing the limits of new materials and the tools used to shape them. In addition to teaching 3D modelling and rapid prototyping at Durham College, Gregory operates a product development and consulting company (Spandrel Media); and he is a researcher with Neurovent Research Inc., devising novel methods of ventilating newborns without injury; and with the CIVDDD-funded Surgical Fetus Project, an initiative to develop anatomically accurate fetus models for high-risk, patient-specific in utero surgical training.
PETER RAHUL is a Toronto-based digital media artist specializing in glitch methodologies. As a techno-archaeologist, Rahul explores the limits of vintage electronics in hopes of discovering unknown functions. Rahul’s work utilizes feedback loops and video synths to produce live generative patterns that are manipulated in real-time. His practice has taken the form of live projection, hardware installations and digitally influenced prints. In 2014, Rahul began curating and self-publishing an annual series of VHS mix-tapes titled “HYPERLINK” which showcase new-media work from A/V artists across Canada.
peterrahul.tumblr.com | vimeo.com/peterrahul
CAROLINA REIS is a fashion designer, artist and researcher with an interest for textile technologies and new media. In her work, she aspires to raise awareness about the impact of our relationship with material culture. Her most recent work, Form Follows Body / La forme suit le corps, is an experimental knitting project that questions dress codes and fashion by exploring the relationship between the shape of clothes and the body.
Her work was presented in several shows, Jeunes Créateurs in Montreal, Fashion Museum (MoMu) in Antwerp, Dutch Design Week, Lisbon Design Biennale, Museum fur Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt, Germany, Saint Etienne Design, France Biennale and Fashion Art Toronto 2014. Since 2012, she has been working for Le Labo, Toronto’s Francophone Media Arts Centre, developing media arts educational and training programmes as well as contributing to the fostering and promotion of francophone artistic creation in Toronto.
KIRSTY ROBERTSON is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies at Western University, Canada (London, Ontario). Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, and changing economies. She has published widely on these topics and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture. Since 2008, she has worked on textiles, the textile industry and textile-based arts, writing about textiles and technology, craftivism, and petrotextiles. Finally, Kirsty has an ongoing interest in critical museum studies, and is starting a large-scale project focused on small-scale collections that work against traditional museum formats. Her co-edited volumes Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada, and Negotiations in a Vacant Lot were released in 2011 and 2014, and her tri-authored volume Putting IP in its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the Everyday was published in 2013.
Phillip David Stearns, Born 1982 Austin, Tx; Lives in Brooklyn, NY; MFA Music Cal Arts 2007. Artist and designer working primarily with electronic technologies and media. His practice spans several disciplines ranging from experimental music performance to interactive light installation, digital art, textile art, expanded media, and post-digital photography. Physics, biology, computer science, acoustics, information theory, media archeology, and philosophy come together in his works through playful experimentation with materials and concepts.
http://phillipstearns.com | http://glitchtextiles.com
Peter Wilkins (British, b. 1968) is a multimedia artist based in Clarke’s Beach, Newfoundland. Wilkins’ various bodies of work have been exhibited in public and private galleries across Canada and abroad, including The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (St. Johns’, NL), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown, PEI), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Victoria, B.C), and Canada House (London, England). His portrait and landscape artworks are held in public and private collections in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and France. In 2009, he was the inaugural artist-in-residence at Memorial University (St John’s, NL). In 2011, he had a featured exhibition at the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival (Toronto, ON). In 2013, Wilkins exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale in the Collateral Event, About Turn: Newfoundland in Venice and in 2015 he had a solo exhibition on Great British Music at the Old Truman Brewery in London, UK.