Collaborator Biographies

Cat Bluemke is an artist working primarily in game design, expanded reality, and performance. Previously working collaboratively as SpekWork Studio and Tough Guy Mountain, she has created games, performances, and immersive experiences that explore technology’s ability to obscure the line between work and play. Her work has been exhibited internationally with prominent institutions including Rhizome and the New Museum (2020) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018) as part of the American Pavillion’s corollary exhibits. Recent exhibitions include the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2024), the Milan Machinima Festival (2024), the Singapore Art Museum (2023), Art Gallery of Regina (2023), and the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (2022).

Since 2019, she’s spearheaded digital programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina, Saskatchewan, Treaty 4 Territory, Canada), overseeing digital exhibitions and residency programs as Digital Operations Coordinator and Digital Exhibitions Consultant. As of publication, she is the Executive Director of the Centre for Art Tapes in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS).

Jonathan Carroll is an Expanded Reality artist and developer creating games and software. With a foundation in performance art, his practice evolved from creating applications to facilitate audience-performer interaction to focus on building engaging interactive experiences for mobile, desktop, and headset platforms. His projects explore concepts of power present in the fields of art and technology, emphasizing opportunities to hack existing hierarchies. His work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and through Rhizome in partnership with the New Museum. As Digital Exhibitions Consultant at the MacKenzie Art Gallery he contributed as primary developer to the DETAIL project.

Brendan Lehman is a neuroscientist, game artist, and arts programmer based in Toronto, Canada. Projects in game development, biodata-driven interactive installation, and event production all aim to capture contexts of togetherness and help people connect with themselves, each other, and their natural environment in new and meaningful ways. Their installation work was featured at the 81e Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica Venezia Venice Immersive, they have worked at Muse: The Brain-sensing Headband, and have given talks or workshops at MIT Media Lab, A MAZE. / Berlin, The Science of Consciousness, Resonite VR, InterAccess, and others.

Katie Micak is a hybrid professional with curatorial, research and artistic practices focused on technology’s effect on space, relationships, emotional states and our collective understanding of shifting realities.

She is one of the founding members and returning curators of Vector Festival. Vector Festival began as an independent initiative highlighting video game-based artwork as a mode of research and personal expression. Vector Festival is now part of the Toronto based ARC, InterAccess’ annual programming, and now showcasing a broad range of digital art across diverse presentation platforms.

Micak has worked as Gallery Director of Spark Contemporary Art Space (Syracuse, NY) and Propeller Gallery (Toronto), as Digital Media Presentation Specialist at the Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), curated the Toronto Kids Digital Festival, and recently as curator and artist residency coordinator at the Living Arts Centre for the City of Mississauga.

As an educator Micak has developed and delivered courses for Syracuse University in the department of Transmedia, and at Brock University in the department of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film. She has also held teaching academic positions at OCAD University and Western University in visual arts. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University in Transmedia: Video Art, and an MA in Digital Futures from OCAD University.

Tina Sauerlaender is the co-founder and co-director of the exhibition platform and international collective of independent curators, peer to space (since 2010). She has been curating and organizing large-scale group exhibitions like Resonant Realities (Exhibition of the VR ART PRIZE by DKB in Cooperation with CAA Berlin, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, 2021), The Unframed World. Virtual Reality as Artistic Medium for the 21st Century (HEK Basel, 2017), or initiated and co-curated SPECULATIVE CULTURES. A Virtual Reality Art Exhibition (Kellen Gallery, Parsons/The New School, New York, 2019). She focuses on the impact of the digital and the internet on individual environments and society, on virtual reality in visual arts, and on exhibition making in virtual realms. She is also the artistic director of the VR ART PRIZE by DKB in Cooperation with CAA Berlin. She is co-founder & CEO of Radiance VR (since 2017), an international online platform and research database for virtual reality experiences in visual arts that includes the Radiance VR App for VR Art for Meta Quest headsets.  

She holds a PhD from The University of Arts, Linz, Austria. The title of her dissertation is PERFORMING IDENTITIES. Self-Representation in Art from the Renaissance to Virtual Worlds. In conjunction with her PhD she curated the online exhibition performingidentities.net. She is a lecturer for Digital Art History at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld, Germany. She gave talks on Virtual Reality & Art at re:publica (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), New Inc (New York), Kunsthalle (Munich), University of Applied Arts (Vienna), Digifest (Toronto), Technical University (Prague) or Roehrs & Boetsch (Zurich).  

She is the founder of the SALOON Berlin, the initial branch of the SALOON Network, an international network for women working in art.

Rea McNamara is a writer and curator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her curatorial work has long been shaped by networked counterpublics’ participatory cultures, particularly the collaborative processes of transformative fandom, alongside a social practice shaped by organizing community-based art initiatives. In her research, she often focuses on the emergence of otherness and hybridity within digital identity formations, informing an on/offline curatorial approach that connects and capacity-builds.

McNamara has previously held curatorial and public programming positions with the Gardiner Museum and Drake Hotel, and been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She has curated and organized a range of exhibitions and public projects, including dis-ease (Vector Festival, 2021), Obsessive Pop Tendencies (Pleasure Dome, 2019), Community Arts Space (Gardiner Museum, 2016-2019), and Safe Space (Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2024). In 2011, she founded the art party series Sheroes, which engaged with female celebrity fandom through music, performance, installation, and internet-based art. Her work has been presented at The Art Gallery of Ontario and is in the Whitney Museum of American Art collection.

Additionally, McNamara has written about art, culture and the internet for frieze, Art in America, The Globe and Mail, and been commissioned to write exhibition texts for Trinity Square Video, the Remai Modern, and Daniel Faria Gallery. From 2020-2021, she was the Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellow for Curators with Hyperallergic. She also gives talks, moderates panels, and lead workshops on fandom, curatorial practice, and the labour of mothering for The Toronto Public Library, Toronto Metropolitan University, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and more.

THERE IS NO CENTRE

Thoreau Bakker is a Toronto-based artist and academic. Initially a sculptor, Bakker engages with digital fabrication artworks for public space and how physical objects shift to digital spaces. Bakker is a PhD candidate in the Media & Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University, and is currently exploring social interaction in online multiplayer video games as a subset of virtual environments, searching for alternatives to combat based game affordances, in hopes of making virtual environments welcoming and accessible.

Milumbe Haimbe was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture obtained from the Copperbelt University in Kitwe Zambia, and also holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts obtained from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. She is a multimedia artist interested in exploring diversity in popular media and culture. Her work combines several mediums including drawing, illustration, animation, video, 3D modeling, text and comic book art to navigate these themes. She has exhibited her work in numerous shows and has attended several international art residencies, including the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington DC in 2016. Haimbe is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Arts Fellowship Award in 2015 and recently participated in the Vector Festival for new media art in Toronto in July 2020.

Adrienne Matheuszik is a mixed Jamaican & settler-Canadian interdisciplinary artist in Toronto. Adrienne has had unsupervised access to the internet since she was nine years old. Adrienne uses computers to make art — video, physical computing, creative coding & 3D design — which usually result in interactive installations, augmented reality, short film and video. Her work explores ideas of representation & identity online and IRL. She is interested in speculative futures and using sci-fi to examine the possibility of the post-colonial. Adrienne has an MFA from OCAD University from the Interdisciplinary Masters of Art Media and Design Graduate program (2019), and a BFA from University of Ottawa with a specialization in New Media Art (2014).

Tom Sherman is an artist and writer. He works across media (video, radio, performance, print and the Web). From a phenomenological perspective, he is obsessed with tracking perception and experience through description and to this end he authors all manner of texts. He represented Canada in “Canada Video” at the Venice Biennale in 1980, and for over five decades his interdisciplinary work has been featured in hundreds of international exhibitions and festivals, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, Documenta X, Ars Electronica, Tate Britain, the Impakt Festival, Kassseler Dokfest, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. In 1997 he founded Nerve Theory, a recording and performance duo with Viennese musician and composer Bernhard Loibner, and has been a contributor to many radio art programs on Kunstradio, the Austrian Broadcasting System, and other radio venues internationally from 1997 to 2021. He has published extensively, including Cultural Engineering, National Gallery of Canada, 1983, and Before and After the I-Bomb: an Artist in the Information Environment, Banff Centre Press, 2002. He received the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art in 2003, and Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art in 2010. Sherman is professor emeritus in the Department of Film and Media Art at Syracuse University.

Fallon Simard is an Anishinaabe-Metis interdisciplinary, artist, filmmaker, educator and policy writer from Couchiching First Nation in Grand Council Treaty #3 Territory. He is an interdisciplinary artist, research fellow at the Yellowhead Institute, policy analyst at the Chiefs of Ontario, and Owner of Contrary Company. His professional appointments enable research into social policy fields such as gender identity, mental-health, child-welfare, and mortality. The experience in these fields propels Simard to create artwork that directly investigates policy and theory in these areas through video, illustration, and memes. Thirza Cuthand in a review in Canadian Art describes Simard’s work “as firmly situated within a strong history in Canada of experimental Indigenous video art. Their experimental, politically charged work gets to the heart of issues of Indigenous sovereignty and struggle.” Simard graduated from OCAD University through the interdisciplinary Masters of Art, Media and Design program. He has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, curated for the Queer Art Festival in Toronto, written policy for the Yellowhead Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University and participated in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute.

Elizabeth LaPensée and Weshoyot Alvitre, et al.’s When Rivers Were Trails was developed in collaboration with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and Michigan State University’s Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab thanks to support from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. The game features over thirty Indigenous contributors with creative directing by Nichlas Emmons, creative directing, design, and user interface art by Elizabeth LaPensée, art by Weshoyot Alvitre, and music by Supaman and Michael Charette. Indigenous writers include Weshoyot Alvitre, Li Boyd, Trevino Brings Plenty, Tyrone Cawston, Richard Crowsong, Eve Cuevas, Samuel Jaxin Enemy-Hunter, Lee Francis IV, Carl Gawboy, Elaine Gomez, Ronnie Dean Harris, Tashia Hart, Renee Holt, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Adrian Jawort, Kris Knigge, E. M. Knowles, Elizabeth LaPensée, Annette S. Lee, David Gene Lewis, Korii Northrup, Nokomis Paiz, Carl Petersen, Manny Redbear, Travis McKay Roberts, Sheena Louise Roetman, Sara Siestreem, Joel Southall, Jo Tallchief, Allen Turner, and William Wilson, alongside guest writers Toiya K. Finley and Cat Wendt.

Xuan Ye 叶轩 works across various contexts of art, music, design and technology. Their works cohere around hacking-informed noisemaking, the erratum and the untranslatable. They make bots, edibles, digital neon signs and other multisensory networked experiences synthesizing language, code, sound, body, image, data, light, and time. The artist has appeared internationally at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (CN), the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, Venice Architecture Biennale (IT), Fonderie Darling (CA), the Art Gallery of Ontario (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), the Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM (GE), among others. They have performed at numerous experimental music festivals and DIY shows as a musician. Their live performances and releases have received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim!.

Echoes From the Future

Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes is a Montreal-based Costa Rican-Canadian digital media artist. Growing up on the edge of a rainforest nourishes her creative practice as her work strives to resurrect the meaning of nature’s place in her own life now as both an urbanite and multidisciplinary artist. Within the virtual worlds she creates, 3D embodiments of organisms borrow shapes, colours, and stories from plants and animals within our own world, while remaining singular. This conscious decision is intended to inspire a newly discovered appreciation of the endangered, non-human world that humanity often takes for granted as her portrayals seek to embody humankind’s seemingly objective and narrow misunderstanding of nature in this time of ecological crisis.

Aviv Benn’s  paintings are a visual universe starring symbolic archetypes that pop up and reappear time and again, and together formulate the dreamlike world they inhabit. These colorful figures take over the entire painterly space, encompassing their surroundings, dissolving and merging, floating in an unknown limbo. Benn views painting as an act of compulsion and a ritualistic repetition of images, motifs, and ornaments. Repeating the same imagery over numerous canvases, informs a narrative that stretches beyond the boundaries of a singular artwork; new relationships are woven together to build a vivid myth throughout her work.

Laura Colmenares Guerra is a Colombian artist based in Brussels. She has a transversal research-based practice that implies long-term processes of creation. Her work explores the impairment between contemporary western societies and the living ecosystems, the environment and the inhabitants of the planet. This questioning drives her to conceive settings that relate to the politics of landscape and the notions of territory. She explores the constructions of the concepts of nature and natural and language as a foundation medium for reality.

Reiner Maria Matysik builds bridges between scientific research and artistic activity. He asks about the possibilities and consequences of evolution as well as human influence on it. His “bionts” are based on Matysik’s assumption that humans will and should actively intervene in evolutionary events. The unbelievable speed of development in genetic engineering and molecular biology already suggests that the future will require completely new thought processes. Here, above all, the human claim to dominance is at stake.

Sarah Oh-Mock’s surrealist video works, installations, objects, photographs, and drawings address the relationships of culture, artificiality of urban places, nature and the unconscious. Her works have been shown at numerous exhibitions and festivals in Germany and abroad, for example the Torrance Art Museum Los Angeles, the Musée Boribana in Dakar, Senegal, in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Dokfest Kassel, Athens Video Art Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Art Space One, Seoul. Sarah Oh-Mock has been awarded numerous prizes and grants, including a scholarship from the German Artists’ Association.

Sabrina Ratté’s (she/her) practice focuses on the multiple manifestations of the digital image: analog video, 3D animation, photography, printing, sculpture, virtual reality and installation. The constant integration of new techniques allows her to explore the themes that run through her work in ever-changing forms: the influence of architecture and the digital environment on our perception of the world, the relationship we have with the virtual aspect of existence, the fusion between technology and the organic world. Her works are situated halfway between abstraction and figurative, landscape and architecture, and on the thin line that separates the real from the virtual.

Tamiko Thiel was awarded the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award for over 35 years of politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity, evoking layers of memory, history, myth, fantasy and desire to give visual form to these invisible levels of meaning. Artworks in museum collections include AI supercomputers in MoMA NY and the Smithsonian Institution, a VR artwork in the San Jose Museum of Art and AR artworks in the Whitney Museum NY and the Kunstsammlung Roche Basel, plus 2D and 3D print works in private collections. 

/p is a German media artist and software developer working on web based projects and VR since 1994 and collaborating on AR and VR artworks with Tamiko Thiel since 2018.

Wake Windows: The Witching Hour

Claudia Cornwall is the author of seven books in a variety of genres. Her 1982 children’s book, Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer, was one of the earliest computer fiction works in Canadian children’s literature. Since Print-Outs, Cornwall has written Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family’s Jewish Past, which won the 1996 B.C. Book Prize for non-fiction. At the World’s Edge: Curt Lang’s Vancouver, 1937-1998, was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2011. The American Library Association’s Booklist selected Catching Cancer: The Quest for its Viral & Bacterial Causes as one of the best books of 2013. Her most recent book, British Columbia in Flames: Stories from a Blazing Summer (Harbour Publishing, 2020), was a finalist for the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for historical writing. Cornwall teaches creative writing in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

Alejandra Higuera (she/her) is a queer multidisciplinary, visual storyteller focusing on video, illustration, animation, embroidery, and projection. Her work focuses on themes of migration, feminism, memory, grief, and ritual. She is committed to creating spaces for dialogue about the complexities of our experiences that celebrate our differences. Further, as a mother/artist, she understands that she is learning from her child as much as she is teaching her. Higuera has received grants and residencies from the Ontario Arts Council, MOTHRA, and SummerWorks Lab. Her work has been presented by the Regent Park Film Festival, the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, the Latino Canadian Cultural Association, and TO Live.

Magnolia Higuera is a 7-year-old kid who loves adventures, nature, and being creative. Sometimes she dances, sometimes she draws, and sometimes she sings; above all she loves playing: making worlds with rocks, empty toilet paper rolls, or just with a marker and paper. Magnolia collaborates with her mamá Alejandra Higuera making videos, gifs, installations, songs, and rugs.

Faith Holland is an artist, curator, critic, and educator whose multimedia practice focuses on gender, intimacy, and technology. She has exhibited at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and DAM Gallery (Berlin). Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times UK, Elephant, Hyperallergic, Broadly, and The Observer. She is the recipient of a 2021 New York State Council on the Arts grant. She has presented solo exhibitions with TRANSFER (New York/Miami), L’Unique (Caen, France), and in 2023 presented her first solo exhibition with Microscope Gallery (New York).

Ben Bogart (they/them) is a non-binary agender adisciplinary artist working for two decades with generative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision and machine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences in Canada, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Canadian Embassy at Transmediale in 2017 and the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018.

Hildegard Holland Watter is an emerging preschooler artist who works across performance, drawing, and installation. She performed as part of Faith Holland’s Hard/Soft installation at Spring/Break Art Show New York 2020 and produced a performance-video work for Vicarious Touching, the online version of the exhibition at TRANSFER. She has also exhibited her work at De:Formal Gallery online in Mozilla Hubs and at juniin in Guayas, Ecuador.

Wednesday Kim is an interdisciplinary artist and a co-founder of De:Formal. She is from Seoul, South Korea and is currently based in California. Kim works with analog and digital media, including 3D animation, video, performance, installation, print, and sculpture, with a clusterfuck aesthetic. Her work is informed by personal experiences and human psychology. She derives imagery from nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and childhood trauma. Furthermore, she portrays the absurdity of information-saturated contemporary life in a surrealist fashion through wordplay, Wikipedia, voyeurism, and witticism.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Barbican Centre, Ars Electronica, REDCAT, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Seoul Museum of Art. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.

Rory Scott is a multidisciplinary artist whose work utilizes animation, extended-reality (AR & VR), and handcrafted means to create emotive environments and re-imagined life. Through both digital and handmade means, Scott explores the ideas of impermanence, the passage of time and the impacts of technology on the evolution of humanity, as well as the important role that patterns play in shaping our personal and collective lives. Her project Impermanence, which began in 2010, is an ongoing documentation of her life and struggle with accepting change and mortality. Through recorded thoughts, sounds and the use of retro sci-fi imagery, her work confronts and reconciles the passage of time by juxtaposing the old with the new.

Skawennati is a visual artist. Her machinimas, still images, textiles and sculptures have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others. Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a research-creation network based at Concordia University. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal.

Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. His work often explores the intersections of race, nature and technology, drawing on personal and institutional archives to rethink the past, and on digital processes to index emancipatory futures. His digital animations using archival photography and archival illustration have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at Trinity Square Video. His digital animations using hand-drawn digital 3D renderings of plants he has encountered throughout his increasingly diasporic life have also been exhibited at the Perez Art Museum Miami. Rodell works between Port of Spain in Trinidad, Kingston in Jamaica, and Austin, Texas in the U.S.