The
Canadian Interactive Arts Consortium
(Toronto + Montreal)
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'Perversely Interactive System' by Lynn Hughes and Simon Laroche
Perversely Interactive System is a large-scale video/ sound installation that puts the spectator-participant into relation with a virtual other whose image (s)he controls through a custom wireless biofeedback handset. The person on the screen is controlled by the body movements of the participant which sets up a kind of symmetry and intimacy even though the virtual other remains fugitive and difficult to control.
Courtesy of Elektra Festival / www.elektrafestival.ca
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'Tribute to a Barking Dog' / 'Hommage au Chien qui Jappe'* by Jean-Pierre Gauthier
Photo courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
In Hommage au Chien qui Jappe, Sobey Art Award 2004 winner Jean-Pierre Gauthier creates a kinetic, interactive sculpture which incorporates elements of a drum kit, automated by electronic motors, light sensors and motion detectors. In his work, everyday objects are transformedinto haunting, humorous and challenging combinations.
Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art / www.mocca.toronto.ca
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'As Yet Untitled' by Max Dean
2005 Gershon Iskowitz Award winner Max Dean constructs situations in which the viewer is given the opportunity to make a choice to intervene, in some cases to stop an action from taking place. The viewer's actions create consequences, and in many instances, the work's success is contingent on this participatory engagement. As Yet Untitled, a robotic work, three times per minute, puts the choice of the archiving or shredding of a found family photograph in the hands and mind of the viewer.
Courtesy of Susan Hobbs Gallery / www.susanhobbs.com
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'Tact' by Jean Dubois
Tact marries technology with tactility and belongs to a space somewhere between stills and films. The viewer approaches a large mirror and an inset circular screen displaying a face. They are then invited to touch the screen which causes the face to press itself against the glass and follow the movement of the viewer's finger. Such manipulation evokes uneasiness, as if caught in a face-to-face encounter with a stranger.
Courtesy of Groupe Molior / www.molior.ca
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'Hum (2)' by Marla Hlady
Above the viewers are mounted a cluster of ceiling fans on which each one has an affixed speaker. As one fan starts to spin, a movement-activated switch starts the audio playing a simple, endlessly looped hummed melody. While the fan continues to spin multiple fans start spinning adding multiple melodies to create a chorus. The spinning speakers give the audio a tremolo effect (like the spinning speakers of the Hammond organ) producing an often hypnotic and meditative experience.
Courtesy of Jessica Bradley Art + Projects / www.jessicabradleyartprojects.com
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'Right or Left Unsaid' by Owen Milburn, Kate Raynes-Goldie, Eugene Ripper and Sohei Oguro
Right or Left Unsaid is an interactive installation which engages participants in a collaborative activity designed to draw awareness to one's relationship with oneself and to other people. Participants interact with each other by moving their hands over the surface of a hexagonal table. As this happens, lines of moving words appear between hands, linking them together. The words explore different relationships and states of being alone or within a group.
Courtesy of Habitat at the Canadian Film Centre / www.cdnfilmcentre.com
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'Taken' by David Rokeby
Taken is a video surveillance installation that tracks the movements of visitors within the gallery space and incorporates this information into its visual display. A recipient of the 2002 Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts, Rokeby creates work that uses technology to reflect on human issues such as surveillance and artificial intelligence.
Courtesy of InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre / www.interaccess.org
David Rokeby's Website
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'Swansong' by The Centre of Attention (Pierre Coinde, Gary O'Dwyer)
Public space meets the chapel of rest in a work that offers the audience an opportunity to rehearse one's own funeral: participants select a song; they then lay on a plinth, performing death, while the song is web-streamed. Formally, the work reverses the viewer/art-object dynamic, while allowing a statement to be generated and examined by the audience itself.
Courtesy of Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art / www.mercerunion.org
Centre of Attention's Website
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'Interjecting Sections' by Darren Copeland
With this work of sound art, Darren Copeland provides visitors with an original experience that evokes a musical dialogue between the trains and people that flow through and past the covered pedestrian bridge at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Locomotive history and memory merge to create a sonic interaction between space, place and participant.
Courtesy of New Adventures in Sound Art / www.soundtravels.ca
Darren Copeland's Website
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'Where are you? (T'es où?)' by Luc Courchesne
This work is an immersive existence simulator and telepresence apparatus in which visitors are invited to fly, as in dreams, through a world of many dimensions, between past and future, light and darkness, the public and private. This immersive display uses a custom designed 'panascopic' projector above, that projects in real time a rendering of the entire horizon onto the hemispheric screen in which up to eight people can participate.
Courtesy of La Société des arts technologiques [SA T] / www.sat.qc.ca
Luc Couchesne's Website
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'Tontauben' by Marc Fournel
Tontauben is a sound installation consisting of several electronic balls that trail here and there across the floor. Move a ball and create sounds in the gallery space. Move another and a second group of sounds is added to the first. The sonic effects are generated by the position of the balls as they come and go creating in an ecosystem wherein you yourself become one of the components.
Courtesy of Oboro / www.oboro.net
Video Archive of 'Tontauben,' go to Oboro TV Archives www.oboro.tv
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'SEED' by Napoleon Brousseau, Galen Scorer and Gabe Sawhney
SEED explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art. Through sound and imagery users create and populate a forest together. By dialing a particular number, each audience member will be given a "seed" to grow using the keypads of their cell phones. With each punch of the keypad, audiences have the ability to grow their seeds, choose the type of trees they want to plant, and change their texture and colour.
Courtesy of DeLeon White Gallery /www.eco-art.com
The SEED Website
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'Glow Redux' by Kelly Mark
Kelly Mark brings her signature "glow" style into the MTCC spaces with a new twist. Those flickering televisions, conspiratorially set to the same channel and set inside houses, now find their jack-o-lantern plutonium-like glow pulsing in a convention centre. Just as different types of music have rhythms and timbres specific to their styles, television imagery has its own particular rhythms and hues: westerns are browner, thrillers flicker faster.
Courtesy of Wynick-Tuck Gallery / www.wynicktuckgallery.ca
Kelly Mark's Website
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'New Creatures' by Kevin Krivel and David Warne
New Creatures is the final work in a series of new media installations that playfully harness surveillance technology to create imagery that is evocative of ancient tales of metamorphosis. The artwork captures and analyzes a viewer's image and turns them into digital bodies that stretch, twist and fly.
Courtesy of Trinity Square Video / www.trinitysquarevideo.com
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[murmur] by Shawn Micallef, Gabe Sawhney and James Roussel
[murmur] is an interventionist public archival audio project that collects and curates historic and everyday stories set in specific locations. At each of these locations, a [murmur] sign with a telephone number and location code signals that stories are available. By using a mobile phone, users are able to listen to a story of that place.
Courtesy of [murmur] / www.murmurtoronto.ca
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'Hybrid Space' programming by the 7a*11d Collective
The 7a*11d International Biennial of Performance Art brings artists who redefine performance in relation to time, space, the performer's body and the relationship between artist and audience. 7a*11d will present a series of performance art works which integrate themselves into the public spaces of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The focus is on artists who have chosen performance art as a primary medium to create and communicate provocative new images and new perspectives.
Courtesy of 7a*11d International Performance / www.7a-11d.ca
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