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A P P A R E L is an augmented reality experimental fashion prototype by the Paris-based anticipatory design studio N O R M A L S. Turning data and network activity into identity and style, the project replaces the details of contemporary couture with jiggly mesh geometry digital overlays.
Huge stroboscopic datastreams, hypnotic human-machine choreographies, a cacophony of Korean, Japanese, English, German, and French – ten weeks ago, from November 25th to 28th 2015, an unlikely cross-cultural exchange took over the all new ACT Center in Gwangju, South Korea. More than a hundred artists, designers, curators, and educators answered our invitation to add their work and voice to the inaugural edition of ACT Festival, an opening celebration for the center’s monumental facilities.
Blackout is a forthcoming “part video game, part live action documentary” VR film that allows you to hear the thoughts of your fellow NYC subway passengers during a power outage. The project is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.
Created by Copenhagen-based artist and researcher Tobias Ebsen, Poème Mécanique is an electromechanical sound sculpture produced for Espace culturel Georges-Émile-Lapalme, a public walkway connecting the Place-des-Arts metro and Complexe Desjardins in Montréal.
“There Should be Gardens” is the title of the 14th edition of InterAccess’s Emerging Artists Exhibition. Drawing on her research in feminist/queer curatorial and media arts practices, the exhibition is curated by Toronto’s Amber Christensen and showcases five Canadian early career artists whose practices address “the interconnectedness of technologies, ecologies, botanies, gender and the cosmos.” In aggregate the show’s selected works invoke elemental qualities, amplify and abstract natural materialities, and offer different modes of seeing and engaging the world. With the show winding down this week, CAN engaged Christensen in a Q&A to unpack the show’s framing and provocative works.
An interactive (and immersive) documentary on code and creativity, Jonathan Minard and James George’s CLOUDS is an ambitious project that is several years in the making. CAN donned an Oculus Rift DK2, explored its landscape and has weighed-in with a review.
The sixteenth edition of Montréal’s ELEKTRA festival took place from May 13th-17th and delivered a range of audiovisual performances and installations addressing the notion of ‘post-audio’ or perception beyond sound—CAN was on hand to have our retinas singed and eardrums buzzed by the ‘POST-AUDIO’-themed programming.
Superflux are a design and foresight consultancy based in London. Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Arden in 2009, the studio produces prototypes and films that are simultaneously prescient, and playful—and now they can add ‘magazine publisher’ to that list of outputs. A few weeks ago the studio announced the first edition of Superflux, a Warren Ellis-edited periodical that would mutate with each edition. The first issue is a handsome A1 poster expanding on their recent work with drones and the duo has engaged in an interview with CAN about their new project.
Transmissions from the Technological Sublime is a panoramic multimedia installation that depicts a nocturnal landscape of non-place populated by infrastructure rather than people. Hatched as a MFA thesis project within OCAD University’s integrated media program by Toronto’s Michael Trommer, the audiovisual piece renders highways, shipping channels, airports, and office parks as uncanny interstitial zones of contemplation.
Forest invites kids and adults alike to engage with a giant tactile colour mixer, with ‘spinner’ controls distributed across a 7 x 2 grid of custom-fabricated MDF panels. Built in collaboration between Micah Scott and a team at Ryerson University’s New Media Program, the interactive installation is currently showing at TIFF Kid’s digiPlaySpace. CAN goes behind the scenes to get a glimpse into this ambitious project’s conception and fabrication.
“The Crystal Line” is the latest work by critical engineer Julian Oliver. Re-creating an authentic crystal radio design that was used widely during WWI, the device broadcasts a transmission of ‘future of warfare’ chatter culled from various defence blogs that is translated from text to speech.
Toronto-based curator Marla Wasser is the mind behind “RAM: Rethinking Art & Machine”, a media art exhibition currently on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia that contains work by media art heroes like Angela Bulloch, Jim Campbell, Manfred Mohr, Alan Rath, and Daniel Rozin. Wasser recently engaged in an extensive interview with CAN, in which she shares some behind-the-scenes details about her show.
This past December a dozen artists, activists, and researchers converged at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry for a book sprint. Led by Addie Wagenknecht, the all-women cadre convened under the collective moniker Deep Lab, and examined how privacy, security, surveillance, and large-scale data aggregation are problematized in the arts, culture and society.
