Artists’ Bios

Kelly Jaclynn Andres

Kelly Jaclynn Andres is an artist and Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Andres’s work intermingles ecology and energies: from living cellular species such as plants to micro-organisms; from electronic media such as radio waves, electrons and photons to forms of interactive installations and performances for specific social and geophysical sites. Andres often works with common or overlooked organisms (due to size or perceived insignificance) such as yeast, fungi, poultry and plants – thus her installations and sculptures are alive, unstable and perpetually unfolding. Her current research-creation PhD project is focused on critical plant studies and new materialisms, exploring plant-to-human relationships through concepts such as extraterrestrial gardening, rogue “systems” and autonomous environments, edibles and performance and rapid prototyping with dynamic materials. Andres’s work has been exhibited at the Whippersnapper Gallery (Toronto, Canada), Medialab-Prado (Madrid, Spain), Eastern Bloc (Montreal, Canada), the Science Gallery (Dublin, Ireland), Latitude 53 (Edmonton, Canada), M:ST4 and 4.5 Performance Art Festival (Calgary, Canada), Free Radio Banff, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Canada), the Outpost of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, USA), Galerie Babel (Norway), the National Museum of Singapore (China), CONFLUX 2000 (NYC, USA) and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Trianon Gallery (Lethbridge, Canada). Andres is currently based in Montreal, Canada.

Rick Fisher & Don Rice

When not working at a full time job as Technical Coordinator at Video Pool Artist-Run Centre, helping to raise his three young children or researching genocide, Winnipeg-based video artist Rick Fisher makes artworks over extended periods of time, mostly with fellow prairie artist Don Rice. After undergraduate art school, he worked underground in a mine for ten years. He was then accepted into graduate school, where he was expelled (with a 4.0 GPA) and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a $103 million lawsuit for conspiracy to destroy one of America’s largest private art schools. He has subsequently worked at new media artist-run centres on the Canadian prairies for twenty years

Don Rice is a digital media artist based in Winnipeg. Rice has created work in the media of video, World Wide Web, print, audio, CD-ROM, performance and photography. The main body of his work is in video, mainly with fellow Prairie artist Rick Fisher.

The single channel version of Arcadia has screened at 40 festivals around the world including SIGGRAPH 2015.

 

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989, he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is a faculty associate at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. As an electronic artist, Lozano-Hemmer develops interactive installations at the intersection of architecture and performance art. His main interest is in creating platforms for public participation by perverting technologies such as robotics, computerized surveillance or telematic artworks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival and animatronics, his light and shadow works are “antimonuments for alien agency.” His large-scale interactive installations have been commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the UN World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003), the opening of the YCAM Centre in Japan (2003), the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004), the memorial for the Tlateloco Student Massacre in Mexico City (2008), the fiftieth anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (2009) and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010). Lozano-Hemmer represented Mexico at the 2007 Venice Biennale and has had numerous solo shows in Europe, the United States, China, Turkey and Canada. He has lectured at Goldsmiths College, the Bartlett School, Princeton University, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Cooper Union, University of Southern Carolina, MIT MediaLab, the Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Netherlands Architectural Institute, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, Savannah College of Art and Design, the Danish Architecture Centre, Montreal CCA, London Institute of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2015.

 

Andrew John Milne

Andrew John Milne is a self-taught Winnipeg-based interdisciplinary artist who interweaves new media, film, photography and performance. He has a background in mechanical, electrical and software design, contemporary dance, photography and film. In his work, Milne approaches cutting-edge media with obsolesced technologies and materials, constructing anachronistic yet functional devices that draw “mechanism” into a post-cinematic dream space that realizes the future of seeing and knowing. Milne is the founder of the Museum of New Ideas, a mobile new media exhibition and studio space, and is a founding member of Bent Light, a post-cinema film collective. His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally.

 

Catherine Richards

Catherine Richards is a visual artist working with new and old technologies. Her work explores the volatile sense of ourselves as new information technologies shift our boundaries. She has exhibited within and without North America, including Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany; 2004 Sydney Biennale; SIGGRAPH, San Diego; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Power Plant, Toronto. Her work has been discussed by major theorists in the field of new media art such as N. Katherine Hayles and Frances Dyson (in Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in Arts and Culture, University of California Press, 2009), and has been included in key surveys such as Art and Feminism (ed., Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, Phaidon, 2006), Art and Science Now (ed., Stephen Wilson, Thames & Hudson, 2010), and Art and Electronic Media (ed., Edward Shanken, Phaidon, 2009).

Richards often works collaboratively with scientists and won the Artist in Residence for Research Fellowship (AIRes), at the National Research Council of Canada, 2002-2005. Her work has been supported by such foundations as the Daniel Langlois Centre for Art, Science and Technology and has received awards such as the Canada Council for the Arts Media Arts Prize. Currently, she is professor of visual arts and University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

 

Kelly Richardson

Recognized as one of the leading representatives of a new generation of artists working with digital technologies to create hyper-real, highly charged landscapes, Kelly Richardson has been widely acclaimed in North America, Asia and Europe. Her work was selected for the Beijing, Busan, Canadian, Gwangju and Montréal biennales and major moving image exhibitions including The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, USA) and Caixaforum (Barcelona, Spain); Video Sphere: A New Generation at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, USA); and Visions Fugitives at Le Gresnoy (Tourcoing, France). Her video installations have been included in the Toronto International Film Festival as part of Future Projections (2012), the Sundance Film Festival in New Frontier (2009 and 2011), and, in 2009, she was honoured as the featured artists at the Americans for the Arts National Awards. Richardson’s work has been acquisitioned into significant museum collections across the UK, USA and Canada from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Albright-Knox Gallery to the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, La Museé d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Towner (Eastbourne, UK).

Kelly Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario in 1972. Having studied fine and media arts, she received her undergraduate degree from the Ontario College of Art and Design and her Master’s degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Newcastle University (UK). She has been living and working in North East England since 2003.

She is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto, Ontario.

 

David Rokeby

Born in Tillsonburg, Ontario in 1960, David Rokeby has been creating interactive sound and video installations with computers since 1982. His early work Very Nervous System (1982-1991) is acknowledged as a pioneering work of interactive art, translating physical gestures into real-time interactive sound environments. Very Nervous System was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and was awarded the first Petro-Canada Award for Media Arts in 1988 and Austria’s Prix Ars Electronic Award for Interactive Art in 1991. His works engage questions of digital surveillance and the differences between artificial and human intelligence. David Rokeby’s installations have been exhibited extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He has been featured in retrospectives at Oakville Galleries (2004), FACT in Liverpool (2007), the CCA in Glasgow and the Art Gallery of Windsor (2008). He has been an invited speaker at events around the world and has published two papers that are required reading in the new media arts faculties of many universities.

In 2002, Rokeby was awarded a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art (for n-cha(n)t) and represented Canada at the Venice Biennale of Architecture with Seen (2002). In 2004 he represented Canada at the São Paulo Bienal in Brazil. In 2007 he completed major art commissions for the Ontario Science Centre and the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montréal. His 400 foot long, 72 foot high sculpture entitled long wave was one of the hits of the Luminato Festival in Toronto (2009). In 2010/2011, Rokeby was a guest artist at Le Fresnoy Studio Nationale in Tourcoing, France, and artist-in-residence at the Ryerson Image Centre at Ryerson University, Toronto. He developed substantial new works for exhibitions in both places in 2012.

 

Michelle Teran

Michelle Teran is a Canadian-born artist whose practice explores media, performance and the urban environment. Her work critically engages media, connectivity and perception in the city. Her performances and installations repurpose the language of surveillance, cartography and social networks to construct unique scenarios that call conventional power and social relations into question. Currently, she is a research fellow within the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship program at the Bergen Academy of Arts and Design, 2010-2014. She is the winner of the 2010 Transmediale Award, the Turku2011 Digital Media & Art Award, the Prix Ars Electronica Honourary Mention (2005, 2010) and the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition (Madrid, Spain, 2005). She lives and works in Berlin.

 

Paul Thomas & Kevin Raxworthy

Dr. Paul Thomas is Associate Professor and Director of the Fine Arts program at University of New South Wales (UNSW), Art and Design. Thomas initiated and is the co-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference series 2010, 2012 and 2014. In 2000, Thomas instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth 2002 and 2004.

Thomas is a pioneer of transdisciplinary practice. His work not only takes inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory, but actually operates there. Thomas’s current practice is based on the research being conducted by Associate Professor Andrea Morello, Quantum Nanosystems (UNSW), looking at the probability of electron superposition in the development of quantum computing. Thomas’s previous projects investigated silver, the mirrors and quantum theories of light and parallel universes in the work Multiverse. Thomas’s nanoart works Nanoessence explored the space between life and death and death at a nano level, and Midas researched what is transferred when skin touched gold. The Midas and Nanoessence installations were in collaboration with SymbioticA: Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia, and the Nanochemistry Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology.

Kevin Raxworthy is senior technician in the Studio of Electronic Arts at Curtin University of Technology. Raxworthy has been working in the area of media art since 1983. He was the technical support officer for the Biennale of Electronic Art, Perth 2002 and 2004. Raxworthy has been working in collaboration with Paul Thomas on the Midas project that was exhibited at Enter 3, Prague, in 2007. Raxworthy’s work looks at the nexus between artificial life, code space and art. He has completed his Master of Art (Electronic Art).

 

Jane Tingley

Jane Tingely is an Assistant Professor in Hybrid Media in the Department of Fine Arts and the Stratford Campus at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Her work combines traditional studio practice with new media tools and spans responsive/interactive installation, performative robotics and the creation of a gestural game. Her current work is focused on non-occularcentric forms of interaction through networked devices and exploring ways to create embodied interactions of new technologies.

 

Bill Vorn

Based in Montreal, Bill Vorn has been working in the field of Robotic Art for more than twenty years. His installation and performance projects involve robotics and motion control, sound, lighting, video and cybernetic processes. He pursues research and creation on artificial life and agent technologies through artistic work based on the “Aesthetics of Artificial Behaviours.” He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from UQUAM (Montreal) for his thesis on “Artificial Life as Media.” He teaches Electronic Arts in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University (Intermedia/Cyberarts program), where he is a Full Professor.

Vorn’s work has been presented in multiple international events, including Ars Electronica, ISEA, DEAF, Sonar, Art Futura, EMAF and Artec. He has been awarded the Vida 2.0 Award (1999), Madrid), the Leprecon Award for Interactivity (1998, New York), the Prix Ars Electronica Distinction Award (1996, Linz) and the International Digital Media Award (1996, Toronto). He has worked in collaboration with many Canadian artists (including Edouard Lock, Robert Lepage, Gilles Maheu, Louis-Phillipe Demers and Istvan Kantor). He was cofounder of the electronic pop music band Rational Youth with Tracy Howe in 1981.