ISEA2015 Art Event Overview

Curators Statement

Lively Objects is dedicated to the memory of Wendy Coburn, whose work was influential in the exhibition’s conceptualisation and who passed away during its development.

Lively Objects explores the seduction of things that seem to possess, or to be possessed by life. It brings together a collection of objects that vibrate with vitality through mechanical, magical or mythical forces. The exhibition addresses the idea of enchantment in a contemporary context and asks why and how, in an age of rationality, we are attracted by the animistic and atavistic experience of things “coming to life”. Spread throughout the eclectic permanent  collection of the Museum of Vancouver Lively Objects infiltrates dioramas, display cases and didactic panels. The works in this exhibition take many forms – gloves, tables, puppets, figurines, machines, houses and boxes. Seeding quiet disruption amongst the traditional museum display, the objects nestle, lurk, provoke, vibrate, dance, move and speak. Like a game of hide and seek, visitors can hunt through the museum to find the objects, or drift through and take their chances. Some objects are hiding in plain sight, speaking only to those who really stop to listen. Others are deliberately pulling focus and making a ruckus. Lively Objects engages with theories of distributed agency and new notions of objecthood in digital culture. It asks how this extremely modern phenomenon revives ancient aspects of the human-nonhuman  relationship. In particular it highlights the resonances between technological objects, imbued with artificial life, and natural, supernatural or magical things. Enchantment, that “strange combination of delight and disturbance” 1), offers a means to re-think and to re-feel the liveliness of objects.

As Jane Bennett emphasizes, enchantment connects objects and people bi-directionally: Objects are enchanted and we are enchanted with them.  Anthropologist Alfred Gell conceived of artworks as re-enchanted technologies 2) both tools for thinking through, and agents participating fully in social practice. Objects in museums often seem lulled by predictable taxonomies and display strategies. Held apart from the flow of exchange, interaction and decomposition, they become caught in suspended animation. The artworks secreted throughout the Museum of Vancouver gently disturb this soporific stasis, wake up their neighbours, and fan the flames of mutual enchantment. The growing acknowledgement of the vitality and agency of things also productively disrupts media art theory and curatorial approaches. It challenges the specialness of media arts’ claims around categories such as interactive, responsive, autonomous and generative art. Simultaneously it allows for an expanded fi eld of enquiry and exchange in which media art can escape its exhibitionary ghetto and form productive and provocative connections with an unlimited world of things. Lively objects demonstrates the curatorial possibilities of integrating new media art not only with other kinds of artworks but with all other kinds of objects. This exhibition builds on curatorial research in new media art and “post-disciplinarity” – the idea that the boundaries between traditional disciplines are not just shifting but inevitably eroding entirely.  Contemporary changes in knowledge formations demand new ways to combine, organize and experience things. The divisions that have separated the aesthetic from the useful and the magic from the mundane are wavering. Lively Objects asks what role enchantment may play in rethinking our mutual co-evolution with technology, and how we negotiate a world where machinic encounters are inevitable.

1) Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter – A political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2009.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. 

2) Gell, Alfred.“The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In J. Coote and A. Shelton, (Eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. pp. 40–66. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Marchessault, Janine. Mirror Machine: Video and Identity. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2006.

Shirky, Clay. “Half the World.” <http://shirky.com/ writings/half_the_world.html> . June 30, 2002. Accessed on May 27, 2015.
Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011.

This exhibition is supported by OCAD University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Canada Research Chair Program, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, The Ontario Arts Council, Intel, Telus, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Museum of Vancouver and the Vancouver Art Gallery.  The following provided production support for Judith Doyle’s work: Ian Murray, Robin
Len, Chao Feng, Nick Beirne, Naoto Hieda, John McCorriston, James Rollo, Fabiolo Hernandez Cancino, Cody Berry.

Production support for Germaine Koh derived from CNC machining by Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Alan Waldron / Infinite FX, Hamza Vora, and Gordon Hicks.
Members of the Social Body Lab who supported Kate Hartman’s work are as follows: Jackson McConnell, Hillary Predko, Boris Kourtoukov, Izzie Colpitts-Campbell, Alexis Knipping, and Rickee Charbonneau.

The curators are indebted to the following OCAD University students who conducted preliminary research for this exhibition through their exhibition Influenced Machines: Robin Goldberg, Matthew Kyba, Kate Murfin, Tak Pham, Treva Pullen & Renée Stephens.

Curators Statement

Beyond the Trees considers mediated representations of nature and the ways our perspectives shift between physical and virtual experiences. Both Vancouver-based collective WALLPAPERS (Nicolas Sassoon, Sara Ludy and Sylvain Sailly) and West Coast modernist Emily Carr invite us to reflect on their perceptions of British Columbia’s coastal landscape, the former through the use of digitally animated patterns and the latter by means of nuanced brushstrokes of line and colour. In both, nature is viewed through powerful aesthetic filters.

WALLPAPERS is a collective founded in 2011 by artists Sara Ludy (b. 1980), Nicolas Sassoon (b. 1981) and Sylvain Sailly (b. 1983). Their artworks are computer-generated animated patterns that exist online at www.w-a-l-l-p-a-pe-r-s.net. Exhibited online, the work takes form as a catalogue of digital patterns, with each artwork created by an individual artist and displayed  full-screen on its own URL. For Beyond the Trees, WALLPAPERS have produced an immersive  environment that both mimics and experiments with the scale and primary forms of nature.  Responding to the architecture of the gallery, their new site-specific works create contrasting  experiences. In the first room, a monumental outdoor environment is created through movement and imagery. In the second, a more confined and intimate space combines subtle movements with defi ned textures, patterns and frames. The treatment of these two galleries speaks to the ubiquity of digital forms in contemporary life, while the content of the animations reflects the power of the natural world.

In addition to addressing the distinct architecture of the galleries, the works created for Beyond the Trees also refer to multiple subjects. Ludy’s cloud-like formations, Sassoon’s hypnotic  pixelated patterns and Sailly’s hard-edge objects evoke not only the wilderness of British  Columbia but also the manufactured, flat display of a computer screen. By representing this duality, WALLPAPERS captures the command of the natural world as well as the effects of human intervention within it. In contrast, a sizable selection of Emily Carr’s works are presented salon style and arranged according to her use of formal elements — particularly those of line, shape and colour. These mounted clusters of oil paintings and works on paper place an emphasis on the rhythms captured in her landscape imagery, allowing us to both view the individual works and see them as a cohesive whole. Carr’s revered landscape paintings have become emblematic of this region’s forests; presented en masse, they emulate the display of WALLPAPERS’ projections. Beyond the Trees compares two diverse visual art practices. While the materials and mediums of these artists are dissimilar, each uses pattern and movement to articulate the natural world in a way that creates pictorial landscapes and draws attention to how one experiences nature in a constructed setting. Beyond the Trees is the fifth in a series of In Dialogue with Carr exhibitions organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Curators Statement

5600K refers to the colour temperature of a defined, white light that has become a standard in film production, used to replicate the appearance of natural light at the brightest time of day. It is understood as both real and false: a verisimilitude, a simulacrum. The manipulation of light in visceral, illusionary and poetic ways, the attempt to dismantle boundaries, space, structures, bodies and perception itself, the fascination with finding new languages of visual experience… all are of particular interest to the three artists in this exhibition: Carsten Höller, Gunda Förster and Elizabeth McAlpine.

Each work in the exhibition references both the disruptive and formative potential of light; to penetrate and affect the physical body and the surrounding space. In adjoining rooms, large installations by Carsten Höller and Gunda Förster each present rotational movement that is performative and dislocating. Hanging in the space between, creating a physical obstacle and alluding to transformative events, is a work by Elizabeth McAlpine. In a dark gallery Gunda Förster presents Circle, a single 1000W white light that floats on a endlessly circling pendulum. This light is compelling and spellbinding, as light in the dark often is, perhaps recalling something of our originating relationship with a vital light source at night and its natural link to the uncanny. The pendulum describes a slow circular movement that circumnavigates and herds the viewer, forming an inscribed enclosure that is distinctly different from the uncertain external zone. In the centre the viewer becomes a compulsory performer, while outside a looming shadow dance takes place, the result of light disrupted by physical mass.

In Light Reading; 1500 Cinematic Explosions Elizabeth McAlpine has mined the cinematic realm for fi lm explosions. The work links the real and unreal; explosions created in real time, filmed and then fi ctionalized to become a cinematic product. McAlpine appropriates and deconstructs 1500 cinematic narratives to produce a single, unified work, condensing the explosions into a tight loop that becomes more volatile and pure in its totality.
The result is a potent assemblage of white noise & perpetually explosive, white light. In the circular cage of the Neon Circle, scientist-turned-artist Carsten Höller has created a place of visceral engagement and perceptual transformation. As with all his works Holler pushes us to the limit; the body, the brain, the eye…challenging our ability to understand what we are seeing and to actually perceive and react within a profoundly disruptive environment. The viewer enters a space apart; an introspective, uncertain, selfquestioning space. The circular structure is alive with constantly shifting permutations of transmitted white light, dislocating our senses and channeling our focus inward. The iterative pulse diverts us from the fact that we have placed ourselves at centre stage and have become at once performer, captive and test subject. New Media Gallery is the civic gallery for the City of New Westminster. The gallery is devoted to bringing together the fi nest new media art from around the world and disseminating it through innovative, engaging and high quality exhibitions and programmes. Directors + Curators Sarah Joyce and Gordon Duggan have worked at Tate and Lisson galleries and have extensive international experience in the area of electronic media art.

Curator Statement

Many of the works in this show use specific objects, or readymades, as a material starting point. Readymades make for interesting material for artmaking as they previously were developed  with human user interaction as a key consideration in their creation, necessary innovation that have grown familiar in the day to day.

These objects are also representative of the quotidian, the most ordinary and habitually  unnoticed. They are stand-ins for lives built up habitually in daily experience, by the distillation of ordinary expectations of the world. The quotidian is also a necessary condition for surprise. The works in this exhibition deviate from the ordinary; the result is unfamiliarity, sometimes wonder, sometimes a new understanding. These artists embrace the paradox of seeing the everyday for its commonness, while imbuing their works with latent possibilities for transformation to further human experience.

In time for ISEA2015, a number of electronic or digital-based works will be on display, interspersed with works of more traditional media. Daniel Kent, an artist residing in Brooklyn, NY, will exhibit Articulating Blind Movement #1, a sculpture motorized to humorous effect and witty sculptures derived from iPhone forms. Vancouverbased Nicolas Sassoon is considering exhibiting a physical object translation of his animated gif moire pattern works. Marisa Olson, also from New York City, will be exhibiting two works from her Time Capsule series, works that have been aptly described as media archaeology.

Curators Statement

ARCTICNOISE is a media installation that draws on archival film footage and sound materials sourced from the Isuma Archive at the National Gallery of Canada, as well as sound and film materials from the artist’s personal collection, onsite research obtained from a trip to Igloolik, and other ethnographical material. Conceived as an Indigenous response to Glenn Gould’s celebrated composition “The Idea of the North”, Inutiq will appropriate Gould’s piece as a musical score, paired with new voices and imagery to produce a layered and multi-vocal work. The project folds into Inutiq’s larger practice of his alter-ego, madeskimo that draws on the use of instruments, digital and analogue synthesizers, as well as the remixing and processing of samples from a large variety of sources —including traditional Inuit, Aboriginal, modern electronic and urban music— in order to create an experimental platform. At its crux, ARCTICNOISE intends to initiate conversations between various communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and to provoke thoughtful exchange about the roles of Inuit orality and materiality in a post-colonial space within the context of new media artwork. New media, with its appropriative and collage-like nature, is employed as a specific strategy to foster a multivocal and multi-generational approach to these sensitive issues. The hope is that by reframing archival sources alongside contemporary technologies and materials, insightful and affective connections will emerge. As a multimedia work, ARCTICNOISE aims to re-purpose past Inuit visual and sound media in an attempt to conflate temporalities of past and present with the aims of repurposing and mobilizing understandings of Inuit art aesthetics.                            “The Idea of the North”: youtube.com/watch?v=3MeTImOtqYc

ARTICNOISE is funded by Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.                                                                          Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Curator Statement

The project is presented at 221A’s exhibition room located in Chinatown, Vancouver, where it is undergoing intensive neighbourhood gentrification and experiencing crude orientalist marketing campaigns that add to the ongoing crisis of affordability and cultural homogenization.

Curator Statement

Texts that move, respond to touch, are created by bots, are evoked and performed through augmented and virtual reality, that digitally remix print works, extend print text to the digital medium or digital text into print environments – all speak to ways artists in the 21st century are questioning assumptions about methods of production and rethinking notions of audience engagement with textual objects like books and creative output like literary art. New Text: Literary and Artistic Explorations into What It Means to Read, Write, and Create, curated by Dene Grigar, builds on ISEA2015’s theme of Disruption by looking at the way digital technologies disrupt text and notions of textuality. Fifteen works created by 22 artists and artist teams have been selected for the exhibit. Some like Jody Zellen’s mobile app Spine Sonnet, which allows the viewer to produce unlimited iterations of a poem by interacting with the tablet interface, force the viewer to rethink the sonnet as closed poetic system. Others like Tiffany Sanchez and Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo’s hybrid book environment, Prey, disrupt cultural assumptions about both digital and print-based books. Still others like Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg’s Networked Optimization, three self-help books presented on a Kindle with accompanying printed versions of the text, offer a critique of tablets that purport to “optimize” the reading experience. In essence, this exhibit asks, “What constitutes a text in the 21st century, and what are the possibilities for reading, writing, and creating texts when artists have both print and electronic media to use as platforms of discovery?” Certainly, the works demonstrate that the disruption caused by digital technologies can result in provocative and compelling objects of study. The exhibit provides the opportunity to showcase new works by international artists working at the intersection of literature, media art, experimental writing, and technology in the field of electronic literature, and showcases artists from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Australia, the U.S., Canada, the UK, Italy, and Korea.

We appreciate the support of the Electronic Literature Organization for its help with promoting the event and Washington State University Vancouver for providing access to technology and research assistance.

Curator Statement

VIVO Media Arts is pleased to host an evening of screenings, performance and installation in connection with ISEA2015. The event thematic of Disruption provokes us to consider our own historical situation within crisis and flux. In a period of social, political, industrial and environmental turmoil, broad and diverse groups of people have been formally committed to a haphazard exploration of un/de-regulated interstices of the physical and the virtual in hopes of finding workarounds, new grades of paydirt, and perhaps even the odd revolutionary silver bullet. In over 40 years of existence, VIVO has aspired to foster, whenever possible, the space of tenuous creative exploration that is traced out by the thematics of ISEA2015. Often, such space issues prototypes with spiky cyberpunk physicality – clunky, not yet streamlined, grotesque, speckled with the historically residual. Several of the works featured at VIVO are deliberately rudimentary – playful but also underdetermined in order to make space for their interlocutors. Both work and platform, they are typically simple and crude metaphors and metonyms that nonetheless touch on profound questions of subjecthood and collectivity, and point at the unfurling dimensions of cognition.

In an interview, Brady Marks characterizes her 3D volumetric display as a means for artists to explore the nascent gestures and vocabulary of a new medium before the contours of its use are influenced – as they invariably will be – by its corporate capture and release. Elsewhere the wispy swivel of Jeremy Keenan’s “animated feedback object” evokes the tentative scale and affect of fable or parable. These hybrid forms suggest different regimes of synaesthesia, suturing sensations together at different angles of incidence. Tom Slater’s Hybrid Spaces presents a contemporary contribution to the trompe l’oeil arms race, perhaps even aspiring to render the concept moot in our felt experience of his protean transmediated beams. Ed Osborn’s Gain Stage plays with sensory resolution in an elliptical fashion as the relationship between his tableaus and their emanations is subject to an impressionistic drift. The improvisational duo good cop/naughty cop concretizes a relationship between source or energy and output — exploring a highly topical sense of constraint as a potential source of new expression. Occupations with time and timing are evident in both Emmanuel Madan’s Addendum to Coincidence Engines and Angela Ferraiolo’s Three Hollywood Grammars.

Programmed by: Elisa Ferrari and Alex Muir
Installation: Elisa Ferrari, Nikolai Gauer, Alex Muir

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Curators Statement

Screenings and Performance, Curated by Samirah Alkassim and Laura U. Marks

This program comprises two parts, a screening of short works and a live performance. These works identify patterns of information that lie below visible and audible thresholds and bring them into perception. Drawn largely but not entirely from the Arab world, the films, videos, video database (CAMP), and live cinema performance (VJ Um Amel) are all alert to seemingly random patterns that, when organized into information, can be rendered audiovisually. Moiré patterns, shadow puppets, analog video decay, surveillance technology, and other media collect and give shape to disavowed histories and the voices of the earth. In some cases these acts of translation permit a heightened political analysis. In others, they unfold histories, places, and events from dry data into the sensory responses of the viewer. Laila Shereen Sakr, aka VJ Um Amel, is known for her founding and ongoing work with the R-Shief project that uses social media extraction and data analysis of contemporary global struggles, people’s movements and national crises (using Egypt and the US as her targets) to study our communications over such crises as the recent war in Gaza and the Ferguson protest, and what they say about us. R-Shief issues a global call for participants to view, study, and use its unique and colossal archive – as a form of counter-surveillance. Shereen Sakr will talk about these ideas and more, preceding her performance.   Video: VJ Um Amel Retrospective

Curators Statement

Generative music software installation (2015)

Musebots are pieces of software that autonomously create music, collaboratively with other musebots. The goal of this project is to establish a creative platform for experimenting with musical autonomy, open to people developing cuttingedge music AI, or simply exploring the creative potential of generative processes in music. Not simply a robot jam, but individual virtual instrumentalists coming together, like a band, to autonomously create (in this case) downtempo EDM. For this Canadian premiere of the MuseBot ensemble, we have contributions from Europe, Australia, and North America. Curated by Arne Eigenfeldt & Oliver Bown.

Curator Statement

VIVO Media Arts is pleased to host an evening of screenings, performance and installation in connection with ISEA2015. The event thematic of Disruption provokes us to consider our own historical situation within crisis and flux. In a period of social, political, industrial and environmental turmoil, broad and diverse groups of people have been formally committed to a haphazard exploration of un/de-regulated interstices of the physical and the virtual in hopes of finding workarounds, new grades of paydirt, and perhaps even the odd revolutionary silver bullet. In over 40 years of existence, VIVO has aspired to foster, whenever possible, the space of tenuous creative exploration that is traced out by the thematics of ISEA2015. Often, such space issues prototypes with spiky cyberpunk physicality – clunky, not yet streamlined, grotesque, speckled with the historically residual. Several of the works featured at VIVO are deliberately rudimentary – playful but also underdetermined in order to make space for their interlocutors. Both work and platform, they are typically simple and crude metaphors and metonyms that nonetheless touch on profound questions of subjecthood and collectivity, and point at the unfurling dimensions of cognition.

In an interview, Brady Marks characterizes her 3D volumetric display as a means for artists to explore the nascent gestures and vocabulary of a new medium before the contours of its use are influenced – as they invariably will be – by its corporate capture and release. Elsewhere the wispy swivel of Jeremy Keenan’s “animated feedback object” evokes the tentative scale and affect of fable or parable. These hybrid forms suggest different regimes of synaesthesia, suturing sensations together at different angles of incidence. Tom Slater’s Hybrid Spaces presents a contemporary contribution to the trompe l’oeil arms race, perhaps even aspiring to render the concept moot in our felt experience of his protean transmediated beams. Ed Osborn’s Gain Stage plays with sensory resolution in an elliptical fashion as the relationship between his tableaus and their emanations is subject to an impressionistic drift. The improvisational duo good cop/naughty cop concretizes a relationship between source or energy and output — exploring a highly topical sense of constraint as a potential source of new expression. Occupations with time and timing are evident in both Emmanuel Madan’s Addendum to Coincidence Engines and Angela Ferraiolo’s Three Hollywood Grammars.

Programmed by: Elisa Ferrari and Alex Muir
Installation: Elisa Ferrari, Nikolai Gauer, Alex Muir

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Curator Statement

In the context of ISEA’s 21st edition in Vancouver, MUTEK is proud to present a series of audiovisual performances from some of Québec’s most internationally renowned and emerging artists working in this fi eld. With The MUTEK Cabaret, MUTEK deliberately recalls and echoes The Electronic Cabaret, a program presented during the last ISEA symposium in Canada, which took place in Montréal in 1995. In many respects, the event of 1995 marked the beginning of a process that led to Montréal’s emergence as a digital arts hub, creating a lasting impression and inspiring the realization of institutions such as the SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques) and the MUTEK and Elektra festivals. Presented at the now defunct Spectrum, the original Electronic Cabaret offered first glimpses in North America of avant garde digital work such as Modell 5 by Granular Synthesis, a revelatory presentation that seeded many of the experimental digital practices that have since matured in Québec and taken on their own distinct qualities and expressions. Curated by Artistic Director Alain Mongeau in both instances, this new program features eight startling and mesmerizing live audiovisual performances representing three generations of Québec artists active in the 20 years since the original cabaret. Herman Kolgen’s always visionary conceptual and technical intersections between sound and image and artifi ciel’s long running fascinations with illumination, power currents and the invention of new digital instruments, epitomize an original vanguard; Bernier and Messier (together and singularly) are a second wave of artists who have furthered audiovisual digital practices that play between the immaterial and material, adding elements of performer intervention and theatrical choreography to the oeuvre, while Myriam Bleau, Maotik & Metametric, Woulg and BetaFeed typify a new generation of practitioners building on the fertile and established terrain that has come before them, always advancing the theoretical, conceptual, affective and technical elements that define this most contemporary of forms. The full circle of creativity exemplified by The MUTEK Cabaret also offers a promise for what could happen in the Vancouver scene, as ISEA provides an opportunity to jump-start a new cycle of inspiration and stimulate ever more daring relationships between art and technology here.

MUTEK Team:

Alain Mongeau, General and Artistic Director. Executive director ISEA95.
Audrey Powell, Executive Director
Patti Schmidt, Programmer and Editor
Bérénice Sensey, Administrative Coordinator
Chloé Douris, Communications Coordinator
Katharina Meissner, Strategic Development

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Curator Statement

AV Disruption brings together a program of audio, and audio video performances that exemplify what it means to bridge research and practice. The four performances are solidly grounded in academic research, whether in computer music or generative and interactive systems. Instead of simply using the current software available to produce audio-video pieces, the artists in this program have developed custom software to craft unique audio visual systems and instruments that result in new and disruptive audio visual experiences.

Over the past 15 years the New Forms Festival has been a mainstay of Vancouver’s media arts community. Through the festival and other events year-round, we are proud to have worked with the collection of artists, collectives and institutions that make up the diversity of Vancouver’s artistrun culture. It is an honour to be a programming partner with ISEA2015, and to be co-presenting a number of works and performances during the internationally recognized Symposium. ISEA2015 marks the start of a new era for New Forms, as we move from a festival focus toward an organization committed to year-round programming. By inviting an international cohort of artists and practitioners for the Symposium, while simultaneously showcasing the rich ecology of local artists that have put Vancouver on the international media arts map, we believe this partnership to be the ideal launching off point for the next 15 years.

Curator Statement

ISEA2015 presents a historic opportunity to stage Vancouver’s first Algorave. An Algorave is a live performance of danceable music that is generated from algorithms, often using live coding techniques, so that instead of playing synthesizers, drums, and keyboards, the artists generate sound by writing code. Starting from a blank page these artists create music making algorithms with programming languages such as IXI Lang, Overtone, Puredata, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Impromptu, Fluxus and Tidal.

The Algorave movement originated in the computer music research community and over the past decade has become popular in the U.K. and across Europe. For this groundbreaking event at ISEA2015 we are excited to present a group of generative system developers and composers as well as live coding artists from around the globe.

Curator: Philippe Pasquier, Metacreation Lab, Canada
Acknowledgments: Vicki Moulder, Curatorial Support;  Kıvanç Tatar, Sound/Tech; Mark Nazemi​, Video Mapping; and Theo Wong​, Graphics.