ISEA2020 Art Event Overview

This is a virtual exhibition gallery space to experience the e-textiles art and FashionTech collections, research, talks and performances of Valérie LaMontagne, a pioneer in the discipline. In 2018 and about to take her post in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, when Valérie LaMontagne found out she has leukaemia, and spent a year fighting it. Valérie had just successfully won her battle with the disease in August 2019, but then deteriorated and died October 4th, 2019.

AUAS Dean FDMCI, Frank Kresin said after hearing of her death: “Valérie was a driving force in an international network of fashion innovators. She knew how to inspire others and create amazing work, thanks to her enormous creativity, passion and perseverance. She fought for her life, for life itself, until the very end and never lost her optimism. Her death is a huge loss for many of us and I wish her family, friends and loved ones my condolences.” This exhibition is dedicated to Valérie and tries to preserve her work and legacy in the e-textiles, wearables and FashionTech community. This is a virtual exhibition of Valérie’s work including images, 3D versions of a few of her pieces, videos of her work and her talks and a commemorative video by close friend and PhD supervisor Joanna Berzowska.

Valerie’s Profile links:
3lectromode.com
linkedin.com/in/valerielamontagne/
To see a sample on her see these links:
v2.nl/archive/people/valerie-lamontagne
designboom.com/art/valerie-lamontagne-interactive-weather-dresses/2219
codame.com/artists/valerie-lamontagne
trendhunter.com/trends/valerie-lamontagne
V2’s 3 interviews with Valérie:
v2.nl/remembering-valerie-lamontagne/?searchterm=VALÉRIE LAMONTAGNE
Memorial links:
amsterdamuas.com/content/news/news/2019/10/death-of-professor-valerie-lamontagne.html
adrianfreed.com/content/celebrating-valérie-lamontagne

Manifestations —a yearly Art & Technology festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands— presents a selection of works by four artists centred around the ISEA2020 subtheme, The Ecosophic World, as part of ISEA2020. During the Dutch Design Week in October (350.000 visitors), we present 50-100 innovative and talented artists that develop accessible installations and artworks for a broad audience. All the artwork is about a more human technology – a lot of the work and projects we present are later in large international museums or festivals. At Manifestations we offer interactive artworks for events or festivals. We work with more than 5.000 international artists that create art using technology. We focus the spotlight on art and technology with a human dimension: sometimes confrontational and other times the perfect match, but always critical, playful, recognizable and awe-inspiring. Think of robot acts, performances with electronic music, exoskeletons, e-fashion art, data & privacy installations, artworks that integrate AI, sustainability, hackers, crypto nails, food printing and more. The festival also reaches a non-art audience to prevent preaching to its own choir. ARTISTS: Tim Dekkers (NL), The Parasitic Humanity [2018] Maartje Dijkstra (NL), Braindrain, TranSwarm Entities, Surface Distortion, Optic Traces [2019] Jip van Leeuwenstein (NL), A Diverse Monoculture [2017] Daniëlle Ooms (NL), Apple-based Material [2019]

Ethnocultural Art Histories Research (EAHR) presents (pre)existing conditions (#eahr_isea2020) —curated by Tamara Harkness and Sarah Piché, with Alice Ming Wai Jim— as part of ISEA2020.

(pre)existing conditions (#eahr_isea2020) (October 13 through 19, 2020) is a selection of seven projects closely resonating with the ISEA2020 theme of “Why Sentience?” that are part of EAHR’s larger HEAR US NOW! Instagram Project (@eahrconcordia), whose goal was to connect with and support the work of BIPOC artists during this time of uncertainty in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the course of ten weeks June 29 through September, HEAR US NOW! posted weekly submissions of artistic responses to the circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the urgent call to address ongoing systemic racism and oppression, (pre-)existing conditions, climate change, and social justice activism.

With the lockdown, artists did not have physical venues to exhibit their work making the Internet the obvious recourse. During the practice of physical distancing measures, social media also functioned
as an important site for sharing videos, news, and information about anti-racist movements. Instagram was chosen because it best conveyed the variances of responses over a ten-week period curated during COVID-19. The archive of all twenty Instagram posts can be found at www.ethnoculturalarts.com.

The EAHR Instagram project is grateful for additional support from the Thinking Through the Museum (TTTM) Research Network.

The online exhibition Re|Search http://researchexhibition.org/ aims to capture our prevailing impulse to search in the digital age. The Internet and its search engines form an economy where attention has become a currency and query establishes itself as the central means of exploring the world. Googling, scrolling, collecting, and sharing are now part of our daily routine. What are the effects of these activities on our personal and collective imaginations? Re|Search focuses on how artistic, literary, and cultural practices reflect on and interfere with this technological pervasiveness. How do these practices allow us to think about widespread data management, online research methods, and tools? What types of alternative actions and stories do they offer? By what means do they occupy the very place of these concerns: the Web? This exhibition is intended to evolve over time in form and content. At present, it gathers eighteen hypermedia artworks available online since the beginning of the 21st century. Ranging from 2006 to the present, the works by various artists and collectives provide an overview of our digital condition, and its resulting issues evolving over time. Re|Search requires to access the artworks through keywords characteristic of our online behaviours. Typing an infinitive verb in the search bar reveals the associated artworks.

The Consulat Général de France à Québec in Montreal, in partnership with the Scopitone Festival in Nantes, presents a selection of works by French artists as part of ISEA2020. Organised by Stereolux, the Scopitone Festival is an international-scale gathering dedicated to electronic cultures and the digital arts. Every year it attracts over 30,000 festival goers, showcasing around sixty different artists, coming from more than 20 different countries. Scopitone Programme includes concerts and performances, installations, conferences, workshops, round tables and industry gatherings, as well as a youth programme. For ISEA 2020, Scopitone’s artistic Director Cédric Huchet curated a selection of artworks by French artists. In relation to ISEA2020’s theme “Why Sentience?,” the selected artists develop a unique approach to digital creation, questioning the place and relationship between humans, their environment, technologies, changes in the world (societal, ecological, philosophical, etc.). ARTISTS Guillaume Cousin (FR) , Le silence des Particules [Large-scale installation, 2018] Nathalie Guimbretière (FR), Naxos [Video, 2020] Laurent La Torpille (FR), das Lichtquant [Informatique, 2020] Guillaume Marmin (FR), Anger & Hope [Installation, 2019] [editors note: Instead of ‘Anger & Hope’, ‘Licht, mehr Licht!’ was shown]

• The Consulat Général de France à Québec quebec.consulfrance.org

Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art and Technology (York University, Canada) is pleased to present the exhibition “Life, A Sensorium,” as part of ISEA2020. The exhibition unfolds at the nexus of art, science and technology through the works of artists affiliated with Sensorium, who collectively explore the entangled ecologies of the post-natural world. Through multi-sensory experiences that include installations, virtual and mixed reality, 360° videos, performances, expanded media and sculptural forms, these artists explore the different ways that contemporary sensorial relations -human/non-human, natural/ artificial- stage complex articulations and expansions of the real. In this show, computer-generated organisms interact with viewing bodies. Site-specific installations, kinetic sculptures, virtual environments, and video games explore our interactions and collaborations with multi-species ecologies. The works in “Life, A Sensorium” range from shadow plays and optical illusions to VR wanderings through cosmic orchestral stagings. The blended physical and virtual nature of these aesthetic interactions and environments provide access into worlds not ordinarily perceptible. In this virtual iteration of the exhibition, we present excerpts of documentation and interviews with the artists as “capsules” of their artistic practice.

For these videos, artists were asked: “What does sentience mean to you with respect to your work?” and “Why sentience now?” as prompts to explore the situation of their work within the ISEA2020 theme.

ARTISTS Freya Björg Olafson (CA), MÆ-Motion Aftereffect [performance & video, 2017-ongoing] Nicole Clouston (CA), Lake Ontario Portrait [sculpture with mud & microbes, 2017-ongoing] John Greyson (CA), Hammer [360° video, 2020] David Han and Aidan Waite (CA), Is there a way to be gone and still belong? [interactive software, 2020] Mark-David Hosale (CA) and Jim Madsen (CA), Messages from the Horizon [interactive kinetic sculpture, 2019] Alison Humphrey (CA), Shadowpox: Citizen Science Fiction [media installation & workshops, 2018-ongoing] Evan Light (CA), Snowden Archive-in-a-Box [wireless network & sculpture, 2015-ongoing] Taein Ng-Chan (CA), Inside the Chrysalis [360° video, 2020] Jenn E Norton (CA), Cucoloris domesticus [media installation, 2012] Joel Ong (SG/CA), Terra Et Venti [media installation, 2018] Michaela Pnacekova (SK/DE/CA/DE), Symphony of Noise [VR, 2019] Dan Tapper (UK), Machines to Listen to the Sky [media installation, 2013-ongoing] Michael Trommer (CA), Ancient Thoughts and Electric Buildings [360° video, 2020] Doug Van Nort (US/CA), GSO: Genetically Sonified Organisms [site-specific audio installation, 2017-18] Graham Wakefield (UK/CA) & Haru Ji (KR/CA), Infranet [neural network & media installation, 2018].

Topological Media Lab, in partnership with ISEA International, presents a co-curated selection of discursive events and artistic works from its core group of artist-researchers, as part of ISEA2020. From experimental panel discussions on Sensory Cosmologies to art works centred around sensorially augmented dissipative structure, dust, mist, and feedback ecologies, this selection provides a small window into ten TML researchers’ variously unique and diverse approaches in playfully engaging with the current ethos, philosophies, and dynamic research-creation streams of the atelier-lab. ARTISTS: Chloë Cheuk (HK/CA), Expose (revisited) [kinetic sculpture, 2019] Alice Jarry (CA), Dust Agitator [kinetic sculpture, 2018] Navid Navab (IR/CA), tangibleFlux . plenumorphic . chaosmosis [triptych, kinetic sculpture, 2018] Peter van Haaften (CA), Michael Montanaro (CA), performed by Nien Tzu Weng (TW/CA), SPIEL [performance/intervention, 2018] Serious Computer Group [Nina Bouchard (CA), Evan Montpellier (CA)], Nova [Video installation, 2019]