The future of digital industries in Alberta got a shot in the arm on Wednesday when CE3C and Digital Alberta brought Laurie Gloge from Global Game Jam and Luis Berumen from StartUp Weekend to speak to a packed room at the Alberta College of Art + Design. More than 40 students heard about two events coming up in the new year: Global Game Jam (January 27-29), and StartUp Weekend (February 3-5). Students were excited about the opportunity to interact with real industry professionals and exercise their ACAD skills in a real, applied context. Global Game Jam pairs artists, designers and technologists to create computer games in a 48 hour marathon. StartUp Weekend matches creatives with business mentors to create project pitches for a real life Dragon’s Den and the opportunity for investment to create a new start up venture. Registration for Global Game Jam starts Thursday, November 17th.

Tex(t)ech is an interactive laboratory that will bring together artists, technologists, media practitioners and writers to translate across medias and mediums, work collaboratively and explore ideas of narrative, textual movement, performance and sound action.

Participants will undergo narrative and content development exercises, and have access to a variety of audio and visual equipment and facilities.  The emphasis will be on collaborative learning and exchange, facilitating professional and creative development.

The laboratory will run on Saturday March 5, 12 and 19, 10am-4pm (lunch break 1pm-2pm) and culminate in an evening performance in early April.

All participants must be prepared to work collaboratively with at least one other participant to produce pieces that are 5 minutes maximum in length. Those interested are invited to submit a two-to-three sentence description of their project ideas to Kurtis Lesick, kurtis.lesick@acad.ca, stating what type of work they wish to do and what type of media they wish to involve. The laboratory will partner up participants and projects and will explore a maximum of 10 projects.

Facilitated by Oana Avasilichioaei & Kurtis Lesick

Oana Avasilichioaei

Some of the strands in Oana Avasilichioaei’s work forage into geography, public space, textual architecture, multilingualism, translation, and collaborative performance. A collaborative book with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra, a dialogic work on authorial experiments and translational impossibilities, came out in 2009 (http://jacketmagazine.com/32/k-avas-moure.shtml). In 2008, Montreal artist Thierry Collins produced a short film based on Avasilichioaei’s feria: a poempark (http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=yQ11gBLPCWw). Avasilichioaei’s recent projects include transformations of text into performative, aural work, SPELLES (a chapbook/CD), The Islands (a translation of Les Îles by Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir, upcoming 2011), “The Mapping Issue” (co-edited with Kathleen Brown for Dandelion Magazine), and a traversal of the linguistic borders of Paul Celan’s early Romanian poems. Though she typically lives in Montreal, she is the current writer in residence at the University of Calgary.

Kurtis Lesick

Kurtis Lesick is an artist, writer, and creative consultant. His work integrates a background in philosophy, over ten years experience as an archaeologist and anthropologist in Canada, England, and Mexico, and blurs genres between writing painting, video, digital media (web, mobile, gaming), installation and performance. His work hinges on the exploration between the physical, tactile world and the creation of social knowledge focusing on fragmented narrative, immersive interactive experience and issues in historical process. Kurtis has worked with several leading organisations including Parks Canada, Canadian Heritage, National Film Board of Canada, Horizonzero.ca, Banff New Media Institute, and Union of BC Performers. He has spoken internationally on a variety of topics in social theory, cultural criticism, and philosophy, and has published on the materiality of gender, cultural resources in Canada, and prehistoric ‘design’.  Kurtis teaches in Media Arts + Digital Technology at the Alberta College of Art + Design and is the director of the Creative Environment for Emerging Electronic Culture (CE3C).

Presented by CE3C   

CE³C presents
Cocoa for Artists Showcase and Travis Kirton

Join us in Room 371 for drinks, a little interactive art, and some cool insight from Travis Kirton.

Event Schedule:
February 16th, 5-7pm
Room 371, ACAD

• 5-6pm: Showcase
• 6-7pm: Travis Kirton Lecture

Cocoa for the Future

Cocoa for Artists (C4A) is a framework for artistic production created by Travis Kirton to simplifying how artists and creatives can programme for Apple devices. Cocoa is Apple’s development framework for iPhone, iPad and all Mac apps, designed to make it easy to work with drawing, animation, images, and typography. Cocoa’s video, midi and quartz components make it especially suited for creating performance works, VJing, and live visuals. Travis will discuss C4A and present work he has created using this robust framework.

About Artist
Travis Kirton is an Artist, Researcher and Interaction Designer specializing in the production of performance, tangible, and interactive media. A graduate from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SFU) with a specialization in Interaction Design, and M.A. Candidate at the Interface Culture Department, at the University of Art and Design Linz. He is currently developing new frameworks for artistic production and leading the Factory C4A workshop at ACAD. Recently, he spent a year and a half at the Banff Centre, Canada, exploring media-art research, prior to which he was an Interaction Designer at the Ars Electronica Futurelab.
His works are based in interactive media, typography and gaming, with a focus on joint production of art and academic publication. He has exhibited at Amber Festival (Istanbul), The Banff Centre (Canada), TEI’10 (Boston), Over the Game Festival (Sevilla), Medialab Prado (Madrid), Santral Istanbul (Turkey), Ars Electronica (Linz), ACM Multimedia (Vancouver), and has published research papers and print works in a variety of magazines and conference publications.

Sponsored by:

The 2nd week of C4A workshop kicked off!
Our participants are developing their visualization and interactive sound interface projects from last week even further.

Last week ended and this week started with multitouch projects starting to appear and happen. For example, Gerry and Garrett were testing their touchscreen projects today and Greg was testing his touch interface for his sound performance last Friday.

Gerry’s project today

Pretend these are butterflies (two) from Gerry Straathof on Vimeo.

Gerry Straathof

Megan Harrison

Garrett Baumgartner

Kim Seung Pen

C4A Workshop – DAY1 & 2 Highlight from CE3C on Vimeo.

Followings are the screen grabs from today’s C4A workshop. Our participants’ codes are evolving so fast!

Gerry Straathof

Alia Shahab

Kim Seung Pen

Jessie Altura

Megan Harrison

Garrett Baumgartner + Shiori Saito

Our participants are already turning out great computer generated graphics.
Here’s the quick pick of some participants’ pieces from today’s workshop.

Jessie Altura

Greg Debicki

Gerry Straathof

Megan Harrison

Great job everyone!

Starting from February 7th to 18th 2011, CE3C will host an artist workshop: Factory C4A with Travis Kirton.

Factory C4A is an artist workshop, an intensive bootcamp and an artistic intervention all in one. The project focuses on learning through making, rapid prototyping, intense collaboration, problem solving and rapidly escalating expectations as a means of learning the computer vision, touch-based and interactive computational arts.

See more details from here.

PopSex! is a unique collaboration between scholars and artists and between the University of Calgary and ACAD and is organized by Annette Timm and Michael Thomas Taylor of the University of Calgary.

On Tuesday January 11th, 2011, Illingworth Kerr Gallery (ACAD) hosted an artist discussion on this exhibition.

Artists include: David Folk (Calgary), Jean-René Leblanc (Calgary),
Kurtis Lesick (Calgary), Wednesday Lupypciw (Calgary), Anthea Black &
Mr. and Mrs. Keith Murray (Calgary), Mireille Perron & Heather Stump
(Calgary), Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (Berlin and Calgary) and RICHard
SMOLinski (Calgary).

Here are videos from the discussion on Tuesday.

PopSex! Artist Talk Part1

PopSex! Artist Talk Part2

Truly electrifying digital night!

Last night – November 29, 2010, CE3C, MADT and the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (IKG) presented POWEr by a r t i f i c i e l and DigitalCultures001 as a part of Digital Alberta’s DigitalCultures001 – A Night of Digital Art and Culture.

At 6pm, we started with DigitalCulture001, which showcased digital artworks from 12 Calgary-based artists (Martha Affleck, Caitlind Brown, Greg Debicki + Jennifer Vallis, Luba Diduch, Nathan Hansen, Kurtis Lesick, Kim Seung Pen, Paul Robert, Adam Tindale, Shiori Saito + Garrett Baumgartner). Their artistic practices using digital media cover a lot of ground such as audio-visual performance, interactivity and film.

It was very interesting to have a piece like POWEr, the high-voltage audiovisual performance by Montréal-based artists, a r t i f i c i e l (Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy: on the right in the picture below), which reveals intensity and sensibility of the purest digital material – electricity.

This main event filled up the Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre (ACAD) shortly after the door was opened at 8pm. Many visitors were sitting in the front row to have a better look of the Tesla coil. Electrical arcs are generated and transformed in the real-time audiovisual process during the performance, and it was 40 minutes of mind-sparking experience.

POWEr is sound of the pure beauty born from intensity and sensitivity.

Performance by Greg Debicki

“Growl” by Luba Diduch

“Machine for the Furure 1″ by Nathan Hansen

The event video is currently being produced and we will be uploading it as soon as possible. Stay tuned!