Travis Kirton is teaching students how to work with his evolving library of C4 classes that all feature an array of intuitive control methods.  The students are already developing iPad apps that would make Steve Jobs (r.i.p.) drool…

This interdisciplinary collaboration between CE3C and the Bee Kingdom features video projected on blown glass.

Written and Directed by Kurtis Lesick
Video by Kurtis Lesick
Glass Sculpture by Kai Scholefield
Audio Engineering and Original Music by Greg Debicki

March 16 – April 4, 2012
Opening reception | March 15, 2012 | 5:00 - 7:00 PM | The Candahar
Illingworth Kerr Gallery

Part of a continuing series of exhibitions that showcase the diversity of work being produced by ACAD’s creative community, this exhibition gives students a glimpse of the issues their instructors are currently exploring in their own practices. A broad cross-section of activity is represented, including illustration, sculpture, graphic design, advertising, photography, ceramics, fibre, glass, print media, media art, digital technology, to painting and drawing.

The Inter(media)tion group certainly offered a change of pace for conference goers and the reviews were very positive.  There have been rumors already that the organizers were inspired by the presentation of the Inter(media)tions group, and plan to imitate their mode of critical investigation in upcoming years.

Performance by: | Leah Desmond and Maria Samaniego |
Installations by:  | Jessie Altura and Sarah Grodecki | Dee Fontans and Nicole Tritter | Mihaela Slabe, Teresa Tam and Victoria Braun |
Kathleen Brown and Greg Debicki chaired the panel for the presentation.

Free Exchange is an annual graduate student conference organized entirely by graduate students at the University of Calgary Department of English. Founded more than fifteen years ago, it has grown to attract participants from across Canada, the United States, and elsewhere in the world.

Kurtis Lesick, Kathleen Brown, JR Carpenter and Greg Debicki curated a selection of 3 installations and 1 performance to take to the Literary In(ter)ventions performance night at the Banff Centre, to be displayed alongside performances by Steve Tomasula, J.R. Carpenter, and Brian Kim Stefans.

Selected artists:
Jessie Altura, Sarah Grodecki, Leah Desmond, Maria Samaniego, Dee Fontans, Nicole Tritter, Mihaela Slabe, Teresa Tam and Victoria Braun

The works were incubated in the Inter(media)tion workshop, in which a large number of students from a variety of departments developed interdisciplinary works at breakneck speed.  The performance and installations wowed the audience and videos are coming to the CE3C website soon.  In the meantime, some photos as a taster…

INTER(MEDIA)TION was a one month intensive production boot camp for artists to create collaborative works that explore the intersections of language and technology. It was held in the CE3C Lab in February 2012, and we have two showcases of the works created by the participating artists. In late February, we brought the works to the Banff Centre for the Arts for an evening showcase with the Literary In(ter)ventions program.  The student generated works and performances were displayed alongside performances by Steve Tomasula, J.R. Carpenter, and Brian Kim Stefans as a part of StageFest 2012.  On March 11th the workshop group will take part in a featured panel at the Free Exchange conference on ‘Media and Excess’ at the University of Calgary, where the student works will be displayed and performed.  Kurtis Lesick, Kathleen Brown (writer in residence), and Greg Debicki co-curated the workshop and mentored the students.  J.R. Carpenter, a visiting artist, also helped to mentor the students in the final phases of production.

The collaborations produced in the workshop examine and interpret our relationship(s) with technology: how technology affects meaning, context and (mis)communications, how language is translated and transmuted through technology and how consumption and excess manifests as productive or destructive aspects of media and technology.

Travis Kirton’s long term C4 project is kicking into high gear this spring. Recently experiencing a change of heart, he rewrote and optimized the framework and is currently working to integrate a set of digital signal processing (audio) tools. He is planning upwards of three immersive crash courses for students over the spring and summer. C4, in it’s newest form, is a programming framework that streamlines the development process for building applications for Apple devices.

Currently he has been organizing a series of lectures and workshops at the University of Calgary that have been promoted in part by CE3C.  He is now working in his newly renovated office in the CE3C lab where he is mentoring and assisted by Jordan Peterson (an ACAD alumni and new media artist).

Technopoet and digi-maven JR Carpenter drops into CE3C to talk lo-fi digital literature over grilled cheese sandwiches and juice.  JR discloses what happened to her in 1993 and how it began her journey to becoming the acclaimed digital artist she is today.  Inter(media)tion participants will be treated to her sharp critical input about their performances and installations for the upcoming show at the Literary In(ter)ventions program at the Banff Centre, and the Free Exchange conference on ‘Media and Excess’.  Kurtis Lesick will also interview JR in the Theo Sims’ Candahar at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery.

Artist talk, February 10, 2012 | Room 595 | 12:45 PM

A video of the interview will be available on the CE3C website.

Bio:

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, writer and maker of maps, zines, books, poems, fiction, non-fiction and non-linear hypermedia narratives. She studied Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students League of New York and Fibres and Sculpture at Concordia University in Montreal, where she served as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO, an artist-run gallery and new media lab, from 2006-2010.

Carpenter has been using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of experimental texts since 1993. Her electronic literature has been presented at museums, galleries, conferences and festivals around the world including the Musee de Beaux-arts de Montreal, OBORO, Dare-Dare and the Biennal de Montreal (Montreal), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and Images Festival (Toronto), Interactive Screen and In(ter)ventions (Banff), Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), The Rhizome ArtBase at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Arnolfini (Bristol), Inspace (Edinburgh), Palazzo delle arti Napoli (Naples), Machfeld Studio (Vienna), Jyvaskilla Art Museum (Finland), The Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Cast Gallery (Tasmania), Interrupt Festival 2008 (Brown), Media in Transition 2009 (MIT), the Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008 (Vancouver, Washington), E-Poetry 2009 (Barcelona) and E-Poetry 2011 (CUNY Buffalo) and is included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Two.

Her essays, reviews, poems and short fiction have been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into English, Spanish and Italian, and published in numerous anthologies and journals across Canada and internationally including: Dandelion, Crannog, Geist, The New Quarterly, Matrix, Ryga, Dragnet, Branch, Carte Blanche and Blood & Aphorisms. Carpenter was named a Montreal Mirror Noisemaker in 2009 and has won the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition (2003 & 2005), and the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, published by Conundrum Press in 2008. Her second book, GENERATION[S], is a collection of narrative codeworks published by Vienna-based TRAUMAWIEN in 2010.

Carpenter is the recipient of grants in literature and new media from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and Canada Council for the Arts. She is a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross, Caldera, The Vermont Studio Center, Struts and the Banff Centre, and was E-Writer-in-Residence at Dartington College (UK) in the autumn of 2009. In 2010 she was awarded a studentship to pursue a three-year practice-led PhD at University of the Arts London / University College Falmouth. She lives in South Devon, England.

[bio from her website]

Local artists Derek Demassi and Greg Debicki have begun developing their exciting new project Swimming with Pask, at the CE3C lab.  The Alberta Foundation for the Arts and CE3C are co-funding the project.  Swimming with Pask is a digital media performance/installation that uses software and technology to give bioluminescent algae creative agency, allowing it to perform audio/visual collaborative improvisations with their breath.

Preliminary tests with the hardware and biology are under way and they are expecting to have a working, scaled down prototype by the end of April.  The project is scheduled for completion in early June.

Previously, the two have worked together creating visuals and interactive installations at Shambhala, Motion Notion and Sled Island music festivals.  More recently they worked with La Caravan Dance Theatre to create a performance that included motion tracking, projector mapping and dancer controlled generative music.

Greg Debicki has developed an early prototype of Lanham Culture (working title) under the mentorship of Kurtis Lesick.  The project is a visualization that uses real time twitter data as input.  Tweets are separated into two streams: tweets that promote culture, and tweets that kill culture.  This dynamic plays out in a digital petri-dish in which the former are represented as microorganisms and the latter as a virus which kills them.
In this early version of the project, the microorganisms (not yet triggered by twitter data) are subject to temperature changes within the computer.  Higher CPU temperatures create a hostile environment in which they are likely to burn, where as lower temperatures stimulate growth.  The project is loosely based on John Horton Conway’s cellular automaton called Game of Life.  It is being incubated at the CE3C Lab.

BYOB Calgary will be hosted by the Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Centre, located at 1418 7 AVE NW on Saturday Feb 11th starting at 7pm. Cash bar.

Originally conceived by Berlin-based artist Rafael Rozendaal, BYOB Calgary (organized by Rick Silva and Justin Waddell) will bring together 20+ Calgary-based artists to create a collaborative happening of moving light and sound.  Various interpretations of the initial idea of BYOB have spawned several different approaches that include ad hoc installations, performances, and other immersive environments of DIY spontaneity and experimentation.