/Greg J. Smith (226)



















In October CAN headed to Pittsburgh to toast the 30th Anniversary of The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. The event was accompanied by “Intersections,” a dynamic group exhibition showcasing many of the anti-disiciplinary works produced within the labs. Here, we review the show and share details about various included works.
08/11/2019Ottawa-based Artengine is looking for Canadian and U.S. artists, designers, and cultural producers to take part in its Digital Economies Lab (DEL), a “year-long exploration of the wonders and anguish of making art and culture in the 21st century.”
05/09/2019HOLO curates a series of critical conversations and hands-on exercises as part of the 20th Edition of MUTEK Monreal, Aug 20-25.
05/08/2019A review, photos, and selection of highlights from the abundant offerings of the 4th edition of the International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN) in Montreal.
03/08/2018Artificial Imagination was a symposium organized by Ottawa’s Artengine this past winter that invited a group of artists to discuss the state of AI in the arts and culture. CAN was on hand to take in the proceedings, and given the emergence of documentation, we share videos and a brief report.
01/05/2018Quartier des spectacles has posted a call for innovative interactive projection mapping projects and their ponying up up to $10,000 (CAD) funding, expert tutelage to support selected projects’ development, and the opportunity to present finished works near the bustling Saint-Laurent metro station.
02/02/2018“Three Pieces with Titles” is the latest audiovisual performance by Montreal’s artificiel. In it Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy manipulate an eclectic collection of objects within the field of view of a computer vision system to generate real-time video and abstract sonic collage.
24/11/2017“Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design” is an exhibition that excavates the foundation of computer-aided design and manufacturing and weaves together several ‘origin stories’ for contemporary consideration. The show recently closed after a seven-week run at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and CAN was fortunate enough to get a guided tour with curator Daniel Cardoso Llach as it was winding down.
21/11/2017The 2017 edition of Eastern Bloc’s Sight + Sound festival put ‘capital I’ innovation in its cross-hairs and pulled the trigger. We journeyed to Montreal to its flagship exhibition and assess its spectrum of ‘non-compliant futures.’
01/11/2017Radiance is a recently-launched online research platform for artistic VR experiences. Essentially a database, it contains info, screencaps, and video on artist-created VR projects and looks poised to become a useful resource for curators.
17/10/2017Dan Tapper is a British artist based in Toronto that combines his interest in code and celestial form and his recent research project “Turbulent Forms” visualizes and sonifies various cosmic phenomena. To mark the recent exhibition of this work (and related collaborations with several composers) we present this extended conversation with the artist about cosmology and data aesthetics.
13/10/2017House of Shadow Silence is a VR experience by Portland-based software artist Jeremy Rotzstain. In it, the artist recreates Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler’s 1929 movie theatre the Film Guild Cinema and uses it to ‘build a world’ of light, geometry, and motion.
04/10/2017Mitchell F Chan’s “Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” updates the contract at the heart of an influential 1958 work by Yves Klein for the age of cyrptocurrency, the blockchain, and smart contracts.
05/09/2017AUDINT is a European artist collective working across animation, installation, and publishing. Drawing on excerpts from an extended conversation with the group, we unpack their vision of the dystopian future-present and the nether zones that can be conjured through sound and vibration.
16/08/2017‘How much should we let algorithms shape our lives?’ is the question at the heart of Ed Finn’s recent book “What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing”. Scanning Silicon Valley, computer science, and the cultural sphere alike it offers a smart and accessible reading of our current moment.
10/08/2017Created by California-based artist Sterling Crispin, Cyber Paint is a freshly-released VR painting app for Google’s Daydream platform. Not so much a painting simulator, its creator describes it as a “laboratory for algorithmic mark-making.”
24/07/2017A follow-up to the influential 2012 booklet series “Critical Making,” “Disobedient Electronics: Protest” is a new zine by Vancouver-based theorist and educator Garnet Hertz that uses dissent as a lens to survey electronics-based projects and practices.
13/07/2017‘Technological Nature’ is a recent short film by media artist and designer Daria Jelonek exploring the emulation of natural phenomena with technology. Auroras, rainbows, and glaring sunlight, are all recreated with everyday materials in an eerily empty domestic environment.
03/07/2017“Reflective Sculptures: A Critique of Binary Beliefs” is a pair of kinetic sculptures by the Ontario-based artists St Marie φ Walker. Produced as part of their MFA show, the motorized devices sit halfway between poems and machines.
14/06/2017“Queer Games Studies” is a recent collection of thematic essays published by the University of Minnesota Press that schematizes LGBTQ approachs to thinking about – and making – videogames.
06/06/2017HEAVY BODY PAINT is a new installment in an ongoing series of works by the NYC-based artist duo exonomeo that fuses paint and pixel in dry self-referentiality.
26/04/2017One of the most recognized faces in biohacking, Josiah Zayner is the focus of the most recent edition of the New York Times’ Op-Docs series. “Gut Hack” chronicles his quest to alleviate his lifelong abdominal problems by killing the bacteria in his stomach and replacing it with microorganisms gleaned from an ‘ideal’ donor.
14/04/2017Entropic System is a drawing machine that inscribes ornate geometric patterns into a bed of ‘black beauty’ sand. Made by the Denver-based media artist Laleh Mehran the device has instability built-in to it, and creates a feedback loop where approaching it affects its output.
11/04/2017PSAD Synthetic Desert III is a (semi) anechoic chamber that endeavors to emulate the silence and emptiness of the Northern Arizona desert. Initially conceived by the American artist Doug Wheeler in 1968, the project was finally realized at NYC’s Guggenheim last week as part of the Panza Collection Initiative.
30/03/2017Machine Art in the Twentieth Century is a recent MIT Press-published book by Andreas Broeckmann exploring ‘machinic’ art-making. CAN weighs in with a review of this survey of moments, movements, and key figures spanning futurism to the present day.
28/03/2017Unhanded was a symposium about ‘making under the influence of digitalism’ that took place in Ottawa last September. CAN was on hand to facilitate one of the discussions, and to mark the publication of the videos online we offer some highlights and thoughts on the proceedings.
22/03/2017In his annual SXSW wrapup, science fiction author and design theorist Bruce Sterling laid a smackdown on Silicon Valley re: AI and automation.
20/03/2017What if tweaking rhythm and melodic loops was like editing DNA? This is the question at the heart of Seaquence, a new iOS app by Okaynokay where you populate a Petri dish with ‘creatures’ that visually represent their sonic properties. A bold step away from conventional interface paradigms, it blends notions of tool, instrument, and game into something new and distinct.
14/03/2017Game developer and 3D technical lead Keith O’Conor of Romero games recently wrote a ‘GPU Performance for Game Artists 101’ that breaks down the GPU pipeline from input assembly through to final render.
10/03/2017A project by Design I/O for TIFF Kids International Film Festival’s interactive playground digiPlaySpace, Mimic brings a UR5 robotic arm to life and imbues it with personality. Playfully craning its neck to get a better look, arcing back when it is startled – it responds to each child that enters its field of view.
07/03/2017In October CAN headed to Pittsburgh to toast the 30th Anniversary of The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. The event was accompanied by “Intersections,” a dynamic group exhibition showcasing many of the anti-disiciplinary works produced within the labs. Here, we review the show and share details about various included works.
Tags: Addie Wagenknecht / andy warhol / Claire Hentschker / CMU / cory arcangel / event / exhibition / featured / Golan Levin / james george / Jon Rubin / Jonathan Minard / Madeline Gannon / media lab / Miller Gallery / moon / Pablo Garcia / Pittsburgh / review / Tahir Hemphill / The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
Ottawa-based Artengine is looking for Canadian and U.S. artists, designers, and cultural producers to take part in its Digital Economies Lab (DEL), a “year-long exploration of the wonders and anguish of making art and culture in the 21st century.”
Tags: artengine / call / economy / holo / opportunity / Ottawa / research / speculative design
HOLO curates a series of critical conversations and hands-on exercises as part of the 20th Edition of MUTEK Monreal, Aug 20-25.
Tags: audiovisual / Bill Posters / Dietrich Squinkifer / education / electronic music / Ellie Irons / Heather Davis / holo / Ingrid Burrington / Joanie Lemercier / Julia Kaganskiy / Julian Oliver / monolake / montreal / MUTEK / MUTEK_IMG / Paolo Cirio / Ryan Stec / Ryoichi Kurokawa / Sava Saheli Singh / Tim Maughan / workshops
A review, photos, and selection of highlights from the abundant offerings of the 4th edition of the International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN) in Montreal.
Tags: Adam Basanta / Addie Wagenknecht / Aleksandra Domanović / BIAN / Chikashi Miyama / Cod.Act / daniel rozin / Elektra / festival / IMDA / Manfred Mohr / MIAN / montreal / NSDOS / Ralf Baecker / review / SAT
Artificial Imagination was a symposium organized by Ottawa’s Artengine this past winter that invited a group of artists to discuss the state of AI in the arts and culture. CAN was on hand to take in the proceedings, and given the emergence of documentation, we share videos and a brief report.
Tags: ai / Allison Parrish / artengine / artificial intelligence / Ben Bogart / Chris Salter / consciousness / event / Jackson 2Bears / Kristen Anne Carlson / machine learning / Nell Tenhaaf / Nora O Morchú / Ottawa / philosophy / Sofian Audrey / Theory / video
Quartier des spectacles has posted a call for innovative interactive projection mapping projects and their ponying up up to $10,000 (CAD) funding, expert tutelage to support selected projects’ development, and the opportunity to present finished works near the bustling Saint-Laurent metro station.
Tags: architecture / contest / MAPP MTL / montreal / MUTEK / projection mapping / public space / Quartier des spectacles
“Three Pieces with Titles” is the latest audiovisual performance by Montreal’s artificiel. In it Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy manipulate an eclectic collection of objects within the field of view of a computer vision system to generate real-time video and abstract sonic collage.
Tags: ableton / Alexandre Burton / artificiel / audio / audiovisual / computer vision / Csound / featured / Jimmy Lakatos / Julien Roy / montreal / music / MUTEK / ofxDecklink / ofxOpenCv / ofxPostProcessing / openFrameworks / performance / sampling / sequencer / Sound
“Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design” is an exhibition that excavates the foundation of computer-aided design and manufacturing and weaves together several ‘origin stories’ for contemporary consideration. The show recently closed after a seven-week run at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and CAN was fortunate enough to get a guided tour with curator Daniel Cardoso Llach as it was winding down.
Tags: Andrew Heumann / BiarBalliet / CAD / CAM / Cambridge University CAD Group / Carl Lostritto / Carnegie Mellon / Charles Eastman / Dana Cupkova / Daniel Cardoso Llach / darpa / exhibition / Generative Design / geometry / George Stiny / Golan Levin / Ivan Sutherland / Joseph Choma / Jürg Lehni / Ken Knowlton / Lillian Schwartz / Miller Gallery / mit / MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory / Paul Pagnaro / Philip Steadman / Pittsburgh / review / Scott Donaldson / Sketchpad / software / Steven A. Coons / The Computer History Museum / Zach Lieberman
The 2017 edition of Eastern Bloc’s Sight + Sound festival put ‘capital I’ innovation in its cross-hairs and pulled the trigger. We journeyed to Montreal to its flagship exhibition and assess its spectrum of ‘non-compliant futures.’
Tags: 3d printing / Aliens in Green / Audrey Samson / Daniel Rourke / Dardex / disnoavation.org / Eastern Bloc / Ernesto Oroza / exhibition / exonemo / festival / Gwenola Wagon / James Bridle / montreal / Morehshin Allahyari / never apart / Peter Moosgaard / review / sight & sound / speculative design / Stéphane Degoutin / Thomas Bégin
Radiance is a recently-launched online research platform for artistic VR experiences. Essentially a database, it contains info, screencaps, and video on artist-created VR projects and looks poised to become a useful resource for curators.
Tags: Claire Hentschker / database / education / immersive / Li Alin / media / Philip Hausmeier / Reference / Theo Miyö Van StenisTriantafyllidis / Tina Sauerlaender / vr / website
Dan Tapper is a British artist based in Toronto that combines his interest in code and celestial form and his recent research project “Turbulent Forms” visualizes and sonifies various cosmic phenomena. To mark the recent exhibition of this work (and related collaborations with several composers) we present this extended conversation with the artist about cosmology and data aesthetics.
Tags: Allison Cameron / Bekah Simms / Canadian Music Centre / creative coding / Dan Tapper / data / documentary / featured / interview / LIGO / Mehrnaz Rohbaksh / nasa / Processing / representation / sonification / Sound / space / toronto / visualization / VLF / workshop
House of Shadow Silence is a VR experience by Portland-based software artist Jeremy Rotzstain. In it, the artist recreates Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler’s 1929 movie theatre the Film Guild Cinema and uses it to ‘build a world’ of light, geometry, and motion.
Tags: Ann Friedberg / architecture / design / film / Frederick Kiesler / Hans Richter / Jeremy Rotsztain / LowkeyNW / Max / MaxMSP / Modernism / oculus rift / OculusRiftCV1 / ofxRay / openFrameworks / opengl / vr
Mitchell F Chan’s “Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” updates the contract at the heart of an influential 1958 work by Yves Klein for the age of cyrptocurrency, the blockchain, and smart contracts.
Tags: Bitcoin / blockchain / conceptual / contract / cryptocurrency / currency / ehterium / InterAccess / market / Mitchell F Chan / ownership / performance / value / Yves Klein
AUDINT is a European artist collective working across animation, installation, and publishing. Drawing on excerpts from an extended conversation with the group, we unpack their vision of the dystopian future-present and the nether zones that can be conjured through sound and vibration.
Tags: AUDINT / bass / Defasten / design fiction / Eleni Ikoniadou / fiction / haunting / infrasound / interview / Kode9 / military / music / narrative / Patrick Doan / peppers ghost / phonograph / research / sonar / Sound / Souzanna Zamfe / speculative design / Steve Goodman / Theory / Toby Heys / vibration / warfare
‘How much should we let algorithms shape our lives?’ is the question at the heart of Ed Finn’s recent book “What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing”. Scanning Silicon Valley, computer science, and the cultural sphere alike it offers a smart and accessible reading of our current moment.
Tags: algorithm / Bitcoin / blockchain / book / computation / Ed Flinn / facebook / featured / google / Ian Bogost / MIT Press / Netflix / Norbert Wiener / review / silicon valley / Theory / Uber
Created by California-based artist Sterling Crispin, Cyber Paint is a freshly-released VR painting app for Google’s Daydream platform. Not so much a painting simulator, its creator describes it as a “laboratory for algorithmic mark-making.”
Tags: 3d / Android / Daydream / drawing / google / google play / Google’s VR / Kai’s Power Tools / painting / Sterling Crispin / unity / vr
A follow-up to the influential 2012 booklet series “Critical Making,” “Disobedient Electronics: Protest” is a new zine by Vancouver-based theorist and educator Garnet Hertz that uses dissent as a lens to survey electronics-based projects and practices.
Tags: Annina Rüst / book / Camille Baumann-Jaeger / critical making / Doug Easterly / Ebru Kurbak / electronics / Garnet Hertz / Institute for Applied Autonomy / Irene Posch / Jaime Carreriro / Jen Liu / Julian Oliver / Matt Kenyon / Paola Antonelli / Pedro G.C. Olivera / politics / publishing / review / Scott Kiddall / Women on Waves / Xuedi Chen / zine
‘Technological Nature’ is a recent short film by media artist and designer Daria Jelonek exploring the emulation of natural phenomena with technology. Auroras, rainbows, and glaring sunlight, are all recreated with everyday materials in an eerily empty domestic environment.
Tags: after effects / CGI / cinema4d / Daria Jelonek / film / houdini / light / nature / rca
“Reflective Sculptures: A Critique of Binary Beliefs” is a pair of kinetic sculptures by the Ontario-based artists St Marie φ Walker. Produced as part of their MFA show, the motorized devices sit halfway between poems and machines.
Tags: Denise St Marie / installation / language / lasercut / machine / motor / plastic / poetry / St Marie φ Walker / Timothy Walker / University of Waterloo Art Gallery / University of Waterloo Department of Fine Arts / wood
“Queer Games Studies” is a recent collection of thematic essays published by the University of Minnesota Press that schematizes LGBTQ approachs to thinking about – and making – videogames.
Tags: Adrienne Shaw / Amanda Phillips / Anna Antropy / Aubrey Gabel / Bonnie Ruberg / book / culture / Derek A. Burrill / Edmond Y. Chang / gender / Leigh Alexander / LGBTQ / Mattie Brice / media / politics / queerness / Robert Yang / Theory / Todd Harper / University of Minnesota Press / videogames
HEAVY BODY PAINT is a new installment in an ongoing series of works by the NYC-based artist duo exonomeo that fuses paint and pixel in dry self-referentiality.
Tags: colour / exonemo / hpgrp / materiality / paint / painting / representation
One of the most recognized faces in biohacking, Josiah Zayner is the focus of the most recent edition of the New York Times’ Op-Docs series. “Gut Hack” chronicles his quest to alleviate his lifelong abdominal problems by killing the bacteria in his stomach and replacing it with microorganisms gleaned from an ‘ideal’ donor.
Tags: biohacking / biology / diy / documentary / ethics / Josiah Zayner / New York Times / video
Entropic System is a drawing machine that inscribes ornate geometric patterns into a bed of ‘black beauty’ sand. Made by the Denver-based media artist Laleh Mehran the device has instability built-in to it, and creates a feedback loop where approaching it affects its output.
Tags: arduino / Chris Coleman / drawing machine / entropy / geometry / Laleh Mehran / materials / politics / Processing / teensy++
PSAD Synthetic Desert III is a (semi) anechoic chamber that endeavors to emulate the silence and emptiness of the Northern Arizona desert. Initially conceived by the American artist Doug Wheeler in 1968, the project was finally realized at NYC’s Guggenheim last week as part of the Panza Collection Initiative.
Tags: anechoic / architecture / arup / conceptual / Doug Wheeler / Environment / Guggenheim / light / materials / minimalism / nyc / Panza Collection Initiative / silence / Sound / space
Machine Art in the Twentieth Century is a recent MIT Press-published book by Andreas Broeckmann exploring ‘machinic’ art-making. CAN weighs in with a review of this survey of moments, movements, and key figures spanning futurism to the present day.
Tags: Andreas Broeckmann / book / David Rokeby / history / Jean Tinguely / MIT Press / MoMA / Stelarc / Tatlin / technology / Theory / Wim Delvoye
Unhanded was a symposium about ‘making under the influence of digitalism’ that took place in Ottawa last September. CAN was on hand to facilitate one of the discussions, and to mark the publication of the videos online we offer some highlights and thoughts on the proceedings.
Tags: 3d printing / artengine / autodesk / conference / craft / critical making / Digital Fabrication / event / featured / Garnet Hertz / Greg Sims / James Hayes / Joanna Berzowska / make / Maker Faire / making / Ottawa / Rachel Gotlieb / Sandra Alfoldy / Sarah Brin / Steven Loft / symposium / Tom Bessai / Valerie Lamontagne / wearable
In his annual SXSW wrapup, science fiction author and design theorist Bruce Sterling laid a smackdown on Silicon Valley re: AI and automation.
Tags: ai / automation / bruce sterling / design / economics / lecture / politics / silicon valley / sxsw / talk / Theory / UBI
What if tweaking rhythm and melodic loops was like editing DNA? This is the question at the heart of Seaquence, a new iOS app by Okaynokay where you populate a Petri dish with ‘creatures’ that visually represent their sonic properties. A bold step away from conventional interface paradigms, it blends notions of tool, instrument, and game into something new and distinct.
Tags: app / artifical life / Cinder / Flash / Gabriel Dunne / ios / music interface / Okaynokay / pure data / Ryan Alexander / sequencer / Sound / synthesizer
Game developer and 3D technical lead Keith O’Conor of Romero games recently wrote a ‘GPU Performance for Game Artists 101’ that breaks down the GPU pipeline from input assembly through to final render.
A project by Design I/O for TIFF Kids International Film Festival’s interactive playground digiPlaySpace, Mimic brings a UR5 robotic arm to life and imbues it with personality. Playfully craning its neck to get a better look, arcing back when it is startled – it responds to each child that enters its field of view.
Tags: computer vision / Dan Moore / debugview / Design I/O / digiPlaySpace / Emily Gobeille / featured / interactive / kids / Madeline Gannon / Nick Hardeman / Nick Pagee / ofxRobotArm / ofxURDriver / openFrameworks / robotics / Ryerson University / Theo Watson / TIFF