InterAccess is thrilled to announce the theme of Vector Festival 2019, Speculative Ecologies: Media Art at the Anthropocenic Precipice. Curated by Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger, this year’s festival explores the ways in which contemporary media art reflects—and reflects on—mass-scale environmental shifts. The 2019 festival program will include works by over 30 local and international artists in more than 8 locations across Toronto and online.
SPECULATIVE ECOLOGIES: Media Art at the Anthropocenic Precipice
At a time when humanity’s collective dithering in the face of impending ecological disaster is threatening to harm our world beyond repair, Vector Festival 2019 explores how contemporary media art reflects on this dire state of affairs. Featuring interactive installations, screen-based works, experimental games, generative art, performances, sound art, and other digital works, the festival’s curators invite you to join us in speculating on possible futures, alternative realities, and post-calamity archaeologies of the mess we have created for ourselves.
PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS:
Future Relics
Flagship Exhibition at InterAccess
How will post-extinction media archaeologists rediscover our lost civilisation? What will robots have to say about the last days of humanity? What possible futures are already inscribed in the technologies and digital tools we use today? Future Relics, this year’s Vector Festival flagship exhibition, presents media artists whose work offers insights and outlooks on digital culture and the environment that oscillate between the playful and the critical, the hopeful and the dystopian. This exhibition will feature works by Anna Eyler (EQ Bank Emerging Digital Artist Award, 2018), Jeff Thompson (Assistant Professor and Program Director, Visual Art & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology), and Scenocosme (Grégory Lasserre & Anaïs met den Ancxt; Lumen Prize Silver Award, 2015).
Eschatological Autopsy: The Act of Seeing the End of the World with One’s Own Eyes
Screening curated by Shahbaz Khayambashi
Presented in partnership with Pleasure Dome
The future is environmental disaster. Humanity is slowly but surely reaching the point of no return, a point of irreversible environmental damage, a point of mass extinction, widespread catastrophe and a step toward uninhabitability. In this screening program, using views from the past, present, and future, a group of local and international artists ask—where can we go from here? When the end seems to be looming and those who can do something about it refuse, what else is there to do but to sit back and watch it happen?
textiles + materiality research cluster 