VECTOR FESTIVAL 2019

Toronto, ON | July 11-14, 2019

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?


Stay tuned!
The full Vector Festival 2019 program, as well as individual event tickets and festival passes, will be available on June 12, 2019 at vectorfestival.org.

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About the Curators

Katie Micak is an artist, curator, and researcher, whose work includes video and performance art practices, collaborative design, and an investigation of the integration of chatbots/robots into physical environments. Micak is a founding member of Vector. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University in Transmedia Studies, and is a recent MA graduate from OCADU’s Digital Futures Program. Micak is also an educator in new media art practices. She has served as the Gallery Director of Spark Contemporary in Syracuse, NY and Propeller in Toronto, and was the Digital Media Department Manager at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
@KatieMicak / katiemicak.com

Martin Zeilinger is a new media researcher, curator, and practitioner based in London, UK, where he works as Senior Lecturer in Media at Anglia Ruskin University. He has been the co-curator of Vector Festival since 2014. Zeilinger’s work on appropriation-based creative practices, digital art, financial technologies, and theories of cultural ownership has been published, screened, and exhibited widely. Current projects include ‘MoneyLab#4’ (London, UK, 2018; on contemporary art and financial activism) and 'Rethinking Affordance’ (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2018; on digital art and design theory).
@mrtnzlngr / marjz.net

Shahbaz Khayambashi is a Toronto-based academic, teacher and curator, currently working towards a PhD at York University. His research deals with visual representations of death and the use of images in political movements. He has curated several shows in Toronto across the last few years, independently and as a member of Pleasure Dome, Citizens Committee on Moral Hygiene and Monster Mash. His writing has been published in the Journal of Radio and Audio Media and Pressed.


About Vector Festival

Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice. The festival was founded in 2013 as the “Vector Game Art & New Media Festival” by an independent group of artists and curators: Skot Deeming, Clint Enns, kris kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger.

Vector Festival is funded by the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and York University. Vector Festival is grateful for the support of 2019 programming partners, including Ryerson University, Pleasure Dome, the City of Mississauga, and Trinity Square Video.

Image: Lorna Mills, Roadkill. 2019.