A diverse group of thirteen artists,writers, producers and collaborators from CFC Media Lab’s TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program transform the InterAcces Gallery into a space of inquisitive discovery and play.

Close Encounters invites the audience to re-imagine game play, explore notions of first contact, take notice of sound installations, and discover the ease of a wearable gaming system. The year’s annual presentation includes the premiere of Unit N-O14, special projects DruMeBa, Voicings, Neighbourhoodie and I Should Be Dreaming of Butterflies by featured Alumni Artist Sharon Switzer.

Neighbourhoodie is a wearable device that combines the energy of the street games with the thrill of interactive game play into the comfy, hooded garment we all know and love. Neighbourhoodie was originally developed for tweens and teens by Rose Bianchini, David McCallum, and Kathleen Climie, and requires the gamer to leave their residence to play in the big beautiful world. Once a Hoodie is fully electronically outfitted the world is turned into a game through the use of light, sound and sensors. Neighbourhoodie is a gateway to an augmented world of collective and personal experiences.

Camille Betts and Justin Ferrato’s Unit N-O14 is an interactive experience which combines the use of sculptural design, generative audio and lighting design, with capacitive sensing to create an overall narrative experience. A shipping container was found. Its contents remain unknown. An unknown being has been discovered. Our understanding of it is incomprehensible but we are aware of its existence. Dare to approach.

DruMeBa created by Conor Holler, Dee Balkissoon, Cathy Chen, and Orla Garriques, is a customizable drumming experience designed to foster social interaction and collaboration among children with Austim. DruMeBa brings music therapy into the 21st century by combining the communicative and collaborative power of drumming with technology, offers dynamic visuals, and enriches the participants’ performance by adding melody and instrumentation in real time. Voicings is an aural composition created by Dawn Buie, David Goorevitch, and Liz Gallo.

Symphonies of voices reveal the human passions and motivation behind innovation, offering insights into the personalities at the MaRS Discovery District. Voicings mines the words of 19 interviews from an experiment in non-narrative storytelling for elemental phrases about behavior and expressed beliefs, and reveals the playful aspects of personalities through associative word play and unanticipated resonances. Voicings live in a space, not a radio.

I Should Be Dreaming of Butterflies is created by CFC Media Lab’s featured Alumni Artist, Sharon Switzer. Switzer continues on the trajectory of pairing unlikely, poetic and darkly humorous texts with evocative visuals. In this new work, Switzer adds abstracted digital drawings, often referencing certain real-world objects and ideas. This series of animated digital video drawings is also an exploration into the possibilities of ‘creation’ within a digital compositing program. They are not traditional drawing, video, animation – but something unique born from within this medium.

Regardless of technology platform or theme, each of these projects makes us look at things a different way. Shaving cream, pillows, mud – they can all become vehicles for our persistent visions.