Panel Statement

Keywords: Sensorium, digital art, research-creation, computational art, archive

This live discussion, live discussion features “Life, A Sensorium” exhibition artists David Han (Is there a way to be gone and still belong?), Michaela Pnacekova (Symphony of Noise VR), and Alison Humphrey (Shadowpox: Citizen Science Fiction). Moderated by exhibition curator Melanie Wilmink, the artist talk examines creation processes, project objectives, art & video games, and innovative uses of experiential technology in artistic creation.

• Melanie Wilmink holds a PhD in Art History at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research examines the relationship between spectatorial experience and exhibition spaces within interdisciplinary media installations. This academic research is supported by her curatorial work including various projects as Programming Coordinator at the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (2007-2012), the Situated Cinema Project mobile micro-cinema (Pleasure Dome, 2015), and the Winter Warmer (Sidewalk Labs Toronto, 2019). Her recent publications include the anthology Sculpting Cinema (2018) and Landscapes of moving image: prairie artists’ cinema (forthcoming), both co-edited with Solomon Nagler. melaniewilmink.com.
• Janine Marchessault is a professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, Toronto, Canada and holds a York Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement. Her research has engaged with four areas: the history of large screen media (from multiscreen to Imax to media as architecture and VR); diverse models of public art, festivals, and site specific curation; 21st century moving-image archives and notions of collective memory/ history. She is a founder of the Future Cinema Lab, and the 2014-2016 inaugural Director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts Research. A Trudeau Fellow, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She belongs to the CinemaExpo67.ca research group and is a founding member of the Public Access Curatorial Collective. Her latest project is an expanded cinema festival Outer Worlds outerworlds.org—commissioning five IMAX films by artists which premiered at the Cinesphere in 2019 as part of Images Festival. Dr. Marchessault is the PI for Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Moving Image Heritage (2018-2024 SSHRC Partnership Grant) counterarchive.ca, a research collaboration involving more than 14 community and artist run archives in Canada devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, LGBTQ, immigrant and women’s histories. Her research explores the afterlife of moving image archives as art forms and new forms of historical knowledge.
• Joel Ong is a media artist whose works explore emergent ways of interfacing with the environment through hybrid discourse of art and science. His works involve a triangulation of field work, wet lab and computational art and are often presented as on-site experiments. Ong is an alumni of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts and DXARTS at UW(Seattle), and is an affiliate artist with the UCLA Art|Sci Collective. He is currently Assistant Professor in Computational Arts at York University in Toronto, and Director of Sensorium: the Centre for Digtial Arts and Technology.