Vector Festival 2019

Curated by Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger

InterAccess is pleased to announce the full program for Vector Festival 2019. This year’s festival, Speculative Ecologies: Media Art at the Anthropocenic Precipice, highlights the emergent, critical, and experimental practices of over 40 artists from Canada and abroad.

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 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, we invite you to join us in speculating on possible futures, alternative realities, and post-calamity archaeologies of the mess we have created for ourselves.

Vector Festival’s launch on July 11, 2019 at InterAccess is also the opening reception of this year’s flagship exhibition. The main exhibition, Future Relics, presents media artists whose work offers insights and outlooks on digital culture and the environment, oscillating between the playful and the critical, the hopeful and the dystopian. This exhibition features works by Anna Eyler, Aksel Haagensen, Lisa Jackson, Raquel Meyers, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Scenocosme (Grégory Lasserre + Anaïs met den Ancxt), and Jeff Thompson.

On July 12, an international line-up of performance artists working with experimental visualization tools, archaic home computing, and immersive sound will present an evening of otherworldly, post-calamity, "future perfect" entertainment. Performances by Raquel Meyers, Jenn Norton, and Tasman Richardson look to the large- and small-scale ways the world is adapting to us. Future Perfect is presented in partnership with Ryerson University School of Image Arts.

The following evening, on July 13, Vector presents the screening program "Eschatological Autopsy: The Act of Seeing the End of the World with One's Own Eyes," curated by Shahbaz Khayambashi and presented in partnership with Pleasure Dome. Featuring works by Anxious to Make (Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez), Christina Battle, Jennifer Chan, Thirza Cuthand, John Greyson, Geoffrey Pugen, Claire Scherzinger, and Tom Sherman, this program asks: when the end is near, what can we do but sit back and watch it happen?

In addition to these key programs, the festival is pleased to announce the presentation of work by Stephanie Comilang, Henning Frederik Malz, Adrienne Matheuszik, Alex McLeod, Jessie Sheng, and Leslie Supnet (Wild Blue Yonder: Vector Festival Preview Screening in partnership with the City of Mississauga), Iodine Dynamics, Brianna Lowe, Kris Pierce, and Zeesy Powers (The Great Derangement in partnership with Electric Perfume), John Ayliff, Matt DesLauriers, Droqen, Nick Montfort, and Vera Sebert (Local Host: Post-Human Media Arts), Milumbe Haimbe (African Space Dream in partnership with the Ontario Science Centre), Sarah Imrisek (Bot in the Woods), Lorna Mills (Roadkill in partnership with Trinity Square Video), and Jordan Shaw (Canadian Abstracts in partnership with Artscape Youngplace). Vector Festival 2019 will also include workshops led by artists Jaimie Howard (Intro to 3D Modeling: Digital Sculpting with Rhino), and Tosca Terán (Bio-Sonification: Non-Human Collaboration presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto).

The full program can be found at vectorfestival.org