Vector Festival 2020

InterAccess is thrilled to announce that its annual celebration of digital art and game art, Vector Festival, will be presented online for the first time in the festival’s eight year history.

Vector Festival 2020: Online Edition, curated by Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger, will present the work of more than 60 artists. The festival features a diverse mix of media art that includes digital artworks, live-streamed performances, video games, panel discussions, participatory workshops, and screenings. This year’s programming is resonant with themes of solitude, distanced interaction, digital art-making and curation, and the many new forms of community, solidarity, and care spawned by the challenges and promises of the current moment.

Vector Festival will launch on Thursday, July 16 with the release of our flagship exhibition Online is the new IRL on our new online platform. The exhibition encompasses interactive artworks, art games, video works, web tool hacks, and artist studio live streams by Hiba Ali, Jennifer Chan, Ronnie Clarke, Hilarey Cowan, Thirza Cuthand, Maya Ben David, Steph Davidson, Hannah Epstein, Jord Farrell, Dimitris Gkikas, Milumbe Haimbe, Fay Heady, Amay Kataria, Samuel Kiehoon Lee, Gina Luke, Ben McCarthy & Cale Weir, Amelia Merhar, Roberto Santaguida, Juli Saragosa, Jordan Sparks, Lee Tusman, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Qirou Yang. While not every artwork featured in the exhibition was created in direct response to the pandemic, what unites them all is their resonance with themes such as digital connectedness, overcoming isolation, and building and maintaining virtual relationships.

This year’s festival features a robust program of live-streamed performances. To celebrate the festival’s opening night, artist collective Tough Guy Mountain (Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, and Iain Soder) will present the VRChat performance Intern Purgatory: A Covid-19 VRChat Story. On July 17, Justin Massey will deliver False Positive, a musical performance remixing recordings of IRL performances and collaborations with computer generated audio and visual elements. The following night, on July 18, Olivia Shortt will present ishkwe-ayi'ii, an installation and performance that looks at the global climate crisis through an Indigenous lens and asks—is the apocalypse coming for humanity if we don’t fix this soon? Keiko Hart will lead two back-to-back virtual life drawing sessions, is this real life drawing and unstill life drawing, on July 19, followed by the participatory Twitch-streamed audio/visual performance Luna with visuals and violin by Meghan Cheng and cello by Cheryl Ockrant.

Over its seven day program, Vector Festival will present discursive and instructional workshop sessions including “A to Z Experimental Chatroom” by Xin Xin, “Resistance Strategies in the Age of Surveillance” by María Angélica Madero and Joselyn McDonald, “Fermenting a Revolution” by Ashley Jane Lewis, “Making Meme Art On Your Phone” by Fallon Simard, and “A Queer Guide to GIF-Making” by Alex Jensen. Additionally, Meagan Byrne will lead the panel discussion “You Need Protocols: Working with Indigenous Culture in the Digital Realm” with artists Elijah Forbes and Taylor McArthur.

Festival events will be hosted on a new, custom built online exhibition platform designed by Toronto artist Jordan Shaw. Using real time data visualization, the site translates the excitement and energy of the festival experience into the virtual sphere.

All Vector events will be presented for free or pay-what-you-can to encourage wide participation while creating new opportunities for community engagement, exploration, and learning.

The full program can be found at vectorfestival.org