Seis8s by Luis N. Del Angel

Seis8s is a web-based computer language that allows real-time interaction with digital audio and localized musical knowledge. Seis8s revolves around Spanish-language commands related to Latin dance music such as Cumbia and Salsa. This music is a 20th-century derivation of Afro-Caribbean rhythms for social dancing that developed in the Hispanic Caribbean.

Seis8s is meant to connect the users (i.e. performer and audience) with cultural layers influencing computer-music languages. This project explores 1) a computer-music language to be derived from Spanish; 2) to appeal to an imagined community in/from Latin America; and 3) to explore how sociocultural commonalities of that community intersect with music software.

Special thanks to Drs. David Ogborn, Christina Baade, and Rossana Lara. Thanks to the Mexican Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA), the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Luis is currently a Hamilton-based audiovisual interdisciplinary artist. His interests revolve around critical code studies, new interfaces for musical expression, live coding, Latin American musicology, and participatory action research. Luis is a member of the live coding collectives RGGTRN, the Cybernetic Orchestra and Grupo D’Binis.

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Celestial Throne by Rah Eleh

Celestial Throne is a two -channel video that consists of two screen or projections that seamlessly interect. The video parodies the tropes endemic to a classic game show, specifically Jeopardy!, where clues are provided and contestants guess the answers. The clues in the game show expose coded internet dialect, iconography, memes, and aesthetics used by far right hate groups to disseminate the movement’s political ideologies, spread messages of animosity and to lure recruits. The characters are all performed by the artist and they deconstruct racial stereotypes, while the videos are a pointed critique of far-right internet extremism. A glossary of terms can be found on the artist’s website

Rah Eleh is a PhD candidate at Die Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Rah’s work has been exhibited extensively internationally at spaces including Venice Biennale (Palazzo Mora), Vogele Kultur Zentrum (Pfaiffikon, Switzerland), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Museum London, Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), and the Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including long-listed 2023 Sobey Art Awards, Chalmers Arts Fellowship, SSHRC Canada Graduate and Doctoral scholarships, and several Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council grants. She has been awarded many residencies including the ONX Studio (NYC, 2024 ), Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna, 2014) and the ArtSlant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris, 2014). 

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Virtual ISLANDs by Olivia Mc Gilchrist

Virtual ISLANDs explores the relationship between the experience of virtual immersion in VR and the physicality of being submerged, offering viewers audio-visual interpretations of the ebb and flow of water around them. The project invites a reading of VR’s virtual space foregrounding submersion alongside immersion, to highlight the relation between water and fluid identities, inspired by my dual Caribbean and European heritage. In earlier versions of Virtual ISLANDS, I explored the affordance of my white privilege through the lens of hybridity by visualizing my body coming in and out of the artwork’s visual plane. In Virtual ISLANDs’ current VR experience, the viewer is placed in an aquatic scene where they can interact with the moving figure of Newfoundlander aerial performer Keely Whitelaw. Her choreographed performance portrays a gestural response to an original composition by Newfoundlander electronic composer Kasey Pocius, inspired by a virtual experience of being underwater.

Olivia Mc Gilchrist (she / her) is a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist and doctoral candidate exploring how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. She works with video, multimedia installation and VR both as an artist and a consultant on interdisciplinary and audio-visual performance based projects.

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