People doing strange things with electricity (Toronto Franchise)
Douglas Repetto - Artbots
Mike Steventon - Art Interface Device
Valérie Lamontagne - Peau d'Âne
Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Douglas is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and lives in New York City with his wife, writer Amy Benson; two cute/bad cats, Pokey and Sneezy; and many plants.
http://music.columbia.edu/~douglas/ArtBots is an international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots. Each year we publish an open call for submissions, inviting artists from around the world to send us information about their work. No firm rules exist on the types of work that can participate; if you think it's a robot and you think it's art, we encourage you to submit. The final list of participants is a mix of works selected from the open call submissions and additional artists invited by the ArtBots curators.
Every year the show is a bit different; the location changes and ArtBots director Douglas Repetto invites a new set of colleagues to co-curate the show with him. We hope that by changing the specifics of the show each year we can keep it open and accessible to a diverse range of people, works, and ideas.
http://artbots.orgThe Art Interface Device (AID) is a microprocessor platform for building electronic installation art. It can also be used as an interface between such artworks and computers. It can enable artworks to respond to people and the physical environment.
www.interaccess.org/aid/Valérie Lamontagne is a Montréal-based artist, freelance art critic and curator. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1993) and Masters of Fine Arts (2001) from Concordia University in Montréal (Canada) where she presently teaches in theComputational Arts Program. In 2006 she will be a Ph.D. Candidate working with the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University.
Valérie Lamontagne's area of inquiry is nestled between performance art, technology and media theory. She investigates the resonance of somatic/digital presence through costume, live performance, networked environments and photography.
www.mobilegaze.com/valerie/In the Charles Perrault fairy tale Peau d'Âne a young princess, whose stepfather's riches are dependant on his gold excreting donkey, orders the impossible from her doting father in order to avoid having to marry him: three dresses made of immaterial materials. The first is to be made of the "sky" and should be as light and airy as the clouds. The second is to be made of "moonbeams" and should reflect the same lyrical intensity as the moon at night. The third, and last, is to be made of "sunlight" and should be as blinding and warm as the sun above.
The aim of the project "Peau d'Âne" is to incarnate these "impossible" dresses in a material form. I propose to build three dresses, which will take on the unique mutable characteristics of - the sky, moon and sun - and translate these natural qualities into actuated dresses to be used in a performance context.
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Dorkbot-Toronto is always free and open to the public.
For more information, email dorkbottoronto@dorkbot.org