Join us to celebrate 9 artists and scholars from York University, TMU, OCADU, the University of Toronto, and Concordia University, presenting their ongoing research creation.
9 artists
9 presentations
5 Universities
Thursday, May 29, 2025
5:30 pm
The Fields Institute
for Research in Mathematical Science
FEATURING:
Kavi – Ilze Briede (YorkU)
Kathy Zhou (OISE/UofT)
Jessica Patel (OCADU)
Dave McFarlane (TMU)
Maria Simmons (Concordia U)
Shelby Murchie (YorkU)
Aileen Dong (OCADU)
Marko Cindric (YorkU)
Gillian Blekkenhorst (OCADU)
Please, RSVP here
This event is co-hosted by ArtSci Salon and SLOLab
PRESENTATIONS + BIOS
Ilze Briede (Kavi) – “Living Data”
My practice examines the dynamic interplay between cybernetic systems, live brain data, and active spectatorship in a mixed-reality environment. This set-up allows for dynamically shaped real-time artistic expressions that respond directly to data streams.
Bio: Ilze Briede, known as Kavi, is a Latvian-Canadian artist and researcher specialising in creating exploratory systems for performance and immersive narratives. Her work involves using live biophysical data from the human body to develop innovative pathways to understanding and perception. Kavi is pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Art at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Kathy H. Zhou – “Research-Creation for the Public Sphere: Designing a Game-Based Interdisciplinary Arts Curriculum”
This talk presents Fall of Artica, a research-creation project that uses a dystopian game world to immerse students in civic dialogue, value conflict, and ethical decision-making. By blending arts-based inquiry and participatory design, Kathy shares how a game-based curriculum can turn the collective inquire in formal classrooms into a socially engaged art practices for deliberation, imagination, and collective meaning-making.
Bio: Kathy H. Zhou is an artist, researcher, and PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her work bridges game design, critical pedagogy, and research-creation to explore how youth can engage in public discourse through creative, interdisciplinary learning environments.
Jessica Patel – “Combatting Toxicity: Designing an Intelligent System to Diminish Verbal Harassment in Video Games”
This project involves developing an intervention system that can be embedded into video games to detect, moderate, and prevent verbal toxicity. The intervention system was built using natural language processing (NLP) deep learning for toxicity detection, and design thinking as a methodology to promote player-centered interfaces and responses.
Bio: Jessica is a Master of Design candidate at OCAD University in the Digital Futures program who thrives on solving complex challenges. Her path began with a bachelor’s degree in physics and astronomy. While researching ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, she realized her desire to conduct research that produces more tangible solutions for the complex problems that affect people every day. After earning a UX design certification, she pursued graduate studies and is working on a thesis project involving human-computer interaction, game studies, and machine learning. While continuing her research, Jessica is working with industry professionals to build upon her expertise.
David McFarlane: “Co-creating Artistic Acoustic Ecologies with the Great Lakes“
Through meticulous analysis and interpretation of sonic data gathered from the depths and shores of the Great Lakes, McFarlane seeks to translate their perceived “sensations” and responses to our presence and actions. This project, born from an initial act of imaginative empathy, asks: what stories do the Great Lakes hold, and what might they tell us about our shared existence?
Bio: David McFarlane is a Canadian visual artist, musician, and PhD candidate in the Media and Design Innovation program at Toronto Metropolitan University. McFarlane’s practice is rooted in a rigorous exploration of acoustic ecology and the transformative potential of sonified biodata. His current research-creation project reimagines the Great Lakes not as passive bodies of water, but as active characters, each possessing unique voices and stories. McFarlane’s work navigates the complex interplay between technology, ethics, and creative expression. He employs innovative methodologies to facilitate a collaborative process, positioning the Great Lakes as co-creators in the composition of immersive soundscapes. These sonic experiences invite listeners to transcend traditional anthropocentric perspectives and reconsider their relationship with nature.
Maria Simmons – “Uncertain Ground: Peatlands as Sites of Resistance, Ritual and Ruin“
My research-creation practice explores the cultural and ecological entanglements of peatlands through video, sensory ethnography, and sculpture. Drawing on feminist theory and environmental history, my research investigates peatlands as contested terrains where extractive histories, embodied practices, and multispecies futures converge.
Bio: Maria Simmons (she/they) is a Canadian sculpture and installation artist whose work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She collects garbage, buries butter, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself. Simmons holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BFA from McMaster University and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Recent exhibitions include the Visual Art Centre of Clarington (Canada), Lydgalleriet (Norway), Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art (Norway), Fiminco Foundation (France), and the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia. Simmons’ work has been featured in CBC Arts, Esse, Peripheral Review, and Public Parking.
Shelby Murchie – “Data Narratives and the Future of Interaction”
This talk introduces Shelby Murchie’s ongoing research at the intersection of data physicalization, embodied interaction, and exploratory design practices. Through responsive systems and biologically inspired media, she investigates how alternative interfaces can reshape how we sense, interpret, and relate to complex information.
Shelby Murchie is a Toronto-based new media creative and technologist interested in exploring how physically responsive systems can enhance and mediate perception, experience and cognition. She holds a Bachelor’s in New Media from TMU, and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Digital Media at York University. Her research spans unconventional interfaces, biologically-inspired design, and data physicalization. By drawing on these subjects, Shelby aims to facilitate more intuitive relationships between humans and technology, making complex information accessible and meaningful through embodied interaction.
Aileen Dong – “LUMIEA: Tangible Storytelling in AI-Driven Mixed Reality“
An interactive MR storytelling system where users speak to real-world objects to generate AI-driven characters and influence narrative flow. The system blends spatial computing, speech input, and tangible interaction to co-create immersive, adaptive storytelling experiences.
Bio: Ailin Dong is a graduate student in the Digital Futures program at OCAD University and an interdisciplinary installation artist exploring the intersections of mixed reality, AI, and narrative-driven experiences. Her work investigates the fusion of physical and digital worlds, crafting immersive environments that explore evolving relationships between human embodiment, cybernetics, and intelligent systems. Through a hybrid approach that combines AI-generated aesthetics, spatial computing, and speculative storytelling, she creates interactive installations that challenge perceptions of identity, agency, and presence in synthetic realities. Her recent thesis project, LUMIEA, transforms everyday spaces into dynamic narrative systems through speech interaction, object recognition, and real-time generative content. Drawing from architecture, game design, and interactive fiction, Ailin’s practice reimagines storytelling as a co-creative process between human and machine, grounded in spatial and emotional experience.
Marko Cindric – “save as”
A browser-based interactive map of 3D experiences comprised of LiDAR-scanned, at-risk wild sites in southern Ontario. A method-as-critique approach that posits the virtual as insufficient substitution for the real.
Bio: Marko Cindric is a new media artist and researcher interested in the overlooked presuppositions and ideological residues that inadvertently shape discussions on the climate crisis. Synthesizing themes of degrowth, decentralization, and ancestral lifeways, his work orients itself toward disrupting the age-old tendencies of science and technology toward control, decontextualization, and forceful quantification of a living, interconnected world. Through his research, he grapples with a central tension: can our digital technologies be emancipated from the ecocidal military-industrial paradigm from which they emerge? And how can we reformulate our questions in ways that de-centre the human, that we may better honour the sovereignty of our more-than-human kin?
Gillian Blekkenhorst – “Ontological bleed: Agency, Metalepsis and Player Identity in Interface Simulation Games“
‘ONTOLOGICAL BLEED’ is a research-creation masters thesis in the form of a database investigation game. It places the player as a research intern cross-referencing databases and physical artifacts, uncovering a supernatural mystery, and interfacing with mysterious entities associated with a reality that is encroaching on our own – much like how fictional game worlds intersect with ours, with the player as pivot point, existing at once in the actual world and the virtual world of the fiction.
Bio: g blekkenhorst is a Canadian artist and experimental narrative designer working across multiple media, including games, ttrpgs, and comics. They have previously worked with Pushing Vertices, Shining Spark Entertainment, Peculiar Path and krakLab, in addition to their experimental games practice. They are a member of the friendship edition comics collective, and published in various comic anthologies, including Wayward Sisters and Wayward Kindred with TO Comics and Pulping. Their work explores concepts of interactivity, cognition, speculative fiction, fear and vulnerability, and experimental narrative structures and mechanics.
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