July 25, 2025 7:00 to 9:00 Factory Media Centre
On July 25th 2025, Expanded Data had its first event Open Studios hosted by Factory Media Centre in Hamilton, ON. This multi-artist interactive exhibit showcased the role that artistic and experimental have in reimagining data futures. This event was open to the public, attended by all artists involved and community members alike, that marked a successful beginning to the Expanded Data exhibit.
Artist Info
Sofian Audry
Sofian Audry is an artist, scholar, Professor at the School of Media at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Co-Director of the mXlab, and Co-Director of the Hexagram Network. Their work explores the behavior of hybrid agents at the frontier of art, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. Audry's artistic practice branches through multiple forms including robotics, installations, bio-art, and electronic literature. Their work has been shown at major international events and venues. https://sofianaudry.com/
Erin Gee
Erin Gee is a multidisciplinary composer and artist who lives and works in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her practice spans disciplines of new media art, music composition, art-science, and performing arts. She is Professeure Adjointe (Assistant Professor) in the Music Faculty at Université de Montreal. As a DIY expert in emotional biofeedback technology, Gee’s music and performances explore the subtle and unconscious dimensions of sound, gesture, breath, voice, eye contact, and simulated haptics—treating them as manipulative tools for shaping the body and its emotional states. Her performance techniques delve into the subconscious influence of sound, drawing inspiration from emotional physiology, hypnotism, feminist theory, ASMR, and the placebo effect to challenge the authority of quantification in biofeedback and quantified self technologies.
to the sooe
to the sooe is a sound object that merges human and machine-generated voices within a tangible, intimate device. It features a binaural recording of artist Erin Gee whispering the output of a neural network trained on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. This LSTM model learns the text character by character, gradually developing a strange, imitative voice of its own. Gee rearticulates this machine murmur using techniques from ASMR to produce an affective, multisensory experience.
The work entwines three cognitive and creative agents: the deceased author, the machine learning system, and the human performer. These voices are inscribed in the object as whispered speech, text etched onto mirrored acrylic, and code embedded in silicon. As Gee’s voice transmits the alien text, the listener encounters a fusion of neural computation and embodied vocality. Through involuntary somatic responses triggered by ASMR, the listener’s body becomes an active participant in the system. to the sooe thus reveals the listener as a cyborgian node—an already-hybrid entity entangled with machine perception, affect, and memory. It is a meditation on voice, intimacy, and the porous boundaries between author, algorithm, and audience. https://sofianaudry.com/works/to-the-sooe/
Cooperative Reality Gap
Cooperative Reality Gap is an installation in which small machines sleep. They collect solar energy to wake up sporadically and connect with each other. Each individual’s sensory experience is obtained entirely through solar cells and intermittent radio chatter. Their effect on the environment is only through imprecise and clumsy control of a rubber tentacle. As they navigate with partial information and limited motor control, success depends on cooperative coevolution. The system explores how low-energy agents survive and adapt with minimal environmental and financial costs, detached from the cloud, data centres, and high performance computing required to drive modern virtual learning machines.
Stephen Kelly
Stephen Kelly is an Assistant Professor in Computing and Software at McMaster University. He received his PhD in from Dalhousie University and completed an NSERC post-doctoral fellowship at the BEACON Center for the study of Evolution in Action at Michigan State University. Stephen also holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His interdisciplinary research-creation practice explores nature-inspired computing as raw material for storytelling, activism, and public engagement. http://creativealgorithms.ca/
object.type(3)
object.type(3) is an experimental lo-tech web game. A global network of psychic trans cybersoldiers have been forcibly neurologically integrated into one another, into a military AI system, and into VR combat environments. Together, they must stop rogue AI agents from destroying the world. object.type(3) dramatizes trans theories of futurity and advances a trans feminist critique of the apocalypticism and militarism of masculinist AI futures. The game integrates a choose-your-own-adventure narrative, in-text interfaces, procedurally generated imagery and lo-fi animations, ambient music and audio, and an archive of multimedia hypertexts that provide fragmentary perspectives into the game world’s mysterious events. Through design (dys)affordances inspired by the structure of a gender transition, players experience trans corporealities and temporalities. Players oscillate between affects of intelligibility and unintelligibility, clarity and confusion, agency and inability, transition and friction, and pleasure and dysphoria as they proceed through the game.
Blair Attard-Frost
Blair Attard-Frost is a multidisciplinary creative, researcher, and educator thinking about AI governance through a trans feminist lens. Her research addresses challenges of power, participation, and justice in the governance of AI systems. She draws on 10+ years of experience working across government, industry, and academia to teach students, professionals, and communities about AI policy & ethics. Her creative practice combines experimental sci-fi, glitch art, and surrealism to expose frictions between gender, technology, and regulation.
https://blairaf.com
https://bsky.app/profile/blairaf.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/blairaf/
My Data Body + Your Data Body
My Data Body and Your Data Body, are two complementary virtual reality artworks which combine medical scans, social media posts, biometric details, and personal identification numbers to analyze the politics and ethics of disseminating digital information. My Data Body features a high-resolution, volume rendered MR scan of Oliver’s body. As visitors to the VR work enter the semi-transparent body and explore it, they encounter data corpuses downloaded from her Facebook and Google accounts as well as texts relating to the data usage agreements of these corporations. Passwords and logins flow back and forth through veins and arteries. Those engaged with My Data Body can read, listen to, manipulate, discard, or re-arrange this digital information; they might also decide to dissect the digital body by removing and examining its organs and bones. Each organ can be pulled out of the body to scatter “particles”; the brain spills password and login windows, the intestines shed data cookies, and the heart sprinkles emojis. Poetry written by J. R. Carpenter dangles from the bones, reflecting on what it is like both to live with and as a body of data. Every anatomical element has a different sound created by Scott Smallwood and Stephan Moore attached to it. As users manipulate the body parts, they activate these sounds and compose a unique soundscape. At the same time, Oliver’s facial recognition scans encircle the scene, alluding to the audiences that witnessed anatomical dissections in the past.
Whereas My Data Body seeks to make visible all the data that humans now generate and are responsible for as individuals, Your Data Body troubles how we interact with, and are responsible for, the data of others. Your Data Body was made using a combination of open access anonymized datasets and donated medical scan datasets with varying levels of information about, and consent from, the subject of the scan. Employing the gaming device of having progressive levels that the user moves through as a way to think through different levels of consent and data ownership, Your Data Body starts with a scene made of open access anonymized data and ends with a scene made with data donated with active and ongoing consent and authorship. The different levels also situate the data within increasingly intimate and emotive virtual spaces, from a home office in the first scene, to LiDAR scans of old log cabins from a family property belonging to artist Liz Ingram who donated multiple MR and CT scans to the project.
Marilene Oliver
Marilène Oliver (she/her) is an associate professor of printmaking and media arts at the University of Alberta. Oliver works at a crossroads between new digital technologies and traditional print and sculpture, with her finished objects bridging the virtual and the real worlds. Oliver uses various scanning technologies, such as MRI and CT to create artworks that invite us to materially contemplate our increasingly digitized selves. www.marileneoliver.com
Current Externalities
Current Externalities is a multi-channel audio-video installation that is part of an in-progress body of work titled “Index of Accelerating Winds”. The works in this series draw from an archive of storm wind recordings collected from the masts of ships docked in the marinas of Hamilton Harbour.
As the audio composition progresses, the recordings moves from their original form to increasingly “distilled” and abstract variations - essentially being reduced to their fundamental acoustic building blocks. The visual component of the work featured time-based imagery generated from data visualization processing of the full-frequency recordings.
Wind itself makes no sound. It is only made audible when it collides with bodies and other materialities. Extreme wind events are the result of pronounced differences between atmospheric systems such as high/low-pressure fronts and currents. Both climate science and many non-Western belief systems consider the increasing frequency and intensity of such events as an indicator that the larger interconnected web of Earth systems is dangerously out of balance.
Chris Myhr
Chris Myhr is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound, the moving image, photography, electronics, and media installation. His work explores intersections between art, ecology, and science - with an emphasis on embodied experience, materiality, and practices of “deep listening” (and looking). He is based in Hamilton, Ontario, and is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies & Media Arts at McMaster University. https://www.chrismyhr.com/
e-tricycle mobile exhibition unit
The Sari-Sari Xchange presented a prototype of customized e-tricycle mobile exhibition unit that will present XR works from the SSX team. Guided by principles of sustainability and accessibility, and
co-designed with our community partners at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, Centre [3] for Artistic + Social Practice, Tangled Art+Disability, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and InterAccess, these mobile units are compact and modular to support a variety of works that include interactive VR experiences, projection, and karaoke! We envisioned these mobile units to activate space, engage a wide audience and support community-building through art. https://sarisarixchange.mcmaster.ca
Sari-Sari Exchange
The Sari-Sari Xchange is a community-building research & creation project that supports the artistic works and practices of artists from the Asian Diaspora and with various intersecting identities. We undertake exploration in eXtended Reality (XR) technologies (ie. Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Realities) to investigate new world-building and storytelling techniques, and to address under-representation and issues of systemic racism in the media arts industries, as well as the inaccessibility of these new technologies for both creators and users. The current SSX research-creation team includes Sana Akram, Haoran Chang, Arturo Jimenez, Carmela Laganse, Taien Ng-Chan and Serena Walk, all practicing artists affiliated with McMaster and York Universities.
