Day 1 : July 26th
Artificial Life, Cybernetics and Small Life
My/Your Data Body : Workshop, Part 1
In the My/Your Data Body workshop, participants will create ‘portraits’ using various kinds of personal data (such as social media, smartphone, and Google data). Participants will choose between using their own data, donated data, anonymized data or synthesized data as a way to reflect on issues of data ethics, sovereignty and privacy using research creation methods. Participants will work collectively or individually using easy access apps to transform the data into multimedia data portrait collages. Or, if they prefer, participants can also work with analogue collaging techniques, neon highlighters and photocopiers to create 2D works or zines. Facilitators: Marilène Oliver and Aynaz Raofian
Learning Outcomes
- Learn how to access personal data from smartphones, social media platforms and Google.
- Work with smartphone 3D scanning apps to make facial recognition scans and LiDAR scans
- Work with simple online tools such as WordArt, Voyant Tools and Flourish to transform data visually.
- Work with hands on collaging techiques, photocopiers, neon makers and stickers to create physical data portraits
Research Creation : Lightning Talks
Emerging research creators present works-in-progress in a dynamic 3-minute format, accompanied by a performance, demonstration or video poster.
Maxime Michaud
This 30-minute presentation-performance shares the ongoing development of a doctoral research-creation project exploring, among other aspects, the cinematic transposition (Schwab, 2018) of hypersensitive (Sensory processing sensitivity) experiences through physiological data (biofeedback). Focusing on selected experimental processes, it investigates how real-time biometric signals—such as brainwaves (EEG) and heart rate variability (HRV) —can be mobilized as aesthetic operators within an expanded cinematic form. Rather than illustrating the data, the project treats it as an active, sensorial materiality, enabling a performative modulation of audiovisual environments. Rooted in theories of embodied cognition (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991; Noë, 2012) and expanded cinema practices (Youngblood, 1970), this research probes how cinematic language can shift from representation toward an affective, immersive encounter with neurodiverse modes of perceptio. Drawing also from non-representational sensory ethnography (Vannini & Vannini, 2023) and neuroaesthetics (Gallese & Guerra, 2020), the performance proposes a live, data-driven refiguration of the sensory field, aiming to generate “felt knowledge” rather than interpretative distance. Viewers are invited not only to observe but to resonate with an unfolding hypersensitive state, in a space where the physiological, the perceptual, and the cinematic merge. By challenging conventional applications of physiological data, this project contributes to the Expanded Data theme through a speculative, process-oriented practice, cultivating new epistemic and aesthetic engagements with embodied data and documentary experimentation.
Maxime Michaud is a doctoral candidate in Communication at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), where he previously earned a Master of Arts in Communication with a specialization in Research-Creation in Experimental Media (Hexagram Network). His master’s thesis was awarded the Prix Philippe-Ménard for Best Research-Creation Master’s Thesis. Michaud’s research-creation practice bridges cognitive science—particularly enaction and embodiment theories—phenomenology, experimental media, and documentary filmmaking. His work investigates sensory and subjective experiences, with a focus on neurodiversity, hypersensitivity (Sensory Processing Sensitivity), altered states of consciousness, and notions of well-being. Deeply interdisciplinary, his projects often integrate experimental technologies, biofeedback art, and cinematic forms to explore lived experience and immersive perception. Michaud’s research continually pushes the boundaries between media creation and critical inquiry, embracing hybrid, situated methodologies. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication with a concentration in filmmaking (directing). More information: www.maximemichaud.com
Haoran Chang
For the workshop, I will present my work-in-progress VR game, Zhan Zhuang Exergame. This game adapts Zhan Zhuang (standing meditation), a traditional Chinese practice rooted in the Taoist tradition, into a virtual reality experience that encourages physical exercise and mindful movement. This VR game explores the game as a healing and reparative medium through the lens of Taoist practice and philosophy. The creation of this game employs ethnographic methodology and a participatory approach to address issues of gamification in health applications. By drawing from the Taoist tradition, this game explores the possibilities of designing games for healing purposes. This project reimagines games as a computational medium through traditional mindfullness practice.
Haoran Chang is an artist, media art researcher, and experimental game designer. His current practice and research focus on feminist game studies, posthumanism in digital media, immersive media, and worlding and worldbuilding. His PhD research-creation project explores how the body can be healed through immersive gaming technology, approached from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine philosophy and practice. He has published papers on peer-reviewed journals, such as Refract and Virtual Creativity. His works have been shown in many international conferences and festivals, including ISEA, xCoAx, CHI Play, SIGGRAPH Asia, and HASTAC. He has also exhibited works in museums and galleries, including CICA museum in South Korea, Walter Otero Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Hunan Museum of Art in China, Center 3 in Toronto and many more. His VR works and films have been exhibited in many international film festivals, such as Slamdance, FIVARS in Toronto, and Pleasure Dome. He is also the founder of Mixed Reality collective Chameleon Gallery.
Aida Khorsandi
In my research, I aim to create connections between the design of and performance with new musical instruments using computational tools, as well as the importance of participatory design and performance in meaning-making through technology. Building on my previous works in digital and virtual music instruments, sonic interaction design, and participatory performance, I am building a shareable musical instrument that is interfaced through wearable and flexible textiles. This work examines the contexts and possibilities in which flexible tactile interfaces can be intentionally mapped and used to enhance the bodily interactions of the performer with the materiality of the interface. It aims to provide greater levels of expressivity for the performer, as well as their haptic and physical engagement with the instrument. My presentation will share my work-in-progress toward prototyping textile interfaces for participatory performance, where human and computational performers engage in embodied and participatory musical improvisation. In addition to utilizing data that can be translated and expanded into sonic and bodily interactions, this research aims to employ computational means to create and reinforce a participatory context for expressivity and music performance. My goal is to explore the creative affordances of computational methods (machine learning and generative AI) to augment participatory musicking and improvisation between human and computational performers.
Aida Khorsandi is a composer-performer, sound synthesist, researcher and educator. Aida’s philosophy to musicking is based on experimentation, welcoming chaos and randomness, unlearning and decolonizing hierarchies and ear training in musical practices and sounds. In her sonic workflow, Aida uses displaced sound objects, repetitive, erratic, and granular sonic and physical gestures to create an ever-shifting sonic scene of ambient noise. Aida’s research in her doctoral studies at York University intersects between instrument design, interactivity, physical and sonic gestures and haptic engagements in sound making and testing new technologies augment the human interaction and bodily involvement through the processes of musicking and sonic engagement and to create fields of shared agency with computational agents. Aida is investigating the expressivity and accessibility of new musical instruments through workshopping with different tactile and gestural interfaces.
Alejandro Franco Briones
In this presentation, I analyze the political economy of music. I begin with an analysis of the current state of music-making in the era of AI, data capitalism, and extreme global cybernetic circulation. I piece together a picture of the music industry – and, by extension, music institutionality – as a site of crisis that inhibits the emergence of new musical forms and prevents musicians from living in a dignified manner. Against conventional understandings of music disaster, I argue that the current crisis of imagination is not a technological issue but rather stems from neoliberal culture. Fredric Jameson (1985) observes that Jacques Attali’s groundbreaking work on the political economy of music reveals how “the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production’s baleful mirror image.” I propose that the networked, algorithmic music ensemble represents both a promise and a provocation in this era of neoliberal capitalism: capable of redirecting music-making away from algorithms as mechanisms of dispossession and toward algorithmic audiovisions of infra-realist communism.
Alejandro Franco Briones is a composer, live coder and sound artist from Mexico City, currently residing in Dish with One Spoon territory. Alejandro is also a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communications Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University. His research entails the development of infrastructure, interfaces, and protocols for online live-coded music and sound art creation. His research is related to the fields of sound studies, time studies, and internet studies with a perspective mediated by de-colonialism, anti-fascism, Marxism, and feminism. Some of his major interests are: time-oriented music, networked art ecologies and musical/technological notational systems. He makes algorithmic acid music and performs on-the-fly documentaries in the context of networked collaborations.
Artificial Life, Cybernetics, and Human Computer Interaction : Roundtable
This roundtable examines how life is understood, created, and manipulated through data-driven processes, considering the social aspects of living systems as life as we know it and as it could be.
Nell Tenhaaf
Nell Tenhaaf is an electronic media artist and writer. Born in Oshawa, she now lives in Trent Hills. Tenhaaf lived in Montreal from 1969 to 1994, then in Pittsburgh and Toronto (Professor Emerita at York University). Tenhaaf has exhibited her work in Canada and internationally. In the early 1980s she made pioneering artworks using the Telidon videotex protocol. She then became known for lightbox displays that critiqued biotechnology. Since the mid-1990s her electronic sculptures and installations parallel Alife research.
Michelle Bunton
Michelle Bunton is a practicing artist, curator and roller derby player currently residing as an uninvited guest in Katarokwi-Kingston, Canada. They hold a BFA from Western University, are completing their MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University and will begin their PhD in Fall 2025. Bunton works with the Vulnerable Media Lab and Ayatana’s Biophilium: Science School for Artists, and they previously held a curatorial position at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. They are the Expanded Data Artist in Residence, 2025.
Swati Mishra
Swati Mishra joined McMaster’s Department of Computing and Software as an Assistant Professor in July 2023. Her research focuses on designing tools that improve ML system’s usability, reliability, and interactivity with stakeholders. Before joining McMaster, she received her Ph.D. in Information Science from Cornell University, where her research was funded by a multi-year Data Science Fellowship from Bloomberg AI. She has worked in the AI industry for 9 years, building and leading state of the art AI products. Her lab currently focuses on applying cognitive modeling to understand end-user behavior and leveraging it to build reliable AI systems for decision-making, sense-making, and storytelling.
Erin Gee
Erin Gee is a multidisciplinary artist and professor in the Faculty of Music at Université de Montréal. A DIY expert in affective biofeedback, her research-creation explores ASMR, voice, and performance to provoke posthumanist grey zones of emotional authenticity and challenge the dominance of quantification in biosensing. Informed by feminist and queer thought, she conceptualizes the body as “wetware” within hardware/software systems. She has presented her music performance and new media art internationally.
Sofian Audry : Keynote
Sofian Audry presents their research-creation practice at the intersection of media arts, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.
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Rooted in a transdisciplinary approach bridging art, technology, and the humanities, their work explores fragile autonomous agents evolving within unstable environments. Developed through iterative experimentation, these works engage indeterminacy, emergence, and relationality as central aesthetic strategies, disrupting dominant narratives of control and optimization in generative AI. Rather than pursuing efficiency or productivity, Audry’s systems unfold through ongoing negotiations between human and nonhuman agencies. By exploring the material and behavioral complexities of more-than-human systems, Audry proposes alternative approaches to computation that are less extractive and more speculative, where art becomes a site for rethinking intelligence, agency, creativity, and experience. Reflecting on how such co-creation interplays between agents involved in creative processes reshape artistic inquiry and open up post-anthropocentric modes of practice, this presentation contributes a practice-based perspective to critical dialogues at the convergence of media arts and artificial intelligence.
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.
Day 2: July 27
DATA Imaginaries, Radical Futurities, and Speculative Interventions
Marina Otero Verzier : Keynote
Computational Compost addresses the environmental impact of data storage and proposes a synergy between technology and ecology.
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Through metabolic processes, Computational Compost links the immense computational energy required to decipher the origins of life with the terrestrial cycles that sustain it. As supercomputers simulate the genesis and expansion of the universe, the heat they produce triggers irreversible transformations, influencing organic life through ongoing processes of composition and decomposition. These dynamics intertwine vast cosmic timelines with computational and earthly systems, positioning data storage architectures beyond a human-centric framework.
Marina Otero Verzier is an architect, curator, and researcher whose work lies at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. She currently teaches at Columbia University’s GSAPP, where she leads the Data Mourning initiative, exploring the relationship between digital infrastructure and the climate catastrophe, with a particular focus on Tuvalu. A recipient of Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize in 2022, she collaborates with scientific institutions such as the DIPC Supercomputing Center to develop prototypes of alternative digital infrastructures.
AI Imaginaries, Radical Futurities, and Speculative Interventions : Roundtable
This roundtable explores AI’s (im)possibilities through speculative thinking and critical reflection, challenging us to reimagine and refuse, the generated future of AI.
Blair Attard-Frost
Blair Attard-Frost (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta and Fellow at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Her research applies a trans feminist lens to address challenges of power and participation in the governance of artificial intelligence. Her creative work combines experimental sci-fi, glitch art, and surrealism to explore frictions between gender, technology, and regulation. She recently completed her PhD in Information Studies at the University of Toronto.
Carmela Laganse
Carmela Laganse is an artist and Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University. Working in a variety of media, she often builds interactive work or portable, modular environments that playfully and critically integrate physical, emotional, ritualistic, and intellectual processes through an intersectional lens. She is Co-PI with Taien Ng-Chan on the Sari-Sari Xchange Project, which partners with the Toronto Reel Asian, Tangled Art+Disability, Centre [3] to explore community-building through XR media creation.
Devon Mordell
Devon Mordell (she/elle) has encountered many face(t)s of data through her experience as an educational developer, archivist, digital humanist and user of countless data-guzzling web applications. She writes about the implications of working with archives as data sources for training machine learning models and imagining archives as data with all its attendant metaphors (i.e. data is the new oil!).
John Fink
John Fink is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. His research interests include open source software, local AI, and potatoes.
Research Creation : Lightning Talks
Emerging research creators present works-in-progress in a dynamic 3-minute format, accompanied by a performance, demonstration or video poster.
Eden Mekonen
Unnamed Women of the Colored Conventions: Data [Re]Imagined leverages sonic and poetic forms to foreground the voice/agency of unnamed Black women referenced in the 19th-century U.S.-based Colored Conventions Movement. Through a multistage process—encompassing data cleaning, thematic organization, poetic reconstruction, and sonic arrangement—I transformed the CCP_Unnamed_Women_Dataset into an audio-poetic composition. The work utilizes TwoTone.io to digitally sonify metadata (namely “date” and “classification_id” from the dataset) within the key of C Harmonic, on a harp to honor 19th-century poet-activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. The constructed poem, sourced and adapted from the 2022 Douglass Day Zooniverse transcribathon data, works alongside the digitally produced melody to create a speculative auditory narrative. Methodologically, the project negotiates tensions around data “cleaning” and narrative construction, deliberately engaging with frameworks from Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) “critical fabulation” and Bowker and Star’s (1999) “community of practice,” to question how both archival and computational norms produce historical truths and silences. In parsing, filtering, mining, and refining such archival data (Fry, 2022), the project prioritizes ambiguity, speculation, and rearrangement over linear fidelity. Ultimately, Unnamed Women of the Colored Conventions: Data [Re]Imagined advances archival remix practices and digital poetics to challenge canonical modes of historical representation while inviting new engagement with marginalized data through sound, code, and collaboration.
Eden Mekonen is a dual-title Geography and African Studies PhD candidate at Penn State University. She joined the Center for Black Digital Research (#DigBlk) in Fall 2022 and is a senior leader of the Colored Conventions Project (CCP), an award-winning national digital humanities project highlighting 19th-century Black organizing. She is the Digital Project Manager and Metadata Curator for CCP, in addition to serving on the Douglass Day Committee, an annual public transcription project that makes Black historical materials publicly accessible, while also serving as the Co-Archivist of The Critical Hope and Black Life at Occidental College Digital Research Project with the Black Alumni Organization of Occidental College. Eden’s research interests include soundscapes, digital cultural preservation, collective memory, Black diasporic community memorialization, and (digital) placemaking. Eden earned her M.S. in Geography at Penn State and her B.A. in Critical Theory and Social Justice with an Interdisciplinary Writing minor.
Andrea Vela Alarcón
My project, The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman, focuses on three augmented reality (AR) installations that critically intervene into the colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist narratives of resource extraction in Iquitos, Peru. These three interventions are presented as illustrated scenarios and placed around extractive historical sites in Iquitos. Users can access the AR content through their smartphones by scanning QR codes, which activate the installations within the physical environment. Using augmented reality, the project creates a speculative space for interrupting, refusing, and re-storying the violent history of resource extraction in Iquitos. In doing so, the project aims to foster new kinds of research relations, particularly ones of political intimacy, with diverse publics. Bio and artist abstract
Andrea Vela Alarcón (she/her/ella) is a brown settler in Tsi T’karonto, originally from the Abya Yala rainforest, now known as the Peruvian Amazon. An illustrator and community educator, Andrea’s work centers on facilitating critical conversations around ecological survival through anticolonial and feminist care ethics. She has been working with communities for over ten years, using popular education and cultural production, particularly visual media and storytelling, to create spaces for resistance to extractive capitalism. Recognizing the emotional and physical demands of environmental justice work, Andrea’s creative encounters prioritize moments of joy, play, and care. Currently pursuing a PhD in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Andrea’s research and creative practice aim to challenge the colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist narratives driving extraction. She also has an MA in Adult Education and Community Development with a focus on Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto.
Aynaz Raoufian
My MFA research-creation explores the generative potential of lived experience as data, focusing on caregiving memory, trauma, and multilingual expression. Grounded in my own experience as a caregiver for my sister, the work examines how memory—especially under emotional duress—can be accessed and materialized through participatory artistic methodologies. The project proposes two interactive installations that explore both private and collective forms of data sharing. On the Language of Memory No.1 invites participants into a divided space. In the first room, they watch a pre-recorded video of me recounting a caregiving memory and respond verbally and privately. In the second room, I listen to their words through headphones and inscribe my own resurfaced memories in my first language on a continuous paper roll. Their voices are not recorded—only interpreted through my body and language—creating a non-disclosive, emotionally safe exchange. No.2 enables co-present dialogue. Seated at a communal table, caregivers and I share stories in our native languages, writing them on a shared paper surface. We conclude with a jointly written sentence, recorded and transformed into a visual audio waveform installation. By foregrounding linguistic, emotional, and cultural particularities, this project proposes alternative epistemologies of care-driven data and expands affect-oriented artistic research.
Born in 1998 in Iran, Aynaz Raoufian is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work explores the emotional experiences of cancer patients and their caregivers. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and a Master’s in Art Research from the University of Tehran, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Intermedia at the University of Alberta. Informed by her own experience as a caregiver, her practice centers mental health, trauma, and the ethics of care. Through video documentary, wearable sculpture, durational performance, and interactive installation, she gives form to the often-unspoken realities of both patients and caregivers. A recurring theme in her work is language—its failures and its possibilities—particularly for those navigating illness and trauma in multilingual contexts. She investigates how linguistic fragmentation shapes emotional expression and memory, often leading to isolation, and proposes alternative forms of connection through collaborative and embodied art-making.
Zahra Zandiyeh
This one-month creative research project explores how Instagram’s personalized advertising algorithm surveils, interprets, and reshapes users through data profiling, and how these processes can be visualized and critiqued through surreal digital portraiture. Over the course of one week, I documented Instagram advertisements that were algorithmically targeted to me based on my platform behavior. These ads became conceptual and visual source material for a series of five digital self-portraits. The portraits were created using a combination of Adobe Photoshop, glitch aesthetics, and AI-inspired filters (such as Photomosh and painterly distortion tools). I drew on surrealist traditions—particularly the works of André Breton and Salvador Dalí—to incorporate dream logic, symbolic layering, and visual fragmentation. As the series progresses, my face becomes increasingly distorted, obscured by ad logos, timestamps, barcodes, and predictive content, illustrating the algorithm’s role in fragmenting and commodifying identity, from intact identity to algorithmic erasure. Through this visual research, I explore how targeted ads operate not only as marketing tools but as mechanisms of behavioral prediction and self-shaping, turning the digital gaze into a mirror that no longer reflects, but rewrites.
Zahra Zandiyeh is a Master’s student in English Studies at the University of Guelph, specializing in digital humanities, surrealist art practices, and literary studies. Their interdisciplinary approach combines visual arts, literature, and critical theory to examine contemporary issues such as surveillance capitalism, algorithmic culture, and identity construction. They hold a BA in French Language and Literature and an MA in Dramatic Literature, bringing a diverse and global perspective to my scholarship and creative practice. Zahra’s artistic explorations use watercolor, pottery, digital illustrations, and surrealist aesthetics to challenge traditional forms and provoke critical reflection. Their recent projects have focused on the intersections of digital surveillance, identity, and algorithmic biases, particularly within social media platforms. Zahra actively participates in academic workshops and conferences, fostering collaborative exchanges within the digital humanities community, and upcoming projects explore further intersections of technology, creativity, and digital identity.
My/Your Data Body : Workshop, Part 2
In the My/Your Data Body workshop participants will create ‘portraits’ using various kinds of personal data (such as social media, smartphone, and Google data). Participants will choose between using their own data, donated data, anonymized data or synthesized data as a way to reflect on issues of data ethics, sovereignty and privacy using research creation methods. Participants will work collectively or individually using easy access apps to transform the data into multimedia data portrait collages. Or, if they prefer, participants can also work with analogue collaging techniques, neon highlighters and photocopiers to create 2D works or zines. Facilitators: Marilène Oliver and Aynaz Raofian
Learning Outcomes
- Learn how to access personal data from smartphones, social media platforms and Google.
- Work with smartphone 3D scanning apps to make facial recognition scans and LiDAR scans
- Work with simple online tools such as WordArt, Voyant Tools and Flourish to transform data visually.
- Work with hands on collaging techiques, photocopiers, neon makers and stickers to create physical data portraits