We’ve kept busy this year, working in a research and consulting capacity with many new clients and partners. There’s also been art-making!

Amy Hull has curated an evening program for Indigenous youth artists to share art, stories, and music in person. Please join us outside at the beautiful Trillium Park (downtown by the water) on Wednesday August 10 at 7pm for a singalong and opportunity to support young artists sharing their art, dance performance, story, or words in a welcoming, safe(r), and celebratory environment. Come early to enjoy the scenery.

See further below for more on art, research and opportunities.

Leading Institutions

Two weeks ago, we led a small intimate semi-asynchronous thought residency for half a dozen leaders of various cultural groups including Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School, Vancouver Mural Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Ukai Projects and ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company.

As a group we created an experimental, emergent space called The Garden to explore leadership questions for the contemporary progressive cultural institution. Co-facilitated with dance artist Ravyn Wngz, we were hosted at Unit 2 Community Space and joined by dance artist Pam Tzeng who spoke about her research on conflict transformation.

The Garden is a set of research residencies created by the Lab with the support of Dancemakers Centre for Creation to develop actionable artistic and organizational research for the aspirations of contemporary artists and the contemporary dance organization seeking to work in just and accountable ways.

Made up of various inquiries / seeds / possibilities led by artists and cultural workers, The Garden is composed of various containers of different sizes that the Lab and Dancemakers will support and observe over the next 12 months to tend to the possibilities and complexities of this time and our contexts.

Restructuring Futures

Beginning last fall, we have been working with Ukai Projects and Hypha to develop a virtual studio platform that could enact and support our shared ideals about restructuring the future (or restructuring possible futures).

In the fall of 2021, with the help of From Later, we conducted 4 ‘thinkshops’ (very short thought residencies) online to help us imagine what alternatives artists, advocates, activists and organizers seek for online collaboration.

When we meet in person, we try to choose between board rooms, retreats, community spaces, and suitably accessible coordinates and settings for the comfort of our guests. When we gather online, we often default to a few video platforms made and controlled by venture capitalists and a narrow scope of technocratic intelligences.

Restructuring Futures is a 2-year project funded by the Digital Strategy Fund at Canada Council for the Arts. It’s been a beautifully messy (artistic, complex) process of understanding and reconciling myriad ideas against a compact development timeline. Hypha has published a record of some of our preliminary work at making sense of ideas and possibilities together here. For phase two, we are aiming to focus on how to be more inclusive of the visually impaired, low-bandwidth Internet, and groups spanning multiple time zones.

If you may wish to use this tool for your group(s), you can send an email to info@artisticintelligence.com.

Opportunities

In partnership with Seneca College, the Lab is developing a microcredential training program to help new immigrants and refugees get oriented and find pathways to working in the film and TV industry here – be it in the back office, on set, or in post-production.

Toronto set a new record in 2021 in film and television production spending at $2.5 billion and is already on track to exceed that in 2022. With the growth in the industry comes requirements in new labour demand.

• Are you an accountant, bookkeeper, manager, animator, sound/light/hair/make-up person, or otherwise smart, quick on your feet, and fluent in English?
• Do you have film/TV or animation/VFX experience?
• Perhaps you do not have experience, but are interested in learning how the industry works and what roles you could play in it? There are more jobs than just actor, director and producer 🙂
• Are you open to flexible work arrangements? Compensation rates are very good in film/TV, but the hours can be long.

If you’re interested in being among the first candidates, send us an email at filmjobs@artisticintelligence.com with brief answers to the questions above, along with a copy of your resume.

Nuit Blanche

This fall, with the Lab’s support, Nava Waxman will offer a site-specific immersive installation as part of Nuit Blanche at the North York Civic Centre. In this installation, a constellation of video performances, moving-image, and documentation archives are projected simultaneously onto different surfaces throughout space. As an event, the work offers “generative and transformative experiences in which the audience participates in a ritual of becoming, thereby adding new layers and meanings to the work.”

Nuit Blanche is Toronto’s all-night celebration of contemporary art, that begins at sunset and continues all night long until sunrise (yes!). This year’s Nuit Blanche will take place on October 1, and the theme is The Space Between Us. For information on Nava’s artwork at Nuit Blanche, please click here.

Celebrations

More happy news and celebrations from friends and colleagues at the Lab:

Khush Parekh, who first started working with us 5 years ago as one of the Lab’s very first research interns and currently works with us on our research for Seneca College, is now engaged to be married this fall! Congratulations Khush! Your happiness is our happiness 🙂

Gopi Chinnaraju who manages the Akhara event series at the Lab recently invited us to celebrate the first birthday of his daughter Mya. With his permission we are sharing a happy photo of the happy 1-year-old. Happy Birthday Mya! May all your birthdays be as joyous and heartwarming.

Amy Hull and Nava Waxman will both be beginning their PhD research this fall. Amy will be studying in a joint program in Culture and Communications with York and Toronto Metropolitan University. Nava will be continuing her research at York on the diaspora gesture, the body, and the role of new media technology in creative practice, performance and identity. Congratulations Amy and Nava!