Events
ARTISTS’ GRANT-WRITING CLINIC & CO-WORKING DAY
If you have a project you are trying to fund, why not set aside some time to figure out the funding and start writing the applications in the company of other artists and producers?
Playful Sessions Weekend
Come join us for a weekend of presentations by and for artists who use digital games and play as a means for artistic expression.
This Playful Sessions weekend is curated by Marie LeBlanc Flanagan, with sessions led by Brian Cullen, Paloma Dawkins, Liane Décary-Chen, Fili 周 Gibbons, and Isabella Stefanecu.
The sessions will take place at Fresh Ground Café at The Working Centre (256 King St E, Kitchener, ON N2G 2L1). Events will run on Saturday, January 27th and Sunday, January 28th, from 10:00am — 5:00pm.
Register here.
SCHEDULE
Saturday, January 27, 2024
10:00 am. Welcome
10:15 am Session by by Liane Decary
11:15 am BREAK
11:30 am Session by Paloma Dawkins (On Playful Animation)
12:30 pm LUNCH
01:30 pm Session by Fili 周 Gibbons (On Playful Connections to Sound & Presence)
03:00 pm SANDBOX
05:30 pm End of day
Sunday January 28, 2024
10:00 am Session by Isabella Stefanescu (Musical Crayons)
11:15 am BREAK
11:15 am Brian Cullen
12:00 pm LUNCH
01:00 pm TBD
02:30 pm BREAK
03:00 pm SANDBOX
05:30 pm End of day
Talk overviews and bios
Marie LeBlanc Flanagan is an artist working in the playful spaces between people, especially related to connection and community. Marie builds experimental video games, playful installations, and cooperative experiences and has an enduring fondness for the possibilities of trash.
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Liane Décary-Chen is a creative technologist and community organizer who works with digital media and cultural intervention. Her work utilizes interactive technologies, such as e-textiles, installations, web, and games, to address topics related to agency, sentience, and intergenerational knowledge exchange. In her practice, she prioritizes decolonial and disabled approaches. Décary-Chen co-runs the Cyber Love Hotel in Montreal and leads the Things+Time community archival project.
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Paloma Dawkins is a cartoonist and animator turned virtual-reality and video-game artist. Dawkins' previous games have been featured at world-renowned festivals and museums such as Factory International, Victoria & Albert Museum, MUTEK ,Garage Museum of Contemporary art, and more. Dawkins won awards at the Canadian Screen Academy Awards, Fantasia, FIVARS, Cinekid, NUMIX, and North Bend Festival. Dawkin’s games are praised for being digital spaces that celebrate natural life and rhythms and the worlds she creates in her games are spaces that incite creative thinking and wonder. Dawkins games and VR spaces carry on these themes and further invites us to be inspired by otherworldly scenes and scenarios.
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Brian Cullen will discuss his early influences, fine art work, academic work, video game projects, and future plans. His talk will cover a range of topics relating to game design, narrative design, music/sound design, and animation. Brian will exhibit playable builds of his games and examples of his experimental animations.
Brian Cullen (Ph.D., M.Phil, B.A.) has spent 25 years studying art, music and media technology, sound design and video games. Brian received his Ph.D. from the Queen’s University, Belfast (2010). His research explored how computer sounds and imagery fuse with everyday experience. Since moving to Canada, Brian completed three post-doctoral positions at the University of Waterloo, during which he created educational animations, researched audio’s impact on stereoscopic 3D, and explored video games as art. In 2014, Brian founded Fluxscopic Ltd. With Canada Media Fund and Ontario Creates funding, Brian worked with local talent, releasing Mayhem in Single Valley in 2021.
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Isabella Stefanescu will talk about the Euphonopen, an instrument for the live performance of drawing, and its possibilities as a toy used by children of all ages as a box of musical crayons, and the artistic game of musical improvisation.
Isabella Stefanescu is a painter, a visual, media, and interdisciplinary artist based in Kitchener-Waterloo. Originally from Romania Stefanescu immigrated to Canada and continued her education in mathematics and fine arts at the University of Waterloo. She is a former artistic director of Inter Arts Matrix, a co-founder of Globe Studios and the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA). Stefanescu has been Artist in Residence at the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab,and the Banff New Media Institute. She was also awarded the Ontario Arts Council K.M. Hunter Award for interdisciplinary art.
Artists' Grant-Writing Co-working Day
If you have a project you are trying to fund, why not set aside some time to figure out the funding and start writing the applications in the company of other artists and producers?
Grant Writing for Artists
Free online workshop! Finding sources of grants and writing good applications are skills you can learn.
Pre-Production Planning for Film
You have an idea, then a screenplay, then a storyboard – you’re ready to shoot, right? Not so fast! If you want to make a film or a project that can be shown at festivals and perhaps on TV, without losing your shirt or getting sued, you must plan and get your paperwork in order. This workshop will show you how to budget, schedule, raise funds, get location permits, secure insurance, get the right release forms filled out and signed by your collaborators and performers, and apply to get your production certified as Canadian Content.
Big Mouth Beauty: A Night of Poetry, Spoken Word and Music
Inter Arts Matrix and Pinch are happy to co-present Big Mouth Beauty, a night of poetry, spoken word and music.
Featuring: Kedrick James, Clifton Joseph, and John Sobol
The Discreet Charm of the Short Film
Like the short story, the short-film is a genre in itself rather than a fragment of a bigger work. Short films can tell big stories with great economy, in very little time: brevity is the soul of wit. We will watch and discuss a selection of short gems, some of them Canadian, and hope to increase our appreciation of this lovely and underestimated art form. Watching short films will perhaps encourage participants to think about creating their own first short. Everyone who loves movies is welcome.
Grant-Writing Clinic and Co-Working Day
If you have a project you are trying to fund, why not set aside some time to figure out the funding and start writing the applications in the company of other artists and producers?
Drop in any time between 10:00 am and 7:00 pm. You’ll be able to circulate and see who is also working in the room, join them at their table, or sit down with an on-site advisor. We might be able to help you find a suitable grant for your project. We can give you a hand getting an on-line profile with a granting body. If you need help drawing up a budget or a time- line, articulating your project, its viability or impact, we can advise you.
This Horizon Line is Bent at The Waist: A Mini Video Art Festival
This horizon line is bent at the waist,
1) A thing usually far away dips towards you, lessening the distance between here and there.
2) Now we know that the farthest thing is more like us than we thought.
3) Near and far are not 2 ends of a spectrum. Instead, they spin on a wheel that lets you touch both ends and what’s in between.
4) What if the thing separating up from down fell away too?
5) More like: A consistently straight thing folds in on itself and becomes curved.
6) More like: Something we rely on is not as reliable as we once thought.
7) Could this line called horizon slouch even further? What else rigid might be willing to bend?
Works by Megan Arnold, Joel Becker, Julie Hall & Jacob Irish, Maddie Lychek, Abisola Oni, Lauren Prousky and Jordyn Stewart. Curated by Lauren Prousky.
Funding for Artist-Led Projects
This workshop is for artists of all disciplines, especially emerging artists, artists branching out in a new discipline, established artists who are out of touch with the current funding opportunities, and artists based in the Region of Waterloo. Small arts organizations or organizations looking to work with artists might also find this workshop useful.
Fund! Your! Game! with Megan Leduc from Canada Council for the Arts
Are you making games? Curious about funding options? Join us for an online conversation with Megan Leduc from The Canada Council for the Arts. Megan Leduc will talk briefly about funding options, then Marie LeBlanc Flanagan will interview them about games funding. Finally, we'll make space for 1-minute pitches, where you can talk about your game! Megan Leduc might have questions or tips for you.
Create your own biomorphic world in Blender with Shonee
Learn the limitlessness of digital space and become a 3D world creator with Shonee (b. Bianca Shonee Arroyo) for an afternoon. Together, we'll explore shiny, slimy, psychedelic iridescence using Blender and ZBrush.
Everyone is welcome, though this is not a "click-by-click" follow-along workshop; it's a wider journey through specific tools and techniques to begin creating your own digital habitats. Have you been using Blender for awhile but can’t figure out how to get past Suzanne, the Blender monkey? Have you been doing 3D for awhile but curious about some other techniques? Let’s play in 3D together!
Fund! Your! Game! with Kim Gibson from Ontario Creates
Are you making games? Curious about funding options? Join us for an online conversation with Kim Gibson from Ontario Creates!
Kim will talk briefly about funding options, then Marie LeBlanc Flanagan will interview Kim about Ontario Creates and game funding. Finally, we'll make space for 1-minute pitches, where you can talk about your game! Kim might have questions or tips for you.
not yr angel bby harpist
Oft associated with divinity, feminine beauty, and dream-states, the Western pedal harp’s enduring stereotype places player and instrument within the same realm of visual and aural expectation by its audience within pop culture - as seen as in Snapchat stickers or glissandi in film scores for dream sequences and/or visits to heaven.
Part of the Open Ears Festival
Concentric Fictions
With a focus on postcolonial thought and writing, we will delve into an esoteric collection of ergodic literature including excerpts from magical-realist-fiction, parser-text games, olupian texts and nonsense verse - and trace the structures and techniques that create room within a narrative to challenge the implicit hegemony of an author or an authoritarian tradition. Participants can bring texts with them that we can analyse during the workshop, and Dhruv will prepare a folder of translated poems, writings and games that will be shared prior to the workshop. A writing exercise will be interwoven with the main body of the talk, where the participants will be writing very short sections of a nebulous text that will reassemble each time we read it.
How to Start an Indie Game (Without Going into Debt or Burning Out)
Attendees will hear from studio founder and lead designer Meagan Byrne about what it takes to
START an indie game in Canada. This will include what you need before seeking funding,
possible first-time funding streams to explore, and how much work it all is (before you even
start production!). Meagan will also be sharing insight on how to handle the load and
expectations without going into debt or burning out.
Weird Theatre Games
Join us for this online workshop where we'll be translating difficult emotional experiences into a theatre game with D. Squinkifer on March 9 5-7pm EST.
Bring an emotionally challenging situation and transform it with us into a one-of-a-kind awkward theatre game! In this workshop, we’ll use prompts to free-write about an experience. What happened? How did it feel moment-to-moment to do the thing? What is something you could have done differently? What role did other people play?
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Making It Work: Tools & Modes for Interactive Experiences
Are you an artist making interactive experiences? Are you curious about doing this? Join us for a free, hands-on, intimate, and practice-based workshop, where you'll explore what tools & modes you can use when designing playful experiences.
This workshop is for creators working with interdisciplinary interactive experiences. Each interactive experience requires a different balance of tools and strategies to make it work. "Making it work" doesn't just mean pleasing an audience or gaining critical acclaim. It can also mean making something reproducible without the presence of the original creators, making something that doesn't drain facilitators or performers and offloads some work onto technology instead, or any other number of goals.
In this hands-on, intimate, and practice-based workshop, we will explore what tools and modes you can leverage to think about and improve your experiences. Specifically, we will start with a short overview of strategies and challenges around using digital technology and automated solutions, physical design (of spaces, objects and set design), and having humans as both facilitators and participants in a live experience. From there, we will turn to hearing ideas from participants and workshop them.
Participants are asked to come with an idea for an interactive piece that they would like to explore and share with the group in order to obtain feedback. This could be a performance or theatre piece, a game, an installation, or any other kind of interactive piece that participants can imagine. Participants can arrive with an idea that they have already been working on, or they can bring an idea based on the prompt "Small but Purposeful".
You can use the following questions to organize your thoughts:
What kinds of digital tech and automated solutions do you envision using for your idea?
What kind of physical objects and set design do you have in mind? Is there a specific location or setting you need?
What kind of involvement are you asking of your facilitators and players for this experience?