4th Annual Vector Festival: Autonomous Agents

As community partners, we at the Hand Eye Society are pleased to bring you a special announcement from Vector Festival and InterAccess! Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. This year’s festival is co-curated by Skot Deeming and Martin Zeilinger and explores themes of autonomous algorithms and machines through emergent media art practices, live performance, screenings, workshops, and lectures. The Festival takes place across multiple venues in Toronto from July 14-17, 2016. Festival passes are available for just $25 and offer FREE access to screening and performance events. Plus, Festival Pass holders get a free drip coffee from Sam James Coffee Bar (Queen St. W. location) throughout the duration of the festival. For a complete schedule and to purchase your festival pass, visit vectorfestival.org.

Hand Eye Society Member’s Discount

$5 off a festival pass
$10 off the Sonic Pi Live Coding Workshop

Vector Festival and InterAccess are pleased to offer affiliate pricing to members of the Hand Eye Society! Discount codes will be e-mailed to all current Paid and Volunteer members of HES on the day of this announcement. Not a member? Find out about how to support us as a local videogame arts org while getting discounts at select stores, workshops, and events like Vector! Hope to see you there, and please read on below for the full festival lineup.

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Vector Fest Events and Workshops

July 13

Day Zero: Pre-Festival Party
Electric Perfume (805 Danforth Avenue)
8-11pm

Featuring a screening curated by Clint Enns.

JULY 14

VIP Preview
InterAccess
5:30-6:30pm, $100

Join co-curators Skot Deeming and Martin Zeilinger for a private tour of the exhibition, The Algorithmic Imagination, and preview the festival’s upcoming events. Tickets to this event include free access to Vector screening and performance events.

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Launch Party and Opening Reception
InterAccess
7-10pm, FREE

We kick off Vector Festival 2016 with an energized evening at InterAccess. Festival curators, artists and performers will be in attendance. The works in The Algorithmic Imagination explore the artistic potentials of algorithmic processes. These processes, expressed in the exhibition in kinetic sculptures and screen-based works, are perched between the appropriated and the pre-determined, the autonomous and the random.

JULY 15

SCREENING: Basement Revolutionaries, Curated by Amber Christensen and Clint Enns
CineCycle
8-11pm, $15

In a time and place awash in the detritus of early 21st Century capitalism, we look to our basement revolutionaries to lead us not upwards but downwards into a bunker of safety to wait it out. Duck and cover, and grab a snack…it may be your only way to survive.

JULY 16

WORKSHOP: Sonic Pi Live Coding Introductory Workshop, facilitated by Martin Zeilinger
InterAccess
11am-3pm, $45 regular/$35 InterAccess and Hand Eye Society members

Live coding is an exciting form of experimental digital sound-making that uses on-the-fly programming techniques to mix traditional improvisation with algorithmic composition. This workshop will introduce you to create live electronic music through simple programming techniques using a mix of sound synthesis and digital sampling. In the practice of live coding, the computer code you enter yields an instant sonic feedback. No prior programming skills required.

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PERFORMANCE: Ascend and Relinquish
Artscape Youngplace (107)
Doors at 8pm, $15

Join us for an evening of performances that bridge the spaces between the composed and the improvised, the generative and the algorithmic, the analog and the digital. Featuring live coding, modular synthesis and generative visuals, performers explore the boundaries of control within sonic and visual apparatuses. Featuring Karl Fousekwith Dan Browne, and Spectral Sound System (Michael Trommer and Eric Filion).

JULY 17

PANEL: Algorithms, Generative Art, Machine Agency
InterAccess
1-3pm, FREE

In conversation and open discussion with participating festival artists and performers, Vector Co-Curator Martin Zeilinger explores some of the underlying concerns and questions that inform this year’s events: What makes generative art? Can algorithms ever be creative agents? What is the future of the digital as an expressive medium? Featuring Dan Browne, Eric Filion, Karl Fousek, Justine Lugli, and Michael Trommer.

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WRAP PARTY
Reposado
8-11pm, FREE

Celebrate another year of Vector with a live performance by Castle If.

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VECTOR FESTIVAL EXHIBITIONS

Art on the BIG Screens

Vector Festival Preview
July 11, 8-10pm
Celebration Square, Mississauga (300 City Centre Drive)
Works by COLL.EO and Brent Watanabe

The Algorithmic Imagination
July 15 – August 13
InterAccess (9 Ossington Avenue)
Works by COLL.EO, Adam Donovan, Justine Lugli, Brent Watanabe

Davis Heslep
July 1-31 (109 Niagara Street)
at Loop Hole

A. Bill Miller
July 14-17
at Common Sort (1414 Queen Street West)

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