Steve Bates is an artist and musician currently living in Saskatoon. His work has been exhibited and performed in Canada, Europe, Chile, Senegal and the United States, at such galleries as Casino Luxembourg, Musée d’art contemporain du Montréal, Dazibao, and Fonderie Darling as well as festivals including Suoni per il Popolo, Mutek, and Tuned City. His work listens to boundaries and borders, points of contact and conflict. Thresholds are explored, stretched and blurred. The sonic is the starting point for his projects which are evocations of communication networks and systems, or expressions of spatial and temporal experience. He works in the field, on the air, in museological/gallery and performance contexts. These shifting territories reflect the content of his practice.
Tomonari Nishikawa is a filmmaker/artist, living in Vestal, New York, teaching in Cinema Department at Binghamton University, where he studied cinema and philosophy and started making films.
Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, he presented a series of 8mm and 16mm films at MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and his film installation, Building 945, received the 2008 Grant Award from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain. He served as a juror for the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2012 Big Muddy Film Festival, and the 2013 dresdner schmalfilmtage. He is one of the co-founders of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. He lives in Japan/USA, currently teaching in Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Total Refusal is a pseudo-marxist media guerilla focused on the artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. They upcycle video games in order to reveal the political apparatus beyond the glossy and hyperreal textures of this media.
Ville Kallio is a Finnish multimedia artist and game designer. He is the author of several comics, and has exhibited work at galleries including FUTURA and SIC Helsinki. Earlier this year, Kallio released Cruelty Squad, an “immersive power fantasy simulator” set in the “hardcore gig economy of corporate liquidations.”
William Gagnon is a Film Studies MA student at the Université de Montréal. His research projects are concerned with amateur cinema, home movies and reversal film.
