E-Publications

Between October 2018 and June 2019 IOTA Institute hosted a series of free public exhibitions, events and installations in Halifax, NS. Whether it’s creating microbial art using yeast, or engaging with a full-body exoskeleton, Bio Art is a practice that transcends the fields of visual art, media art, and science — applied, social and political. This continuously evolving practice also tests (and sometimes breaks) the boundaries of these fields.

IOTA invited writer Julia McMillan to write about Ruth Marsh’s immersive film Cyberhive.

IOTA: ARC presented a 15-min stop-motion, sound and video piece conjuring a technologically altered, large-scale beehive. This Immersive Experience was created by Halifax-based artist Ruth Marsh in the form of a 360 degree video original music with sound design by musician Jeremy Costello. The new work titled Cyberhive, was presented by IOTA Institute October 3, 2018 at the Sea Dome in Halifax, Nova Scotia and was supported via a 3-month artist residency with the support of technical director Nick Iwaskow. Cyberhive was presented again at the Discovery Centre in Halifax in the context of IOTA’s Bio Art Series in 2019.

Julia Fleur McMillan is a writer, curator, and cultural worker based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax); where she is currently the Artistic Director at Eyelevel ARC. Of settler ancestry, Julia grew up on unceded Mi’kmaq territory in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. She holds a MA in English from Dalhousie University, with a focus on contemporary Canadian poetry and visual art, and a BA in English and Art History from Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB. She has worked at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, and has curated exhibitions in Halifax, NS, Sackville, NB, and Strasbourg, France.

In the Media:

CBC: “This Halifax woman has collected 500 dead bees and is turning them into art”

IOTA Institute commissioned artists J.R. Carpenter (UK) for the digital poetry site ‘This is a Picture of Wind’, Jennifer Chan (Ontario) for her work ‘Important Men’, and Liz Solo (Newfoundland) for her Second Life exhibition and website ‘The Wide Sky’. The projects were produced under the IOTA: DATA wing, and include a digital research publication on the topic of web-based art communities, digital aesthetics and the historie(s) of Net Art.

For this E-publication, IOTA invited writers David Clark (Halifax, Canada), Isabelle Avers (France), Johanna Drucker (USA), and Adrienne Crossman (Ontario, Canada) to reflect on the commissioned works.

Originally presented by Dalhousie Art Gallery and the Centre for Art Tapes in partnership with White Frame from the 18th October to the 30th of November, 2014 Edith Flückiger and Germaine Koh present conceptual artwork, made up of electronic installation, video and digital text pieces, in a conversation exploring mobility and balance. Edith Flückiger works to reach a place in time and space that is unknown to us, something that tries to find the space between here and there on a map; an unmarked site. These artists consider human presence or absence within their work: while Koh creates a space for the body to interact with the artwork, Flückiger shows the body seemingly lost in a nowhere land. One’s works do not knowingly create a space for the other’s, but they trigger a conversation, a dialogue between sites of the mind and state of the body.

This project stems from a short 10 day residency which served as an introductory meeting for the (im)mobile artists. The work Tracing Tracks, a mapping game for experiencing different spaces, was started during this residency, and premiered at the 2014 exhibition.