About the Artist

@cawsand on twitter and instagram

Megan Smith PhD is a new media artist and curator. Her art practice probes new systems for delivering syndicated data through narrative structure and she often works with geo-location, live-feed installation, performance, and community projects as methods for storytelling. In December 2015 she embarked on a durational performance in physical computing called ‘Riding Through Walls’ which involves a live-cast cross-Canada cycle through Google Street View, from her studio in Regina. This project is part of the 2016 Project Anywhere global exhibition. In July 2016, she will take part in the Canadian Wilderness Artist Residency and canoe a 700 km stretch of the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Dawson City with 10 artists as part of her growing series of research called ‘Adrift’. In 2015, she partook in a 12 day art residency, curated by the Department of Biological Flow and supported by the SenseLab travelling from Lake Ontario through the Rideau waterway system to Ottawa by canoe. During this time, she mapped and collected zooplankton samples on route. She has also been a resident artists at the Pelling Lab, University of Ottawa where she worked with researchers to image the zooplankton samples.

Her work has been shown internationally and most recently at ‘The Works Art Festival’, Edmonton (June 2015), ‘Conversations électroniques’, La Panacée, Montpellier, France (June-December 2013) and Electric Fields, Ottawa (September 2013).

Smith was Creative Director and co-Founder of Canada’s national capital Nuit Blanche festival (2012-2015), a pop-up Contemporary Art event focused on embedding temporary transformative projects into public spaces. The festival annually hosted over a hundred artists from diverse areas of practice and was regularly attended by thousands of smiling people. Smith holds a PhD in Contemporary Art & Graphic Design from Leeds Beckett University and is Assistant Professor in Creative Technology within the Faculty of Media+Art+Performance at the University of Regina.

About the SSHRC Research Assistant

Yujie Gao is a media art practitioner, she creates site-specific installations and interactive sculptures that deal with space, light, and movement, by playing with existing and new relationships between nature, technology, and mankind. Her artistic creation, interests, and concepts are inspired by nature; however, the work process is driven by technology which combines hardware and software, focusing on the different sensory stimulations of the viewer’s behavior through different media platforms.  She holds MFA in Media Art Design from the Central China Normal University, and is now pursuing her doctoral program in Creative Technologies at the University of Regina. She has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries including K11 Art Space, Today Art Museum, GuanshanYue Museum. Her work also longlisted for the 2017 Lumen Prize.

John Desnoyers-Stewart P. Eng. is a Professional Engineer and Aspiring Artist who is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Regina. Building upon a background in engineering and marketing, his research focuses on the application of emerging technology in art to improve communication between the artist, artwork, and viewer. Currently he is investigating the potential of virtual reality as a creative tool to expand reality, beyond replication and simulation, through its ability to immerse and connect with the viewer. He intends to use this new medium to transcend the boundaries of localized and distributed media to create works that blur the boundary between mass media and fine art. He will eventually apply the findings back to science and technology to improve the creative process and bring together these mutually symbiotic disciplines that can benefit from an improved understanding and intercommunication.