Artists
Philip Beesley practices digital media art and experimental architecture in Toronto. His creative work in the last two decades has focused on ‘field’ oriented sculpture and landscape installations. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queen’s University in 1978 and received his professional degree in Architecture from the University of Toronto in 1986. He maintains a practice that combines sculpture with public buildings, exhibitry and stage design. He frequently works within art collaboratives and was a founding member of the Kingston Artists Association, an ANNPAC parallel gallery. Distinctions for his work are many and include the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada), 1st prize at Spain’s VIDA 11.0, a Far Eastern International Digital Architectural Design Award (FEIDAD), and two Dora Mavor Moore Awards. Philip Beesley holds degrees summa cum laude in visual art at Queen’s University, in technology at Humber College, and in architecture at the University of Toronto.
The Team
Philip Beesley Architect is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary design collective led by experimental sculptor/architect Philip Beesley. Core team members include Eric Bury (graphic designer and visual artist), Jonathan Tyrrell (interactive system coordinator and sound artist), Martin Correa (industrial designer) and Andrea Ling (architect and visual artist). Currently there are 15 artists, designers, architects, and engineers within the collective. This ongoing sculpture series is widely published and exhibited. Projects since 2007 have included major installations in Venice, Madrid, Linz, Enschede, Brussels, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Mexico City and Copenhagen, Salt Lake City, and Sydney. The work has also appeared in Barcelona, Beijing, and Taipei and has been featured in WIRED and MARK magazine and numerous journals including the covers of LEONARDO and ARTIFICIAL LIFE.
David Bowen was born in the United States in 1975. He is a studio artist and educator whose work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Bowen’s work is concerned with aesthetics that result from interactive, reactive and generative processes as they relate to intersections between natural and mechanical systems. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
Bartholomäus Traubeck, born in Munich, Germany in 1987. Living and working in Vienna, Austria. Originally having studied graphic design he now works in various fields of media. His work received an honorary mention in Digital Musics and Sound Art at the Ars Electronica 2012 and he was given the "Landespreis Medienkunst Salzburg" (Grand Prize in Media Arts of the State of Salzburg) in 2010.
His works are shown in exhibitions including the following: “Tokyo Art Meeting 3: Art & Music” at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan, “Panoramas Biennale” in Bordeaux, France, “Touch”, at Musée de la main/mudac, Lausanne, Switzerland, “Schlossmediale” in Schloss Werdenberg, Buchs, Switzerland, “TonArt” at City Gallery, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany, “Dust”, in Laboratoria, Moscow, Russia, “Digital Whispers” at Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria.
Haru Ji is a trans-artist and researcher exploring the subject of life in art through “Artificial Life Worldmaking”: a form of computational generative art creating and evolving virtual ecosystems as immersive environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Technology at the University of California Santa Barbara and is an assistant professor of Art & Technology in the School of Consilience at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited computational installations, digital sculptures, virtual architecture, video installations, sculptural objects and 3D animations at exhibitions and art festivals worldwide including ISEA, EvoWorkshops, and SIGGRAPH, with corresponding publications. She is a co-creator of the research project and immersive ecosystem "Artificial Nature", exploring the expansion of media art towards ‘art-as-it-could-be’. It is an amalgam of play, research, and art, which raises novel and significant questions regarding the trans-disciplinary interpretation of both subjective beauty and objective truth in art and biology.
Graham Wakefield is currently exploring the creation of music and art through the computational embodiment of creative becoming. This work expands upon his musical practice to re-asses computational composition from its natural grain towards the generation of open-ended environments for exploratory discovery, engaging with enduring questions of creativity, emergence and experience. It is informed by process philosophies emphasizing continuation over closure and integrates bio-inspired computation and run-time code generation. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California Santa Barbara USA. He is currently employed as a post-doctoral researcher for the AlloSphere (a multi-user spherical immersive instrument in the California Nano-Systems Institute) producing interactive environments for art-science research and co-developing an open-source multimedia framework (LuaAV). He is a software developer for Cycling '74 (Max/MSP) and lecturer at the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc). His works and publications have been performed, exhibited and presented at international events including SIGGRAPH, ICMC and ISEA.
The collaborative localStyle was founded by Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim. Their intermedia projects have been shown worldwide in many cities (including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Chicago, Eindhoven, London, Mexico City, New York, Santa Fe, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Torino, Toronto, Valencia, Warsaw). Festival presentations have included the TransLife Triennial, STRP Festival, Visioni dal Futuro, and others. Often they explore how thresholds and boundaries are constructed, interpreted, and negotiated, via themes as varied as the mating behavior of hermaphroditic marine flatworms and the sonification of electric fish from the Amazon.
Marlena Novak co-founded localStyle with Jay Alan Yim. Her work is in collections throughout Europe and the USA, and has been presented internationally and extensively in solo and group exhibitions. Currently she is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to that, she served as Associate Director of Northwestern’s Animate Arts Program, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of New Mexico. She has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, CIRA, and the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Jay Alan Yim has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and many other awards for his music, which has been featured at international festivals (Darmstadt, Tanglewood, Ars Musica, Wien-Modern, Gaudeamus, Huddersfield, Aspen, ISCM, ICMC) and performed by the New York Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Nederlands Radio Filharmonisch, Hague Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble SurPlus, Arditti, JACK, and Spektral Quartets, Nieuw Ensemble, dal niente, ICE. He co-founded localStyle with Marlena Novak.
Jesus Duran is an experimental technologist and educator whose works explore overlaps in computational and physical space in an effort to initiate a reconsideration of the latent impact of technology in the social feedback circuit. Often he will construct unseen frameworks as a gesture to engage in extradisciplinary activities. The products of these endeavors include interactive installations, interventions, software, unconventional modes of distribution, robotics, light, sound, video, digital images and physical objects.
