In Katherine McKittrick’s essays on the Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter, she spotlights Jimi Hendrix’s suggestion on how to marry art with our technological reality. On his seminal 1967 album Axis: Bold as Love, his combination of “structures of feeling” (bold as love) with a “scientifically familiar configuration” (axis) results in a reminder that “through such creative acts we find the poetics of our future.”

It is in the spirit of this tradition, and an effort to locate solutions and lessons in the art that moves us, that “Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow” takes it’s inspiration. Four spellbinding artists from across Toronto have selected work that illuminates the nuances of our relationship with new technology, or the central tenets of a ubiquitous cultural condition.

Attendees are invited to rotate through small, breakout conversations with each speaker, explore their insights with our collective group, and linger after for as long as they’d like. Food, drinks, and musical selections will be provided.

It’s not mandatory, but we enthusiastically invite everyone to spend time with the selected works beforehand:

Akash Bansal — Post 9/11 Nostalgias with William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely to explore affect, surveillance and cultural memorialization in the age of the internet.

Akash Bansal is a writer, filmmaker, DJ, and curator currently based out of Toronto. His expanded poetry practice includes video, sound, performance, photography, as well as more traditional forms of text-based poetics. His recent work has examined borders – both real and imagined, between people and places, and especially those within ourselves.

Kasra Goodarznezhad — “What do we mean when we talk about “Extended Reality/XR work?” through Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s “Thought Experiments in F# Minor” (2019)

Kasra Goodarznezhad (Cassraa) is a new media artist based in Toronto. His focus is Performance and Installation. Kasra graduated from OCADu’s Integrated Media program and currently works as the Prototyping Lead at UKAI Projects.

Kadrah Mensah — “Are memes a technology of the psyche?” through Adrian Piper’s “Everything” series (2003–13)

Kadrah Mensah is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist. Her practice is an exploration of technological intimacy as a site of freedom, escape, and identification. By leaning into the frictional paradoxes inherent to survival, she uses humour as a source of relief and resolution to confront mounting absurdity. The internet is her foundational instrument.

Myst Milano. — “What can a creative expansion accomplish?” through Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

Myst Milano is a Toronto-based rapper, DJ and producer spent years traversing underground nightlife, enamoured by the exploration of music, culture and community offered everywhere from red-lit raves, to punk show mosh pits, to the glitz and pageantry of the ballroom (vogue) scene. Their career as an artist has cemented Myst as a creative chameleon, a quality that has allowed them to share stages with the likes of Thundercat, Lizzo, Rico Nasty, Tinashe, and Kim Petras, just to name a few. Their 2021 debut album, Shapeshyfter was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize.

This event will be moderated by Melissa Vincent (MI Candidate, Faculty of Information: Culture and Technology, University of Toronto) and Chris Wilson (MD Candidate, Strategic Foresight and Innovation at Ontario College of Art and Design). This event is part of the EDIU Fellowship Program and presented by the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Unit at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information in collaboration with Music Ontario.