Regular Members
Rob Cruickshank
Luis Hernandez (Mandelbrut)
Dafydd Hughes
Dafydd Hughes is a musician, new media artist, educator and programmer living in Toronto, Ontario. He is an active member of Canada's jazz, pop and experimental music communities, performing and recording regularly as a pianist, keyboardist and electronic sound designer, both with his own projects and with artists such as Esthero, James McCollum (The Philosopher Kings), Jacksoul and Feist.
Dafydd is on faculty at Sheridan College, where he teaches Ear Training and Music Technologies. He is also a member of the board of directors at Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, where he loves to spend time teaching and participating in workshops, playing with technology, taking things apart and finding himself unable to put things back together.
Rob King
Rob King is an artist, researcher and student in the Communication and Culture masters program at Ryerson. His works have focused on the social interactions between people in an online environment, emergent systems, and digital play.
Julie Lassonde
Julie Lassonde is an interdisciplinary practitioner who is interested in performances of femininity and masculinity in art and social justice. Julie has presented solo performances and movement improvisations in Edinburgh, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. She lives in Montreal and she is a member of the Board of InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto. In May 2007, she received an Innovative Electronic Theses and Dissertations Award for her work entitled "Performing Law" in Uppsala, Sweden - see http://law.uvic.ca/lassonde/.
David McCallum
Toronto-based musician and media artist David McCallum has an M.Sc. in Art and Technology from Gothenburg, Sweden, and studied physics and music before that. He is currently the Editor of Musicworks Magazine.
His work has focussed on improvised performance, DIY electronics and locative media, with an emphasis on curiosity. Groups and projects have included the Warbike, a mobile sonification of WiFi networks; and You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato: a study in the sonic properties of genetically modified potatoes.
Kristin Trethewey
Kristin lives in Toronto's east end. She works in interactive and performance video, after graduating from McMaster University in 2005. She is currently studying to become an art director.
Michael Trommer
Michael Trommer is a Toronto based producer and visual artist who has recorded for such top electronic music labels as Transmat, Wave, Truffle, Stasisfield, Interchill, Monocromatica, Thinner and Stratagem. He records under his own name, as well as aliases such as ‘sans soleil’, ‘minidisco’, ‘Hydraulic’,and ‘Manitou2‘.
Broad-minded in his approach to electronic music, Michael also creates gallery-based audio installation work. 2005 saw him creating a site-specific sound installation for Australia’s ‘Liquid Architecture’ exhibition. Another of his recent works was a net-based audio-manipulation project which was part of the ‘from 0 to 1 and back again’ exhibition at Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt; this became the subject of many radio specials on both Deutsche Welle and Hessischer Rundfunk. In 2000, his work was nominated for the Prix Italia for experimental music. His field-recording based material has been featured on London’s Resonance FM, www.vagueterrain.net, www.insine.net, www.monocromatica.com and www.stasisfield.com.
A site-specific field-recording based installation is being exhibited in New York state’s upper Catskill forest (http://www.restlessculture.net/deepwoods) from the end of May.
As a live performance, sans soleil was featured at the 2003 Movement Festival (a.k.a.DEMF) in support of Michael's full-length album on Detroit's legendary Transmat label. 2007 saw him performing alongside Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender of Berlin’s Raster-Noton label, as well as headlining Toronto’s ‘inthemix’ festival (with VJ Nokami) and closing the ‘Electric Eclectics’ festival of experimental and improvised music.
Nominated as one of eye magazine’s ‘10 talents to watch for 2006’, Michael has more plans in the works, including an installation based on Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto Dominion Centre will be presented at the State Gallery in St. Petersburg, Russia in the autumn; in addition, a site-specific collaboration with video artist Arnold von Wedemeyer is planned for downtown Berlin in late 2008.
Casual members
Ben Bogart
Ben is an installation artist, visual performer and programmer. He works in an open-source context and makes the software he develops available under the GPL. His installations create content live and on the fly in response to the work's sensed environment. These works may involve interaction from the audience, or the work may simply respond to the context in which it exists. Ben is a structural thinker and imagines his work as the production of media architectures. Physical modelling, chaos, feedback systems and evolutionary algorithms have been used to inform and engage in his creative process. Ben is currently developing the pixelTANGO visual performance software for the Société des arts technologiques.
Len Goins
VJ Nokami
Eric Filion aka vj Nokami, graphic designer is in the visual media and communications environment. He participates in several visual artistic performances as media designer. Eric was part of the Neoist movement, and collaborates regularly in international artistic visual presentations in Europe (AVITUK, Optronica, Arts Electronica), USA (SHARE, AVITRetreat, Center art project) in Asia (Mobile road cinema thailand, Thailand New media Arts) and in Canada (Momentfactory, SAT, Champs Libre).
His artistic approach is clearly influenced by his numerous travels on several continents. The canvas of the images he expresses tend to reflect human emotions based on cultural values where ancient traditions meet with the present, to clash and become in harmony in the now.
Mantissa (Jeremy Rotsztain)
Jeremy Rotsztain founded I/O Media in 2005. He is currently in New York City and works with responsive and evolving media systems. His interests span from audio-visual performance to interactive architecture, and video painting installations. In 2003, he created BIXSimulator, a realtime 3D simulator for the award winning BIX media facade in Graz, Austria (www.bix.at). He has also worked closely with a number of theatre and dance companies to create media-based components for their productions. Jeremy has performed and exhibited his work in Berlin, Frankfurt, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and New York City.
Neil Wiernik
Montreal ex-pat Neil Wiernik who currently calls Toronto his home, began composing electronic music in 1988 with explorations in audio art and experimental music. Neil's interest in sound and technology has lead him to a continued questioning and refinement of audio tools and modes of production resulting in experimentation with altered instruments, modified devices, and custom software environments. Neil's music could be described as warm, atmospheric, and cinematic electronic music. The sound design of naw is firmly grounded in the rich traditions of dub studio culture but can also be weighed alongside formal contemporary composition. His music was recently described in "The Wire" as having "...the kind of sharpness and clarity usually lost amid the murk and decay of clicks and cuts and digital delays." Neil has released music on various labels including: Noise Factory, Pertin_nce, Clevermusic, Piehead, and A/S Systems.
In addition to his recording career Neil is an accomplished curator and digital media specialist, he has shown work in a variety of non-traditional spaces since the late 1980's and his projects have included works in radio, print, and internet diffusion as well as other non-gallery spaces including derelict buildings, billboards, pirate airwaves, and public space. Neil has presented projects at the Finland Contemporary Museum, ISEA, Subtle Technologies Conference, La SAT, The Medusa Complex, Mutek Festival and Gallery Optica. Neil was a co-founder of the Toronto and Montreal based electronic music promotion outfit clonk, the Canadian electronic music portal phoniq, and currently co-curates vagueterrain.net - an online digital arts quarterly.