multiPLAY

Rebecca Caines is an interdisciplinary community-engaged artist and curator, who works in contemporary performance, sound art, and installation, and new media art. She is currently Associate Professor in Creative Technologies, in Interdisciplinary Programs in the Faculty of Media, Art and Performance at the University of Regina, Canada.

Caines has staged large-scale community-based art projects in Australia, Northern Ireland, Canada, China and the Netherlands, funded by local, national and international art bodies including the Canada Council for the Arts, the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), and a wide range of community, government, research and welfare funding partners.

In 2012 she worked with Ontario new media gallery Ed Video and Canada Council for the Arts to establish a project in partnership with the Keewaytinook Okimakanak council, to create sound art and training with First Nations communities in Northern Ontario. In 2016, she was ISEA K11 FUSE Artist in Resident in Wuhan, China (with long term collaborator John Campbell), where she developed socially-engaged performances, workshops and gallery installations with local partners, before participating in a group show of multichannel video and sound works at the K11 Gallery in Hong Kong as part of the ISEA program.

Recently she has been co-leading (with researcher Dr. Michelle Stewart) a national art and research project with partners across Canada, Northern Ireland and Australia that investigates creative responses to social isolation and stigma surrounding people with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. This project has included interventions, workshops, performances, talks, art exhibits and the development of new downloadable resources for families and agencies. She is also the director of the Regina Improvisation Studies Centre at the University of Regina, which is the site of the 2.5 million dollar Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership entitled the “International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation”.

She is lead artist and facilitator of the multiPLAY project.

Andrew’s work in radio dates back some twenty years, and has extended beyond standard broadcast radio into gallery pieces, installations and sound design.  This work has been presented at festivals across North America including Megapolis in Baltimore, the Third Coast Filmless Festival at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Vancouver New Music Festival, and at the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound.  Through this work Andrew has been invited to be a visiting faculty member at the Banff Centre for the Arts, received a commission from the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture for their yearly thematic series, The Natural & The Manufactured, helped create the award winning theater project BOBLO and had his work included in the anthology Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves“ published in 2011.

Dr. Michelle Stewart is an Associate Professor in Gender, Religion and Critical Studies at the University of Regina. Michelle is an interdisciplinary scholar working with a number of participatory arts and research teams at the regional, national and international level. As an applied anthropologist trained in Science and Technology Studies, Michelle uses her background in visual and legal anthropology to focus on cognitive disabilities, mental health and racialized inequalities as they present in the criminal justice and child welfare systems of settler states. More specifically, Michelle looks at the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in these systems and the ongoing role of colonization to create these racialized outcomes in Canada.

Working with individuals, families, community members and frontline workers, Michelle uses participatory and community-based research models to co-design projects and mobilize research findings. The overall goal of which is to change programs and practices so as to bring about better justice outcomes for individuals while also working on the systemic root causes of these forms of marginalization and oppression. From delivery of training to scholarly and artistic outputs, Michelle works at multiple levels and with a wide variety of stakeholders to try and address inequalities.

In addition to projects that seek to directly intervene on the justice and child welfare systems, Michelle is also involved in a number of strengths-based initiatives across Canada. These projects place an emphasis on making resources available to communities and include supported employment opportunities through projects that are focused on lived experience, community making and arts-based practices.

Michelle is dedicated to community-engaged and publicly-available scholarship in her own work and supporting the work of others.

James Harley (b. 1959, Vernon, B.C.) is a Canadian composer presently based in Ontario, where he teaches at the University of Guelph. He obtained his doctorate in composition at McGill University in 1994, after spending six years (1982-88) composing and studying music in Europe (London, Paris, Warsaw). His music has been awarded prizes in Canada, USA, UK, France, Poland, Japan, and has been performed and broadcast around the world.

Some of Harley’s compositions are available on disc (Artifact, ATMA, Centrediscs, Dame, Kappa, McGill, Musicworks, PeP, Soundprints) and his scores are primarily available through the Canadian Music Centre. He has been commissioned by, among others, Codes d’Accès, Continuum, ECM, Hammerhead Consort, Kappa, Kore, New Music Concerts, Oshawa-Durham Symphony, Open Ears Festival, Polish Society for New Music, SMCQ, Transit Festival Leuven, Transmission, Trio Phoenix, Vancouver New Music. He composes music for acoustic forces as well as electroacoustic media, with a particular interest in multi-channel audio.

As a researcher, Harley has written extensively on contemporary music. His book, Xenakis: His Life in Music (Routledge) was published in 2004, and Iannis Xenakis: Kraanerg (Ashgate) in 2015. As a performer, Harley has a background in jazz, and has most recently worked as an interactive computer musician, notably in the duo ~spin~ with flutist Ellen Waterman.

Helen Pridmore

Helen Pridmore is a singer and sound artist, with a focus on contemporary scored music, experimental music and improvisation. She has performed across Canada and the US, including a solo appearance at Carnegie Hall. Helen has also performed in Europe, Mexico and Japan. She has three CDs to her name, including …between the shore and the ships…, which won the 2013 East Coast Music Award for Best Classical Recording.

Helen’s current focus is on the technology of the voice and the body, with explorations into the concepts of aural beauty, space and silence. She is writing and performing new works for voice that employ both structure and improvisation. One of her current projects is her solo voice work Sor Juana and the Silences, which will be touring Canada in the 2020-21 season. Helen also shares her ideas with students and community members via workshops and improvisation sessions. With degrees from the Universities of Saskatchewan and Toronto, and the Eastman School of Music, Helen is currently a faculty member in Music and Creative Technologies at the University of Regina.

Michael Waterman is a visual and audio artist whose work focuses on sound installation, improvisational performance, and experimental radio art. He is especially interested in performance on found objects and altered electronics, which he fashions into unique musical instruments. He has presented his sound installations and performed extensively in museums and festivals across Canada, the United States, and in telematic performances globally. Waterman is a founding member of a number of sound art collaborations most notably, his audio collage ensemble, Mannlicher Carcano, who have explored a range of recorded, performance and transmission contexts over their 30 year history. For the past 20 years, Waterman has hosted the weekly collaborative radio show, The Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour, regularly connecting participants from up to 12 cities across North America and Europe. In recent years, he has been exploring the creative potential of off-grid pirate radio installations. Waterman recently moved to Ottawa, Ontario from St. John’s, Newfoundland where he had been living for the since 2010.

John Campbell is an emerging artist who explores agency, interactivity, self and perception of self; informed by a contemporary climate where avatar/person/online profile blur, and where human and machine are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate. He comes to the field of interdisciplinary arts practice from a professional career in software architecture, network engineering, and web integration.

His current art practice includes kinetic sculptures, new media, and sound installations, that utilize his mechanical, electronic, and software engineering knowledge. He creates playful and disturbing interactive experiences that demystify and interrogate, using a mix of repurposed older technologies, combined with experiments at the unstable edge of emerging software and hardware that is about to be taken up by contemporary societies in yet to be determined ways. He is interested in interdisciplinary work, which blurs the boundaries between computer programming and artistic expression because it emphasizes the inherent creativity of technological design. He has many years of experience as a leader in an online gaming environment, leading teams of hundreds of”people” in completing group goals. This has given him insight into representation of the self, and perception of others in a world where all interaction is via an avatar.

In the past five years he has moved from working as a technologist in service of other artists, to an emerging artist in his own right, with art projects featured in galleries, festivals, artist residencies, and speaker series in Canada, the Netherlands, and China.

Ian Campbell and Holophon Audio Art

Holophon Audio Arts Inc (Regina) presents audio works by prairie sound artists in a virtual 3D space. All sounds are spatialized to work with contemporary VR/AR technology and explore a sense of place within an imagined sonic environment of the experimental sound art milieu. By working with these new presentation technologies, we envision a new way of hearing sound art from the past and present. Holophon Audio Arts is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and multiPLAY and partnered with The University of Regina.