PXR2020
2020 Presenters

Catherine Bourgeois began her career in theatre as a scenographer. In 2003, she co-founded the company Joe Jack et John through which she has developed a body of theatrical work which is performative, collective and inclusive. She has twice won best Mise en Scene at the Gala des Cochons d’Or, with Just fake it in 2012, then AVALe in 2014. Just fake it also earned her a LOJIQ scholarship in addition to the Janine-Sutto Prize in 2013. In 2017, Brigitte Haentjens, winner of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement, declared that she wanted to encourage “creators and creators whose approach is unique and profound” and awarded her grant to five artists, including Catherine. Lately, Catherine is directing je ne veux pas marcher seul  and Dis merci, and is currently working on the development of a theatrical work of virtual reality, Violette. www.joejacketjohn.com

Ian Garrett is designer, producer, educator, and researcher in the field of sustainability in arts and culture. He is the director of the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts; Associate Professor of Ecological Design for Performance at York University; and Producer for Toasterlab. He maintains a design practice focused on ecology, technology and scenography. Through Toasterlab’s Mixed Reality Performance Atelier, recent work includes The Stranger 2.0 with DLT Experience; Groundworks with Rulan Tangen and collaborating artists from Pomo, Wappo, and Ohlone communities; The locative audio project TrailOff with Philadelphia’s Swim Pony; and Transmission (FuturePlay/Edinburgh and Future of Storytelling Festival/New York). Notable projects include the set and energy systems for Zata Omm’s Vox:Lumen at the Harbourfront Centre and Crimson Collective’s Ascension, a solar 150’ wide crane at Coachella. With Chantal Bilodeau, he co-directs the Climate Change Theatre Action. His writing includes Arts, the Environment, and Sustainability for Americans for the Arts; The Carbon Footprint of Theatrical Production in Readings in Performance and Ecology, and Theatre is No Place for a Plant in Landing Stages from the Ashden Directory. He serves on the Board of Directors for Associated Designers of Canada. He was the Curator for the US for the 2019 Prague Quadrennial, and is co-chair for World Stage Design 2021 in Calgary.

Nick Fox-Gieg is a researcher, animator, and developer in Toronto. Most recently, he’s been working on XR projects for the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge, NYT T Brand Studio, the University of Waterloo, Google Creative Lab, and Framestore. His awards include a 2017 Engadget Alternate Realities grant, Eyebeam and Fulbright Fellowships, and the jury prize for Best Animated Short at SXSW 2010; his work has also been shown at the Ottawa, Rotterdam, and TIFF film festivals, at the Centre Pompidou, and on CBC TV; his practice has been supported by grants from Bravo!FACT, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the arts councils of Ontario, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and West Virginia. Fox-Gieg holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Athomas Goldberg is a 25-year veteran of the computer graphics and video game industries specializing in real-time interactive animation and behavior-based AI systems for the creation of lifelike digital characters.  He has worked for several major game and VR developers, including Electronic Arts, Relic Entertainment, Microsoft Studios, 343 Industries, Oculus VR, Zenimax Online, Walt Disney Imagineering, and Epic Games. His new media performance practice seeks to marry the visual expressivity of modern graphics technologies, including commercial game engines, real-time motion capture, procedural animation, stereo 3D projection and virtual / augmented reality with the emotional immediacy and interactive potential of live performance techniques drawn from theatre, dance, circus arts and Bunraku puppetry. He is a co-founder of Pepper’s Ghost New Media & Performing Arts Collective (http://www.pepperghost.org) and the Executive Director of Shocap Entertainment (http://www.shocap.com), whose debut project, codenamed LiViCi, a live theatrical production with world-renowned circus arts collective,  The 7 Fingers (http://www.7fingers.com), is officially in development.

Youhan is a programmer and user experience designer who has been researching in and developing VR/AR experiences since 2013. She has developed projects for Blackbird Interactive, Microsoft, IBM and more. Her most recent work was designing and developing for a large-scale co-located VR experience for SIGGRAPH VR Theater in 2018 and 2019. Her goal is to bring fun interactions and tell stories to users in emerging media. http://youhanguan.com/

Beth Kates is an award-winning lighting, set, projection and mixed reality designer, who started in rock&roll at 14. In 2019 she and Neil Christensen co-created Bury The Wren, a ground- breaking Augmented/Virtual Reality/live performance, and most recently was the virtual world lighting designer and virtual stage lighting designer for Doubleeye Studios VR Theatre performance Finding Pandora X which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the ‘Best Immersive VR Experience’ prize. A recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Calgary, Beth’s research joined the departments of drama and computer science as she focused on VR, AR, and live performance. Upcoming work includes a virtual presentation of Alistair Newton’s adaptation of The Dispute, and leading an artist residency with Canadian Stage in Virtual Reality Performance.

A career spanning 30 years has seen Beth collaborate with acclaimed directors Jillian Keiley, Jackie Maxwell, Daniel Brooks, Peter Hinton, and Paul Thompson among many others. Highlights: I, Claudia (Crows Theatre), Between Breaths Orchestral (Artistic Fraud), Silence (Grand Theatre/NAC), Vigilante (Catalyst/NAC), Bigger Than Jesus (Wyrd), The Last Donnelly Standing (Blyth), Alice in Wonderland, Ragtime, (Shaw), Brimful of Asha (WhyNot).

She has been commissioned by The Blyth Festival to co-create Airborne: The Life and Legacy of Lorna Bray a technology-driven play about trailblazing pilot Lorna Deblicquy with Gil Garratt, Kelly McIntosh and Emma Marcy. Beth is also the Founder of Playground Studios and the Digital Alchemy Performance Lab, funded by the Canada Council’s Digital Strategy Fund. She lectures and teaches internationally and is a co-signatory with several digital leaders on the “Art and the Digital Ecosystem: a manifesto”. Beth serves as the Chair of the Advisory Board of the Toasterlab Mixed Reality Performance Atelier, the Steering Committee of PXR, and is a proud and active member of the Associated Designers of Canada. Her best production is her son Aaron, who is often in the theatre with her.

www.playgroundstudios.ca

www.dacreationlab.com

www.bethkates.com

Twitter: @the_play_ground

IG: @beth.kates

BAFTA-nominated designer Tyler McCulloch has designed interactive entertainment since 2003, working with notable companies such as Rockstar Games, Sony, and Capcom as well as leading the design for multiple small startups. He led design on VR title FORM, praised by critics and consumers alike. His passion for interactive storytelling led him to co-found Inscape Studios in 2017. As part of the Archiact team he spearheaded AR design on MARVEL Dimension of Heroes, and continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in the AR/VR world.

Dan Miller is a senior developer advocate focused on XR at Unity Technologies. In his role he focuses on Augmented and Virtual Reality, building content, sharing knowledge and helping the community. He has a background in game programming and development.

Neel is a Performance Capture specialist and 3D animator. He has worked on larger projects like Mortal Kombat 11 and Skater XL as well as several independent game and research projects. Since early 2019 he has also been developing various VR/AR proof of concept applications and experiences with companies in Vancouver, Japan, and his home country of India. His goal is to make the movement of characters as believable as possible blending captured performances and the principles of animation to tell immersive and unique stories.

Cohort [https://cohort.rocks] is an open-source software toolkit that makes it easier for creators and producers of live performance to integrate smartphones and tablets in their work. Cohort’s tools have powered sound walks, large-scale site-specific performances with multitrack synchronized headphone audio, AR and VR experiences, and many other adventurous show formats. We develop our shared tools through direct partnerships with artists and arts organizations, with administration provided by adelheid [http://adelheid.ca] and funding from the Canada Council’s Digital Strategy Fund. The Cohort development team also accepts commissions for project-based creative/technical collaborations.

Darren O’Donnell is an urban cultural planner, novelist, essayist, playwright, filmmaker, performance director and the Artistic and Founding Director of Mammalian Diving Reflex. His books include: Your Secrets Sleep with Me (2004), Social Acupuncture (2006), which argues for aesthetics of civic engagement, and Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract (2018), which proposes the cultural sector as a site to pilot a new social contract with children.  His performance works include Haircuts by Children, All the Sex I’ve Ever Had, The Children’s Choice Awards and Teentalitarianism. His films include Sleeping with Family and High School Health. The Last Minutes Before Mars is his first work in mixed-reality, using 360° video and live performance.

His institutional collaborators have included  the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, the Humboldt Forum, the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, the West Kowloon Cultural District, the London International Festival of Theatre, the Metropolitan Region of Rhine-Neckar, the Schauspielhaus Bochum and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.

Conrad is a 3D Artist that specializes in real time graphics. He has been producing architectural visualization for virtual reality projects for 2 years, and has worked on several iterations of the VR Theatre for Siggraph in 2018 and 2019. He has a deep interest in the crossroads of experimentation with emergent technologies such as VR and AR, and traditional theatrical and art contexts.

www.conradsly.net

As co-founding artistic director of The 7 Fingers (http://www.7fingers.com), Samuel Tétreault directed and/or co-directed Vice & Vertu, Bosch Dreams, Triptyque, Fibonacci Project, Intersection, La Vie and Loft. Through 7Fingers special projects, Samuel also directed Rengeteg – Looking Out for the Budapest National Circus School annual show, Luces Fugaces for the Festival de las Luces in Medellin and Qualia, a show created for the 50th anniversary of the famous Reford Gardens in Gaspésie. Samuel is known for his versatile creativity. His interest for interdisciplinary creation and artistic collaboration has brought him to direct a wide range of authentic work mixing contemporary circus arts with dance, theater, visual arts, video projections, historical research, live music, etc. Driven by humanistic values, Samuel initiated the Fibonacci Project in 2007. This ongoing creation, realized through a series of residencies around the world, aims to build bridges between cultures and celebrate human diversity. For the past twenty years Samuel has been highly invested towards the development of contemporary circusarts in Canada. He was the President of En Piste (the Canadian circus arts association) from 2013 to 2019 and spent eighteen years as a board member. He served on several juries for the Québec and the Montreal Arts Councils (CALQ, CAM) and he is involved with the Research Chair of the National Circus School in collaboration with key academics and industry leaders.

Brian is a Vancouver, BC based composer, creative programmer and music technologist. He is currently completing a doctorate in music composition and interactive music technology at the University of British Columbia, focusing on the intersection between music performance and composition with new technologies such as virtual reality. Brian is also a co-founder and developer with Chroma Mixed Media, a Vancouver based arts collective devoted to the development of new immersive audio-visual works.

www.briantopp.com

www.chromamixedmedia.com

Debi is an interdisciplinary performance artist that loves to weave together sound, text, movement and technology to create contemporary stories. Her performances have been recognized as “unique and magical” (Rondo Classic) and “electric & poignant” (Schmopera). Debi is also the founding artistic director of re:Naissance Opera in Vancouver, BC. With re:Naissance she created #DidoAndAeneas (2014), an interactive, social-media opera and Acis & Galatea which was recognized by Vancouver Classical Music as one of the city’s best operas in 2017.

www.reopera.com