June 26 – July 29, 2018

Visiting Speaker Series: Artist Talk by Ilana Harris-Babou
Tuesday, June 26 | 6pm
Video Speaker Series: Artist Talk with Hannah Black
Wednesday, June 27 | 6pm
Visiting Speaker Series: Video Talk with Simon Denny
Friday, June 29 | 11am
Visiting Speaker Series: Talk by Architect Nerea Calvillo
Friday, June 29 | 6pm
Video Speaker Series: Artist Talk with Aria Dean
Monday, July 2 | 6pm
Visiting Speaker Series: Artist Talk with Christopher Kulendran Thomas
Tuesday, July 3 | 6pm
Talk by Economist Dr. Evelyn Forget
Thursday, July 5 | 6pm
Rooftop Party and Open Studio
Saturday, July 7 | 7-11pm

A guide for this brave new world that might help us understand how to be and how to live, love, and work in our bodies in this techno-capitalist context. – Marco Roso

For Session I of our Summer Institute research program, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present DIS. Over the duration of the Institute Marco Roso and collaborators will facilitate “Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network”. The session will be grounded in discussions that centre on media and the visual arts; offering directed, one-on-one conversations with Roso and guests, as well as group activities that privilege participants and their ongoing work.

The seminar circles around a series of exhibitions organized by DIS and framed by dis.art, a new streaming edutainment platform. Through direct engagement with the artists of dis.art, the session will contemplate a series of linked concerns, including: the nature of belonging in a rootless-seeming, networked world; the changing relationship to the ways one owns, lends or gives time through occupations, bodies, or other forms of value-creation. Some of the topics DIS will covered will be: Money: what is it?; information consumption; the future of citizenship; reparations; love and humor.

Participants will engage in a series of exercises and activities in response to the themes of the Institute. These will range in form and approach, and may include the production of short videos, bike rides, city walks, screenings and guest lectures. Participants will be encouraged to produce individual work generated through our collective thinking and peer-to-peer engagement. The workshop is open to visual artists of all kinds as well as writers, critics and scholars.

DIS is a New York based collective best known for DIS Magazine (2010-2017), and curating the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016). DIS has become an umbrella for a number of networked and collaborative platforms – all of which reimagine one format or another.

Today DIS is focused on dis.art. While remaining true to the novel approaches to critical inquiry that defined life as a magazine, DIS is now focused on redefining entertainment and education through the new streaming platform on dis.art.

DIS enlists writers, filmmakers, and artists to offer new forms of genre-bending edutainment that help cut through the atomization and polarization that defines the noisy, disjointed mediasphere. In the last century, public television programming meant that quality information, education and artistic formats could go hand in hand.

Participants

Chris Andrews is an art writer, curator, and visual artist, living and working in Toronto. Recent curatorial projects include Slipping between the gap of touch, two hands vibrating (2017), exhibited at Jenine Marsh’s studio (Toronto). His work was shown in Summer 2017 at Galerie VAV (Montreal) as part of the artist collective Babyland. He participated in the Celine Bureau (Montreal) residency program in Spring 2017 and received a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University in 2018. He recently founded and directs the curatorial platform LOIS (www.loisprojects.info).

Stephanie Berrington is an arts administrator, editor, and programmer currently based in Winnipeg, Canada on Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation. She completed a master’s degree in English, Film and Cultural Studies at McGill University, where she was involved in a large research project that screened bike-powered movies in public spaces around Montréal. While there, she twice facilitated a course on gender politics in contemporary film, literature, and pop culture as part of an alternative education program at Dawson College called New School. Since moving back to her hometown in 2016, Steph joined the curatorial collective behind the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival. She is the Distribution Coordinator at the Winnipeg Film Group and edits books in her spare time.  

Instant Coffee (Jinhan Ko & Sunny Lee) is a service-oriented artist and curatorial collective based in Winnipeg and Vancouver, Canada, and Seoul, South Korea. Instant Coffee has an extensive art practice established in 2000. As an artist collective they have been invested in combining the social with the aesthetic, and as such have worked in public spaces to engage expanded audiences. They have produced projects for Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Simon Fraser University Galleries, Vancouver; Subdivision, Hamburg; International Medellin 07, Colombia; Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn, The Netherlands; the Toronto Sculpture Garden; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. And most recent worked with grunt gallery, Vancouver to produce Pink Noise Pop Up at One and J +1, Seoul.

Ibai Gorriti (Barcelona, 1994) started writing about fashion in 2009. Having gained a visual arts background from Escola Massana they went on to study Communications and Cultural Industries at the University of Barcelona and York University (Toronto) where they engaged in Semiotics, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies as well as Marketing, Advertising and Art Management. Their initial research focused on television and Media Studies but they soon returned to aesthetics to analyze how artists and art institutions operated under the logics of branding. This brought them to explore digital identities in relation to Performance Studies. Later on, they were granted a collaboration scholarship with the Art History Department for a project around art and biotechnology within the Art, Architecture and New Materialities research group. Outside academics, they joined the exhibitions team at MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art) for a year-long internship. Ibai has also been an activist in social movements such as the anti-war 2003 protests, anti-austerity 15-M, taking the squares in 2011, and self-determination demonstrations in Basque Country and Catalonia.

Brian Hunter is a Winnipeg Police Officer and multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes video and interactive installations. In 2016, he won the 18th RBC Canadian Painting Competition. In 2012, Hunter spent one year in residency at the Gwangju Museum of Art in South Korea. Select exhibitions and festivals include Kunsthalle Gwangju in South Korea, the Ourense film festival in Spain, and the Power Plant in Toronto. Hunter graduated from Concordia University in 2007 with a BFA in Studio Arts. Upcoming projects this summer include a solo show at Library Gallery in Winnipeg and a collaboration between Winnipeg Police Officers and youth at the Graffiti Gallery.

Ryan Josey is an interdisciplinary visual artist from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He trained in Fine Arts (BFA 2015) and Art History (BA 2015) at NSCAD University and in studio with Canadian artist, Brendan Fernandes in New York City. His research-based practice uses drawing, photography, performance, video, and public installation to explore questions of the historical; the role of amnesia in North American culture; and how histories bare on personal experiences. His current research aims to better understand contemporary relationships with the HIV/AIDS crisis and how the work and loss of that period has shaped conversations around queer community, sexual identity and collective care.

John Patterson is a visual artist and writer living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Combining intuitive narrative explorations with visual or text assets taken from the commercial sector, quick phone pics, interviews or critical texts, Patterson uses a methodology which aims to reform the understandings, memories, or translations of personal experiences. He holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba and has shown work in galleries and artist-run centres across Canada, most recently Turismo [2017, Le Studio at La Maison des Artistes, Winnipeg], in which he developed short-term histories of the geographical area surrounding the gallery through the construction of objects, texts and videos. He is a co-founder of Blinkers Art and Project Space, has written for Canadian Art Magazine and SCAN publication, and is the editor of Monotext, a tri-annual publication of writing and images.

Shaylyn Plett is a Winnipeg based visual artist whose practice, often collaborative, stems from an interest in modes of viewing and translating sensory information. She is currently invested in the capacity of language to alter visual perception. Her recent history includes a BFA from the University of Manitoba, a mentorship with artist Ufuk Gueray, an ongoing effort to learn a new language, and the exhibition of two collaborative bodies of work including saw you as a soft touch with Cameron Cummings in Le Studio at La Maison Des Artistes Visuels, and open air, langueur with Janelle Tougas at Flux Gallery.

Erica Stocking has a diverse practice that encompasses sculpture, installation and performance. She received my BFA from Emily Carr Institute in 2004, and since then my work has been exhibited at numerous venues in Vancouver, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery and the Western Front. In 2015, her solo exhibition at Artspeak, was reviewed in Artforum’s critics picks. Stocking has completed three public artworks including a recent commission in 2017 for the nəә́c’aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch of the Vancouver Public Library. In 2009 she was honoured by the City of Vancouver as the Emerging Artist in Public Art. Stocking is a founding member of Norma, an artist collective, whose works have been exhibited internationally and who unofficially went into retirement in 2014. Norma was also a recipient of a Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award in 2010. Forthcoming projects include the publication of a script, and a new public artwork for the City of Surrey in 2018. She currently lives and works in Toronto.

Xin Xin is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersection of technology, labor, and identity. Xin co-founded The School of Otherness which seeks to empower marginalized identities through storytelling, forums, and workshops that process experiences of the other. They initiated voidLab, an intersectional feminist collective exploring art, technology, and society. Their work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Hammer Museum, Gene Siskel Film Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Machine Project. Xin holds a M.F.A from UCLA Design Media Arts. They have given numerous talks at universities and currently teach new media art at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.