Animate^CA/QC+DE

Chris Salter is Professor for Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is also Professor Emeritus, Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal and former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. He studied philosophy and economics and completed his PhD in theatre studies with research in computer music Stanford University. His artistic work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Montréal Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, MUTEK, EXIT Festival and Place des Arts’ Montréal, among many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022), all from MIT Press.

Berlin-based Dutch Remco Schuurbiers is co-director, curator and creative producer of Berlin’s CTM festival & DISK-Agency and program director of TodaysArt Festival in The Hague. He regularly sits on juries and award teams and is frequently invited to conferences and to contribute to panels as working more on advisory boards. He is also an artist whose photography, videos and installations have been featured in international exhibitions and festivals, and his pet personal project, a music and ping-pong rundlauf action known as The Art of Pingpongcountry, has been staged at galleries, biennial and events around the world from Montréal, and Paris Nuit Blanche to Christchurch Biennial SCAPE.

Timothy Thomasson is a Montréal-based artist. His work interrogates the ways in which moving images are produced and consumed in historical and contemporary contexts, looking particularly at the effects of computer-generated images on society, culture and perception. His work has been presented in galleries and media festivals in Canada and internationally.

Animate sits at the crossroads of performance, installation and radio play utilizing the newest Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies in order to blur the experience between the physical and the digital world. An interdisciplinary international artistic and technological team from Montréal, Canada, and Berlin, Germany, thus takes the audience on an extraordinary participatory journey that uses the creative potential of new technologies to address the urgency of climate catastrophe.

Animate is commissioned and produced by DISK e.V. Berlin and Chris Salter and co-commissioned and co-produced by Kunstfest Weimar. Co-produced by Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Fondazione Campania dei Festival Campania Teatro Festival. Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media). Supported by Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQ), the Canada Council for the Arts, Zú Montréal, Concordia University Office of Research, the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, HUB XR.

This event is supported by the German Consulate General in Montreal.