Opening Night Reception: the exhibition will be on view from March 5 – March 18 during regular hours of 12pm – 6pm. All are welcome to join our opening reception on Wednesday, March 5, from 5 – 7pm.
Exhibition Dates: Tuesday, February 6th to Thursday, February 15th.
Location: POD Student Gallery (POD 056-A) | 350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON M5B 0A1
Gallery Hours:Monday to Friday, 12 PM – 6 PM
of skin, synapse and sensor is an exhibition of cybernetic art pieces exploring wearable technology as a place for expressing the self unseen through altering human experience and ornamenting the self. The works displayed explore aspects of embedded behaviour that become changed through designing responsive or dependent machines / frameworks with craft and curiosity.
In the sharing of these works, artists and curators are finding novelty and human expressiveness through digital interfaces, images or systems and combining them with physical forms. The exhibition looks to find the threshold where the body brings out more from the essence of the machine than itself, or, when wearable technology benefits more from human thinking, touch or understanding.
Artists Include: Joanne Ammari, Seth Britton, Madeline Dam-Hoang & Alec Lin, Pui Kiu Natalie Lam, Madeline Hanitijo, Tanvi Singhal, Raven Zhang Liu.
Directions to Exhibition
Location: POD Student Gallery (POD 056-A), Lower Ground Floor of the Podium Building, across from the Career and Co-op Centre.
Directions from RCC:
Head west on Gould Street toward the Campus Bookstore. Turn right onto Nelson Mandela Walk to enter the POD Building. Once inside, turn right and continue straight toward the Career Co-op Centre. POD 056-A will be on your right.
Directions from SLC:
Head east on Gould Street toward the Campus Book Store. Turn left onto Nelson Mandela Walk to enter the POD Building. Once inside, turn right and continue straight toward the Career Co-op Centre. POD 056-A will be on your right.
Directions from Dundas Station:
Exit Dundas Station and walk north on Yonge Street toward Gould Street (past Dave’s Hot Chicken). Turn right onto Gould Street and continue east until you reach Nelson Mandela Walk (just before the hot dog stand). Turn left onto onto Nelson Mandela Walk to enter the POD Building. Once inside, turn right and continue straight toward the Career Co-op Centre. POD 056-A will be on your right.
Curatorial Essay
By: Dean Vukovic, Programming Curator
When the sun comes and I’m waking up and stretching, I think there must be something my bones know that I don’t yet. Maybe this gets revealed over breakfast or by putting on jeans but then, as it always does, a kind of digital arm pulls me in first. My attention, my desires, memories —– this might happen by staring at pixels in my hand, or plugging in wires, or wondering how to string together cohesive code to conjure something which yet has not materialized. Each time, I wonder what brings us here. There is language and there is action and the machine finds itself firmly in both. A feeling, into a moment, into machine, into outcome, into discovery. A thread pulling it all together. Can you hear the hum, the shimmer? Can you feel it?
of skin, synapse and sensor uses art and wearable technology pieces within sculpture, mixed media, craft, interfaces and computation as a place for expressing the self unseen through altering human experience and ornamenting the self. In the creation of their works, the artists involved in this exhibition find their own curiosities and connections to home, tradition, nature, perception, learning and performance. By exhibiting them and with participation, these ideas transfer from mind to mind, audiences becoming receptors to information themselves.
The image and instrument of the hand echoes itself in this work, in Seth Britton’s The Musical Hand and Madeline Hanitijo’s Beat Drop Glove. From a love of Japanese idol group live performances, Hanitijo’s glove acts as a real-time video graphic switcher to augment expressions of song and dance that accompany high-energy performance. Britton’s piece, an extension of his practice as a musician, uses The Musical Hand to wonder how music-making can be new, different and embodied – specifically inclusive for those with other barriers to expressing themselves through music. Users can sharpen or flatten pitches with the tilt of a wrist, with potentiometers changing progression of notes at will. The works use sound as sites for connection and exploration among others within the space. There is an element of the instinctual, and a desire to bridge gaps between others, performer and witness.
The cybernetic depends on the living, emerging from nature. Raven Zhang Liu’s Escape into the woods with me uses fantasy aesthetics by fabricating a pair of crown and staff, evoking fiction stories of magic and mysticism that find themselves accessed increasingly in the face of a desire for escapism. Madeline Dam-Hoang & Alec Lin pay homage to the bright sensory experiences of rave culture with Jellybrella, a jellyfish-shaped luminous beacon used to ensure coordination and understanding in the shared space of electronic music festivals. Here, the digital becomes a path to belonging.
Or, a path back to critical reflection. Tanvi Singhal uses mixed media to bring the image of the technological and the skin together in Digital Embodiment. Using stretched fabric, electric wire, thread and acrylic, Singhal reveals a truth on how we continue to remain intertwined and inseparable from technology, infinitely expanded through wearables and bionics. In the case of reflecting on home and tradition, Joanne Ammari & Pui Kiu Natalie Lam use textiles and electronics to find ways back to meaningful moments. Ammari’s Jordanian Bedouin | أردنية بدوية is an illuminated headpiece inspired by the resilience of Bedouin women, using a cultural artifact and fostering visibility and connection through its transformation. Pui Kiu Natalie Lam’s my//chrono//denim//bag is a callback to the well-renowned Y2K material goods of Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po. Augmented with embellishments and interactions, this artwork leaves the artist closer tied to identity, passions and memory while the audience is brought into a novel inner world.
On display at Toronto Metropolitan University’s POD Gallery, located at 350 Victoria St in the basement of the Podium Building (POD 56-A), of skin, synapse and sensor will be on view from March 5 – March 18, 2025 during regular hours of 12pm – 6pm.