Pixel Room

About the Exhibition

What does it mean to care for each other in a pixelated world? What are the aesthetic and affective outputs of collectivity within worlds that are increasingly digitized? Can we allow for breaks between both modalities — the digital and the physical? Where are breaks emergent, and where have they always existed?

Featuring artists from Ontario and the prairies, Pixel Room seeks to ponder boundaries between embodiment and mixed realities, action and stillness.

Pixel Room presents a soft retrospective focusing on the past 50 years of innovations in tactile, interactive and digital media being consumed, used, and hacked with — by and for BIPOC communities. Exhibited works and sound performances highlight historic changes in visual art, sound, and digital media: from hand-made beadwork, arcade cabinets and augmented reality, to drums and dance, and live-coding.

Each medium carries its unique cultural and technological weight. Beads and thread are sewn together into a tangible actant, like pixels and binary being strung together for a digital interface. Wires are nervous systems, roots, and strings — malleable, flexible, robust, and yet still subject to breakage and ephemerality.

Pixel Room is an exhibition and performance event made in collaboration between Sari-Sari Xchange and Centre[3] for Artistic + Social Practice. The Sari-Sari Xchange is a community-building research and creation project using Extended Reality (XR) — virtual, augmented and mixed realities — to foster new works by artists from the Asian diaspora. The Sari-Sari Xchange undertakes exploration in emergent XR technologies and new storytelling techniques, to address under-representation and issues of systemic racism as well as inaccessibility of these new technologies for both creators and users with disabilities. sarisarixchange.ca

Micropress and Hand-Made Multiples

Independent artists will be selling their micropress copies and hand-made works in person on August 21, and during the Supercrawl weekend from September 11–13.

Performance Schedule

About the Artists

Adrian Kyle, Adrienne Matheuszik, Anchoui, apè Aliermo, Arturo Jimenez, Aysia Tse, Carmela Laganse, Charlie Star, Christina Dovolis, David Ogborn, Dylan Callaghan, Freida Wang, Haoran Chang, Hubert Huang, Immony Men, Jasmine Liaw, Jessica A. Rodríguez, Jiayao Chen, Kat Bell, Kat Estacio, Krissh Lalit, Lingziang Wu, Luis Navarro, May Yu, Melanie Yan, Nadia Lofaro, Nicole Mae, Niña Adawag, Olivia Mae Sinclair, Rain/griefrot, Sabrina Vachon, Sana Akram, Selena Zhang, Serena Zena, Taien Ng-Chan, Yuji Lee

Artist Groups

• Sari-Sari Xchange — Carmela Laganse, Taien Ng-Chan, Cyril Gaaman Chen, Sabrina Vachon, Arturo Jimenez, Haoran Chang, Adrian Kyle, Christina Dovolis, Sana Akram, Hubert Huang, Krissh Lalit
• Asiatic Itineraries — Immony Men, Kat Estacio, Aysia Tse, Jasmine Liaw, Melanie Yan, apè Aliermo
• livecoderA — Jessica A. Rodríguez, Dylan Callaghan, Charlie Star, Nadia Lofaro, Jiayao Chen
• CTRL+ — Lingziang Wu, Adrienne Matheuszik
• 404:notFound! — Nadia Lofaro, Jiayao Chen
• Grupo D’Binis — Luis Navarro, Jessica A. Rodríguez
• Hand Eye Society — May Yu
• CurrentlyAV

About the Curator

Cyril Gaaman Chen (they/them) is a media artist, animator and percussionist/drummer based in Hamilton, ON and Regina, SK, exploring queer and diasporic multimedia production and design. Cyril is a research assistant for Sari-Sari Xchange and a PhD student in Communications, New Media and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.