Ice Follies 2023

February 10th - 24th, 2023

THEME: NBAAGZI MKWAM (THIN ICE)

Under the Surface was chosen because it represents the efforts behind the scenes to make Ice Follies 2012 more community-oriented and engaging. With artists travelling from across the country to work alongside of local artists, community members, and coordinators we hope to present a unique arts experience on Lake Nipissing that everyone can enjoy.

Public Visualization Studio, Innumerable Ones, 2023

Presented by Near North Mobile Media Lab

Innumerable Ones presents creatures inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. Each creature on display has been conjured by collaborators connected to ArtFix and Near North Mobile Media Lab (N2M2L) in North Bay. Short descriptions and sketches were developed through a series of workshops with Public Visualization Studio (PVS). Working from this information, PVS created a three-dimensional digital mask for each creature for display on 83″ QLED screens. One screen is mounted in custom-built, free-standing “hut” in the middle of Lake Nipissing. Another screen is in the DGTL Creator North space at the Capitol Centre. The masks look back at the viewers, tracking them in real-time through motion-sensing cameras and AI-generated animations. Narration of the descriptions of each creature accompanies the images. Through processes of social and technical translation, this project aims to explore our complex and often fragile relationships to place, identity, and the natural world by combining, dramatizing, and questioning concepts of description, classification, and belonging.

This work is part of a series of projects that uses fiction as a form of anonymization and expression of experiences of displacement and alienation, and uses AI and facial recognition as a technical means for creating connection with personal testimony and experience.

The first project in the series, Fabulous Ones, was presented as part of AGYU’s Nuit Blanche 2022 program.

Artist Bio:

Public Visualization Studio (PVS) is a design collective whose members are designers, artists, creative technologists, and researchers. The collective creates projects as a means to pursue inquiries into the political and conceptual aspects of interaction, space, and media. Its members attempt to investigate how specific technologies of vision, communication and gesture support our experiences in participatory spaces. Members of the collective have exhibited nationally and internationally, and have worked in a variety of areas including public projection, media architecture, locative media, video installation, exhibition design, interaction, communication design, and media scholarship. PVS works in collaboration with the Public Visualization Lab, a university-based lab in Toronto.