2024/25 Artist in Residence Program
APPLICATIONS CLOSED
Call for Applications – Artist in Residence 2024/25
APPLICATIONS CLOSED
The Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto seeks applications for its third annual Artist in Residence. The theme for our programming in the 2024-25 academic year is “Absent Here, Present There.” The Artist in Residence will engage questions of mediated presence and absence, either contemporary or historical. The artist will mount an exhibition of their work at the Centre for Culture and Technology Coach House and will participate in Centre programming as detailed below.
New media technologies, critics worry, bring with them seductions to take leave of ourselves. Using new technologies, we become absent from our here and now. We need to go touch grass. But with this newfound absence comes new modes of presence--of empathy to others, but also what Marshall McLuhan called "total-field awareness" of all the terrible things happening in the world. "In the electric age," he wrote, "we wear all mankind as our skin." In other words, doomscrolling.
A full statement of the theme is available below.
In addition to hosting an exhibition, the Centre will also invite three Faculty Fellows (one from the University of Toronto; two from other institutions) to view and engage with the Artist’s work. The Fellows will visit the exhibition while it is mounted, and will return to campus in the Winter Term to deliver public lectures that will be, in part, in conversation with the Artist’s work. We anticipate that Artist’s and Fellows’ lectures will be published, alongside documentation of the exhibition. The Centre has recently secured an imprint with Punctum Books to publish these lectures.
This year, the Centre's two external Faculty Fellows will be Kris Paulsen (Ohio State University), author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT, 2017), and Hannah Zeavin (UC Berkeley), author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT, 2021).
We are especially eager to receive proposals from queer, trans, nonbinary; women; racialized and/or colonized; disabled; or otherwise marginalized artists.
We seek artists working in “media art,” very broadly understood. This might be work that uses digital technologies and electronics as its artistic medium. Or, it may use any means or media to pose questions or draw insights about contemporary technologies. Or, it may be some conjunction of art, technology, and concept that we have not yet imagined.
We welcome projects in progress as well as proposals for new projects. We are happy to host artists working in pairs or teams.
The studio and exhibition space will be the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Marshall McLuhan’s salon on campus. Successful projects will activate the space while respecting the limitations of that space. Photos of the exhibition space are available here.
Artist support
The Artist in Residence will have studio, work, and exhibition space at the Coach House, on campus at the University of Toronto, from June 15 through October 1, 2024 (start date flexible), with the expectation that an exhibition will run from August 29 through October 12, 2024.
The Residency comes with:
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a stipend of $10,000 CAD;
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a materials budget of $10,000 CAD;
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gallery, studio, and research assistance;
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close collaboration with the Centre's curator;
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photo and/or video documentation of the exhibition;
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access to the University of Toronto libraries;
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access to fabrication facilities, with additional support for specialized fabrication;
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the opportunity (but not the obligation) to participate in the Centre's inaugural weeklong summer institute in June, 2024;
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and a vibrant intellectual community dedicated to critical inquiry into media.
The Centre will be happy to help coordinate studio visits with University of Toronto faculty during the residency.
Living and/or moving expenses will not be covered.
Artist responsibilities
Beyond the mounting the exhibition, the Artist in Residence will be expected to make themselves available to host class visits to the exhibition during the time they are in residence in September 2024. They will also be the featured speaker at one of the Centre’s famed Monday Night Seminars, running a single 2-hour workshop on a topic of their choosing for students and faculty. The Artist will also deliver a public artist’s talk or lecture related to the work sometime in April 2025, and will work with the Director of the Centre to prepare this talk for publication. The Artist will also license the Centre to use documentation of the exhibition in Centre publications and publicity.
Eligibility
The Artist must be eligible to work in Canada (e.g., Citizen or Permanent Resident; holders of restricted Work Permits are not eligible). The Artist must not be a current student at the University of Toronto, nor may they hold a full-time staff or academic position at the University (but sessional instructors may apply).
To Apply
To be considered for the residency, please submit the following by email to cultureandtech@utoronto.ca not later than March 1, 2024:
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Cover letter
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CV
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Project proposal of approximately 500 words (and not more than 750)
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Optional: Supplementary material – up to 5 images
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Representative portfolio
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Include up to 5 images, and up to 2 video links
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All inquiries about the program and the application process may be sent to cultureandtech@utoronto.ca.
The Artist-in-Residence, as well as all applicants, will be notified on April 15th, 2024.
Absent Here, Present There
Of the persistent anxieties new media bring, perhaps the most pointed is absence. Critics of new media technologies--novels, radio, movies, television, phones, social media, AI, VR all--tend to worry about the ways new media technologies seduce us into taking leave of ourselves. They slacken, attenuate, or obliterate our presence in the here and now. Living amongst our ubiquitous technology, distracted by rampant notifications, we are reminded, sarcastically, that we ought to go touch grass.
Meanwhile, as Marshall McLuhan understood, new media technologies also expose us to what is happening elsewhere, in ways that are often difficult to control and therefore frightening. With worrying absence comes presence: new forms of empathy, but also abrading overexposure. We scroll, or rather, doomscroll--attenuating our selves and our attachments to the immediate surround--only to attune our attention to the terrible things taking place elsewhere. Atrocity, however, also competes for attention with advertising and the social media amplification of the mundane.
This was already happening in McLuhan's age of cybernetics and television:
"Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. ... Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have “social consciousness” presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. ... In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin."
We are overexposed, over-intimate, overwhelming aware of what is happening in the "total field" of the world--brought to you by Corn Flakes. New media bring new anxieties, new modes of absence, new modes of presence, new techniques for managing these new ways of situating ourselves in a world made present by new forms of mediation and new processes of commodification.
This condition is historical. Modernity, understood broadly, has fretted about new media's seductions to absence and celebrated its new forms of presence. This complex, however, seems to be on a path of constant intensification. Attention is increasingly intensively monetized, and new technologies aim to appropriate it from us ever more effectively.
The Centre for Culture and Technology will dedicate its inquiry in the 2024 and 2025 academic year to the theme of "Absent Here, Present There." This will be the theme to which our Artist in Residence and Faculty Fellows will address themselves. It will also be woven into our biweekly Monday Night Seminars and the research activities of our Working Groups.
This year, the Centre's two external Faculty Fellows will be Kris Paulsen (Ohio State University), author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT, 2017), and Hannah Zeavin (UC Berkeley), author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT, 2021). Calls for a Toronto-based Faculty Fellow and Artist-in-Residence are circulating.