Interactive-05  (Curatorial)

a celebration of interactive culture in the public spaces of the Toronto Convention Centre for the Toronto International Art Fair 05

What is I-05?

'Going to the Fair' will never be the same again! Visitors to the Toronto International Art Fair will find the public spaces of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre transformed by I-05, the inauguration of an interactive art initiative that brings together and presents for the very first time in Canada a consortium of arts organizations, galleries, and artists of interactive culture from Toronto and Montreal.

Click here for more information on the artists and organizations participating.

Who can come?

I-05 is a free public event presented daily by the Toronto International Art Fair. From November 3 to 7, students, colleagues, friends, and families can roam the public spaces of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and interact with some of the most exciting and engaging art being created today.

Returning to the MTCC on Saturday, November 5th, TIAF's Speaker Forum will host 'Art of the Interactive Experience" with some of the most provocative minds in the field, including moderator Vera Frenkel (Multi-Disciplinary Artist), Sara Diamond (President of OCAD), Thom Sokoloski (Multi-Disciplinary Artist), Alain Thibault (Director of Elektra) and Andrée Duchaine (Director of Groupe Molior)

Why now? Why here?

The popularity of high profile public media arts festivals, such as the Cyberarts Festival in Boston, Art Futura in Barcelona, Elektra in Montreal, Transmediale in Berlin, International Society of Electronic Arts 2006 (ISEA) in San José and ARS Electronica in Linz, Austria, have catapulted the interactive arts into the mainstream of contemporary art experience. With the support of the Toronto International Art Fair, I-05 in Toronto takes its place on the international stage with an annual event dedicated to interactive culture.

Who are the organizers?

The organizers and initiators of I-05 were independent curator and art consultant, Clara Hargittay and Thom Sokoloski, independent artist and producer. They both have over twenty years of proven experience in the arts in Canada and are well known in their respective fields as creators of high profile projects.

Hargittay was co-curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario's major exhibition 'Free Worlds: Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art,' and director of 'Hungary Reborn,' a Toronto-wide multi-disciplinary international arts festival. More recently, she curated 'The Political is Personal: A First Nations Perspective' for the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts at Queen's Park, and engaged as Cultural Program Consultant to TIAF 2000 & 2001. This spring, asked by TIAF to curate an exhibition of installation art for the surrounding public spaces of the Art Fair, she invited Thom Sokoloski to collaborate on the project. The result is the inaugural edition of INTERACTIVE 05.

Thom Sokoloski has created and produced over one hundred innovative theatrical, operatic and multidisciplinary works in Canada and internationally. His work includes Schafer's 'Ra' throughout the Ontario Science Centre and 'Hermes Trismegistos' inside Toronto's Union Station, composer Michael Nyman & Band at Massey Hall, his own 'Kafka in Love' inside the University of Toronto's Hart House swimming pool, as well as works at the Holland Festival, Opéra de Lyon, Ars Music Festival of Brussels and Strasbourg's Musica Festival. More recently, he was the Creative Director for the inaugural edition of the McLuhan International Festival the Future in 2004.

What is the artistic vision behind I-05?

The best of interactive art combines computer technology with dance, theatre, light, poetry, music, video, and digital images through an interdisciplinary dialogue that creates its own unique environment and experience. In our wired and connected universe, interactivity is the ultimate art spectacle accessible to all. Never before have the lines between the avant-garde and mass culture been so effectively blurred as in interactive art. It is relational; it must be experienced - it is immediate and real and promotes an aesthetic that is created between the public and the art work.

In a collaboration between the I-05 artists, galleries and Sokoloski, the architectural spaces of the MTCC have been poetically transformed into a spectacle of interactivity. At once theatrical and participatory, the combination of still and moving images, sensory interventions, and sound punctuate the navigational flow of visitors with engaging interactive encounters as they find their way to the TIAF exhibition hall.

Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art has installed a series of computer stations for visitors to access the extensive Canadian Art Database Project which includes 32,000+ images; 200+ media clips; 1,000+ texts, 700+ artists.