Equipe

Amber Berson is passionate about art and its potential for social change. Her current research focuses on art and mourning, museum practises, narrative theory, artist-run culture, the mythology of national art and vernacular collections. Her Master’s thesis at Concordia University considered how missing and murdered Aboriginal women have been depicted in Canadian art. She works in and with artist-run-centres and most recently curated several editions of the SIGHT & SOUND festival, the Salon : Data series, the exhibition Département des Nuisances Publiques, and other projects at Eastern Bloc; The Wild Bush Residency at a cottage in Val David, Quebec; In Your Footsteps at the VAV Gallery, The Magpies Nest at the Wenger Homestead in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and “We lived on a map…” at the CEREV (Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence) exhibition space. She helped to coordinate the Quebec Quilt Registry, to organize the Guido Molinari painting archive, to research Métis clothing in European collections and generally wants you to let her go through your stuff.

Candace Mooers has worked in alternative media since 1995. Writing zines, hosting community radio shows, and organizing all-ages punk concerts, have all figured part of her DIY counter-cultural ethic. Her art practice explores gendered divisions of labour and digital cultures of communication via the mediums of embroidery, scavenged objects, and paper. She is a former President of the National Campus and Community Radio Association, past Executive Director of Gallery Connexion (Fredericton) and past Production Coordinator for The HTMlles 10: Feminist Festival of Media Arts + Digital Culture, produced by Studio XX (Montreal). In 2010, she co-founded the G20 Alternative Media Centre in Toronto, a temporary autonomous workspace for over 100 independent journalists to cover the protests from social justice perspectives. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in History and French Literature at the University of New Brunswick and studied in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities.

Christina Haralanova is a feminist, a free software activist and trainer in strategic use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Christina has been working for the past 12 years with feminist movements around the world for the appropriation of ICT through principles of solidarity, software freedom and privacy of information. In her MA research, Haralanova has studied free and open source software development, highlighting examples of women’s contributions and challenging the technological gap between men and women in computer science. Since fall 2010, she is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University focusing on spaces of hacking and feminist practices and perspectives of technology.

Corina MacDonald is an information specialist, developer, DJ and music producer. She completed a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies in 2008 at McGill University, with a specialization in knowledge management. Her professional interests include the role of open content, technologies and standards in community and capacity building, systems of knowledge representation, electronic publishing and digital heritage. She worked as a heritage information analyst at the Canadian Heritage Information Network from 2008 to 2010 before beginning work as an independent consultant for digital cultural projects. Under her musical alias Cyan she hosts the radio program modular systems on CKUT 90.3 FM. She has been actively involved in Montreal’s independent electronic music community since the late 1990s and was a founding member of collectives phoniq, Women on Wax MTL and dark disco. She has blogged and written about digital art, music, and information practices for Vague Terrain, Artengine, art press 2, Leonardo and other scholarly and professional journals.

Esther Bourdages works in the visual arts field as a writer and curator. She holds an MA in Art History from Université de Montréal, where she wrote about the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely and the relationship between sculpture in the broad sense (in situ art, installation) and sound and digital art. Performing under the name Esther B., she plays toy turntables to manipulate vinyl records and audio samples of field recordings to create new sounds. Her practice as a musician centres around improvisation - to create a raw, non-linear music, punctuated by abstract sounds such as those produced by altering the record (sanding, cutting, etc.). She is part of the turntablist trio Vinyl Interventions with Carrie Gates (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) and Marinko Jareb (St Catherines, Ontario). Together they developed the workshop series Vinyl Interventions, where she presents Echo of the Vinyl Record, Between the Sound and the Visual, Between the Past and the Present. Since 2002 Esther has organized A Microphone in a Noize Storm, a concert series dedicated to new music. She is actively involved in artist-run-centres and independent structures for many years, such as Quartier Ephemere (since 1996), Agence Topo, Eastern Bloc and CKUT radio.

Julie Alary Lavallée is currently preparing her doctoral thesis in Art History at Concordia University on contemporary art from India, with a focus on the art market and the fields of museum, diaspora and global studies. She is the communications and archives coordinator of the artists-run centre OPTICA and publishes on a regular basis for art galleries based in Montréal, while also presenting her academic research locally and abroad. Julie Alary Lavallée sits on the Board of Directors of Studio XX as vice-president and is a member of the centre's programming committee since 2012. She won esse arts + opinions magazine’s Young Art Critic award in 2011 and is the 2015 recipient of the Concordia University Graduate Doctoral Fellowship - FOFA.

Koby Rogers Hall is an artist interested in site-specific participatory works as sites for political engagement. Her most recent projects are dedicated to dialogical arts practices, archiving as cultural activism, public interventions for political participation, and interdisciplinary performance settings for direct audience-artist interaction. As Artistic Director of Mischief Theatre, her independent performance-creations have been seen in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, São Paolo, and New York. Her recent collaborations include presenting with artist Mariam Ghani (Sharjah Biennial X), with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (Encuentro 2013 and 2014), and as co-creator of Preoccupations (preoccupations.ca) presented by centre des arts actuels Skol (with Htmlles X). As an arts activist Koby contributes to the Media Coop and the Artists’ Bloc of the Immigrant Workers’ Center (IWC-CTI). Her writings have been published in the Artthreat journal, the .dpi journal, the collective publication TO REST / SE RESTAURER, and her upcoming book of political and poetic works to appear in 2014. She holds a BFA in Theatre with a specialization in collective creation from York University in Toronto, and a Masters in Arts and Politics from New York University.

Paule Mackrous est étudiante au Doctorat en Sémiologie à l’UQAM pour lequel elle s’intéresse à l'effet de présence dans les formes d'art émergentes sur le Web. Impliquée depuis plus de dix ans dans le milieu des arts visuels à Montréal, elle écrit régulièrement pour plusieurs revues et galeries d’art contemporain. Elle est intervieweuse pour Punctum, arts visuels et chroniqueuse à La Marelle, le guide culturel des familles du grand Montréal. Blogueuse compulsive, elle rédige un blogue de réflexions spontanées comme théoriques sur l'art, la culture et le féminisme (www.effetdepresence.wordpress.com). Elle a dirigé durant trois années le Magazine électronique du CIAC, un magazine sur les arts et les nouvelles technologies incluant la cyberculture et la littérature électronique. Elle a été commissaire aux arts électroniques lors de la Biennale de Montréal (2011) ainsi que pour d'autres événements en arts visuels. Ses recherches actuelles, grandement inspirées d'un séjour d'études à l'Université du Colorado à Boulder avec l'artiste pionnier de l'art Web Mark Amerika, portent sur la théorie créative en histoire de l'art, c'est-à-dire, faire de l'histoire avec des images, des sons, des vidéos, de la performance et de l'hypertexte.

Stéphanie Lagueux is Webmistress at Studio XX since 2002. She is also web manager, graphic designer and trainer for organizations such as 3e impérial, and RAIQ. She completed her BFA in Art and Design at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in 1998 and began her new media art practice through her involvement in artist-run-centres Axe NÉO-7 and DAIMON. For the past few years, she has been working on The Sensible Lab –The Social Body, a participatory video and web installation. She has received support for her creations from numerous art centres across Québec such as Vidéographe, Vidéo Femmes and the Musée régional de Rimouski. She is Matricules’ Project Director, an online archive created over a period of three years.