Tag Archives: Nava Waxman

Toronto’s ArtSci Salon and December 2025 events

I received (via email) a November 25, 2025 notice from Toronto’s ArtSci Salon about some December 2025 art/science events (available online here) being held in Toronto, Note: Some links have been removed,

THE BODY ELECTRIC

Exhibition & Performances
December 5, 6 & 7th, 2025

at Charles Street Video,
76 Geary Ave, Toronto

Opening, reception and performances:
Friday, December 5th at 6pm,
performances start at 7pm.

Exhibition Open to Public:
Saturday, December 6th and Sunday, December 7th
from 12pm – 4pm. 

Inspired by Walt Whitman’s visionary poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” this exhibition reimagines the body as a network of electric impulses, voltages, and signals that both generate and transmit lived experiences. Body Electric brings together artists, researchers, performers, and technologists who explore the inner electrical life of the human body through biophysical sensing.

By capturing physiological signals such as brainwaves (EEG), heart rhythms (ECG), and muscle activity (EMG), the exhibition reveals the hidden languages of the body — not as metaphor, but as material, as data, as expression.

Body Electric features contributions from York University faculty, students, and international collaborators. The exhibition builds a living bridge between the past and the present, connecting analogue pioneers with today’s generative futures, and invites us to look into the future with an open and curious mind.

..

Biophysical Movement and Emotion as Computational Interfaces (bioMECI) Workshop 
Charles Street Video, 76 Geary Ave, Toronto
Free with registration (same workshop both days):

Workshop 1: December 13th, 10am–6pm register at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1934433134579

[or]

Workshop 2: December 14th, 10am–6pm register at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1941956487129

This Workshop is a collaborative workshop centred on biophysical data, computational art, and performance. At the centre of this workshop is the biophysical sensing toolkit, called The Source (www.biomeci.com). The Source is a wearable device solution for full-spectrum biophysical sensing that integrates with commonly used software platforms, enabling its use in the maker and arts communities. Data gathered from The Source is analyzed using hardware and software tools that interface with popular platforms such as Arduino, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Ableton Live, TouchDesigner, and Processing. The Source provides real-time access to signals from the brain, heart, muscles, skin and eyes and more. This modular system empowers artists to create responsive artworks that engage directly with the body’s inner states.

Here’s more about the exhibition and performances, from the Charles Street Video project webpage,

Inspired by Walt Whitman’s visionary poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” this exhibition …

Electricity governs life on Earth at every scale, from small molecular organisms to sophisticated evolved beings. In the human body, in particular, electricity presents itself as the firing of neurons, the pulse of the heart, the conductivity of the skin, and the flux of emotional states. This exhibition foregrounds electricity not only as a force of animation, but as a creative medium — a raw, natural element that artists can sense, shape, and translate. The electric medium is further carried into the technological domain as a means of instrumentation and expression of gathered data from the human body. Through interactive installations, performances, and sonic-visual systems, Body Electric invites audiences to witness how the body thinks, feels, and reacts beneath the surface. What emerges is a portrait of the human not as a fixed entity, but as an ever-changing field of affective and electrical relations.

About the artists

The programme will feature a series of interactive installations, including body-physiology sensing chairs originally conceptualized by artist Alan Macy, a retrospective of the work of artist, composer, and scholar David Rosenboom, and installations by artists from York University’s nD::StudioLab (https://www.ndstudiolab.com/), including Ilze Briede [Kavi], Kwame Kyei-Boateng, Kyle Duffield, Mark-David Hosale, Hrysovalanti Maheras, and Nava Waxman.

It will also include live performances, among them

a new work by composer Gene Coleman with violinist Amy Hillis from York’s Music Department;

a performance by The Global Organoid Orchestra (GOO); and a set by the live-coding collective The Endemics.

The Global Organoid Orchestra (GOO) includes:
*Mark-David Hosale and Ilze Briede [Kavi] in Toronto;
*Diarmid Flatley, Marcos Novak, Iason Paterakis, and Nefeli Manoudaki in Santa Barbara;
*and collaborators at the Kosik Neurobiology Lab, UC Santa Barbara (Ken Kosik, Director),
*along with Tjitse van der Molen and Eve Bodnia.

The Endemics consists of
*Ilze Briede [Kavi] and
*Hrysovalanti Maheras.

bioMECI: Biophysical Movement and Emotion as Computational Interface

You can find out more about bioMECI here and about the Body Electric’s bioMECI workshops here.

Toronto’s ArtSci Salon hosts opening receptions for two very different exhibition events on February 5, 2025

A January 27, 2025 ArtSci Salon notice (received via email and visible here on a mailchimp webpage for a limited time) announces the events. Here’s the first exhibition and its associated events,

Speculative Meteorology: Weather Channeled
Feb 3-7, [2-25] 10-4pm [ET] 

opening reception : Feb 5, [2025] 5-7pm [ET]
Special Projects Gallery,
Goldfarb Centre for the Arts
York University [Toronto, Ontario, Canada]

Curated by Aftab Mirzaei (Science and Technology Studies) with Mark-David Hosale (Digital Media) and showcases the work of artists and researchers including, Chris Beaulieu, Kwame Kyei-Boateng, Nava Waxman, Mark-David Hosale, Hiro Kubayashi, Grace Grothaus, Leo Liu, Winnie Luo, Aftab Mirzaei, and Colin Tucker.

DESCRIPTION
Speculative Meteorology: Weather Channeled emerges from a series of interdisciplinary experiments conducted by members of the nd:studiolab between 2023 and 2024. This exhibit invites artists and researchers to explore imaginative and multidimensional accounts of atmospheres and climates across past, present, and future. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of SF—speculative fabulation as a mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding—the works collectively reimagine our relationship to the weather, engaging it as a site of both knowledge-making and creative practice.

Sponsored by the nD::StudioLab at York University   

Environmental Monitoring for Art
a workshop as part of the Speculative Meteorology: Weather Channeled interdisciplinary art exhibition,
with Grace Grothaus

Feb 7, 2025, 12 -3 PM [ET]
ACW 103, The Transmedia Lab
York University [Toronto, Ontario, Canada]

In this three-hour workshop, we will fabricate sensors that can detect environmental data using some readily available materials and electronics. We will fabricate sensors that can detect animal footsteps, record raindrops, or measure wind and then learn to read their values using Arduino. The data from these sensors can be used as input for actuators in physical computing projects, or they can be triggers for screen-based animation or music – the options are wide and varied.

Space is limited, click here to sign up

Here’s the second exhibition and its associated events, from the January 25, 2025 notice,

Afterglow Exhibition
Feb 4-7, [2-25] 10-3pm [ET]

opening reception : Feb 5, [2025] 5-7pm [ET] 
Gales Gallery,
York University [Toronto, Ontario, Canada]

Curated by : Nina Czegledy & Joel Ong, featuring international and local artists Raphael Arar, Nagy Molnar, Laszlo Zsolt Bordos, Jennifer Willet, Joel Ong (with Khaled Eilouti,  Zhino Yousefi, Shelby Murchie and Oliver Debski-Tran)

AFTERGLOW [ af-ter-gloh, ahf- ] is an exhibition envisioned around the graphic quality of light, as well as its traces and incandescence both real and metaphorical. The participating artists explore cross-cultural practices via a variety of analog and digital media, relating light to unfolding contemporary considerations in the global Light Art panorama. At the same time, Afterglow references a deep resonance with the past, paying tribute to historical ideas that have illuminated our current understandings of interconnected systems of values and beliefs that underly the complementary artistic practices today.

In the words of pioneering Hungarian artist György Kepes (1906-2001) : “Our human nature is profoundly phototropic”. The exhibition is a reminder of the integral nature of light to human and more-than-human life, but also to the notion of light as a sensory environment within which we remain rooted, transfixed and nourished.  The exhibiting artists take up these ideas in various formations, alluding to the physical, metaphorical and ecological implications of light. As an initial exhibition prototype, Afterglow is presented first at the Gales Gallery at York University in Toronto as it grows towards future touring exhibitions and symposia. The exhibition is integrated with a virtual Symposium that features exhibiting artists as well as International artists/theorists in conversation. Please proceed to our Eventbrite page for more details and registration [see below].  – Nina Czegledy, Joel Ong. 

Afterglow Symposium
Feb 6 [2025] 1-3pm [ET]
Symposium Presenters: Andrea Polli, Jennifer Willet, Joel Ong, Karolina Halatek, Marton Orostz, Nina Czegledy and Raphael Arar.

ONLINE, Register Here (Zoom link)

How to reach the three venues (Special Projects and Gales Galleries + Transmedia lab)?

click here

If you’re in Toronto, you’re spoiled for choices. As for the rest of us, the Afterglow Symposium, as a hybrid event, offers an opportunity to hear from the artists.