I received (via email) an April 3, 2026 notice from Toronto’s ArtSci Salon featuring two April 2026 art/science events (available online here) being held in Toronto, Note: Some links have been removed,
Beneath the Skin: Biophysical Signals as a Creative Medium
Featuring Mark-david Hosale & Ilze Briede [Kavi]
Friday, April 10 [2026] 3:00-4:30 pm Jackman Humanities Building – JHB 100 (first floor) 170 St. George Street [Toronto, Ontario]
This presentation explores an art–science research-creation practice that uses biophysical sensing as a medium for interactive and computational art. Central to this work is The Source (www.biomeci.com), a biosensing platform developed to enable artists and researchers to incorporate physiological signals directly into responsive media systems. The Source supports real-time capture of multiple biophysical signals, including electrocardiography (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), and respiratory effort (RSP).
Mark-David Hosale will introduce The Source and demonstrate how physiological signals provide insight into affective and physiological states and how these states can be used to shape audiovisual, haptic, and multisensory outputs in interactive artworks and performances.
Ilze Briede [Kavi] will present her academic research and artworks that use The Source, including the collaborative works, Somatic Interventions (2022)and Reimagining Living Ontologies (2024), both of which have resulted in scholarly publications. She will also discuss her current PhD research exploring brain data (EEG) and cybernetic feedback systems in artistic practice.
The presentation examines how biophysical signals can function not only as measurements of the body but as expressive materials within embodied and cybernetic media systems that expand the sensorium of computational arts.
This is a free public event. Please register via the Eventbrite link here.
This event is organized by the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group Performing Gestures, Producing Cultures: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Human Movement.
Sponsored and hosted by Jackman Humanities Institute.
Ilze Briede (artist alias Kavi) is a Latvian–Canadian artist and researcher working across visual art, digital design, interactive installation, and live audiovisual performance. Her creative and pedagogical practice engages with biophysical sensing, creative coding, and projection-based media to explore the aesthetic and epistemological potential of physiological data. Kavi is currently a PhD candidate in Digital Media at York University, Toronto, where her research investigates the design of cybernetic systems for performance and immersive narrative environments driven by real-time biophysical signals.
Mark-David Hosale is a computational artist and composer and an Associate Professor in Computational Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at York University. His work explores the boundaries between the virtual and the physical world, spanning performance, public art, and gallery installations. Mark-David is the founder of nD::StudioLab (www.ndstudiolab.com), a research-creation space dedicated to art-science exploration, computational art, and interactive architecture. His research integrates hardware, software, and digital fabrication to create immersive experiences that blur the line between the virtual and the real.
BOOK LAUNCH Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen with editors: Neda Atanasoski & Nassim Parvin Tuesday, April 21, [2026] 5:00-7:00 pm William Doo Auditorium 45 Willcocks Street University of Toronto
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New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
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Neda Atanasoski is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland.
Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.
Please, let us know if you can attend here This event is supported in part by SSHRC the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and hosted by New College at the University of Toronto
