Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection

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pr0phecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda and Steve DiPaola, "Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection," 2022

still from audiovisual generative artwork. Photo courtesy of artists.

Preview Night: February 10 at 6 p.m. outside at UrbanScreen (13458 107A Avenue)

Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibit, Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection, on display half an hour after sunset until midnight at their outdoor exhibition site UrbanScreen from February 12 until May 1. Body as Border will be the last exhibition at UrbanScreen’s current location on the west wall of Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre (13458 107A Avenue). Visitors are invited to preview the artwork on Thursday, February 10 at 6 p.m. The evening will also include a curated showcase of short video and media-based artworks from current SFU students and faculty.

In their audiovisual art project, pr0phecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola—all artists and academic researchers at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Art and Technology—have collaborated on an immersive foray into the world of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven poetry. Using machine learning algorithms, Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection expands the human form into digital space and mingles it with fragments of poetry, painting, and sound. Each artist examines the intersection between the body, technology, and the broader ecological world in which we live. 

Through a randomized, generative digital process, the work draws from bacterial cultures, documentation of the Fraser River, and fragments of poetry to produce a series of composite audiovisual landscapes. The resulting images and sounds chart humanity’s impact upon the environment, as well as our own porous relationship with both artificial and natural entities. Exploring the possibilities of these artist-developed technologies, Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection invites audiences to see, feel, and sense the world beyond the limits of the ordinary senses.

“In the present moment, our relationship both with our bodies and with the environments in which we live can often seem fragmentary or alienating,” says Assistant Curator Rhys Edwards. “Body as Border is an attempt to respond to the challenges and subtleties of this relationship through art and poetry.”

The exhibition marks the conclusion of exhibitions at UrbanScreen in its current location, which has been an outdoor exhibition site for Surrey Art Gallery since it opened as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2010.

About the Artists

Steve DiPaola, working as a scientist and artist, uses computational models of creativity, cognition, and artificial intelligence to create generative and interactive art installations. He explores the uneasy interplay between what it means for humans to perceive and emote in a modern computer era. DiPaola’s art has been exhibited internationally at the A.I.R. and Tibor de Nagy galleries in NYC, Tenderpixel and LimeWharf galleries in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT Museum, Cambridge University’s King’s Art Centre, and the Smithsonian. In 2021, he was elected to the College of New Scholars by the Royal Society of Canada.

Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda is a media artist and cultural historian with a research focus on feminist media art, aesthetics of interaction, and research-creation. She is the author of the award-winning book Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico (Nebraska Press, 2019). She produces video installations, sculptures, digital projects, print media, and live performances that investigate the body as a site of cultural, gendered, and techno-scientific inscriptions. She directs the Critical Media Art Studio at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Simon Fraser University and is a member of art/mamas, a Vancouver-based collective of artist mothers.

prOphecy sun is an interdisciplinary performance artist and researcher based in Vancouver, BC. Her practice threads together choreographies, sound, and environment to create exploratory works that invoke deep body memory. Over the last ten years, she has been self-releasing music, choreography, compositions, and videos using smartphone technology. She has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. She completed her PhD in 2021 at Simon Fraser University and holds a BFA and MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is currently a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.

Freya Zinovieff underwent her MFA at University of New South Wales. She holds a first-class honors degree from Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin. Her research looks at how sound can mediate relationships to landscapes in the Anthropocene age. She is interested by the potential for digital audio technologies to reimagine the narratives of digital media, deep and cyclical conceptualizations of time, and how sonic art practices can explore human history and geo trauma. Freya has received multiple awards, including an Endeavour Scholarship and has exhibited her research across the globe in various formats, including writing, choral singing, and curating.