Media Arts + Technology Residency 2024 Recipient

Lawrence bird

It is our pleasure to announce Lawrence Bird as the 2024 recipients of the Media Art + Technology Residency (MATR). MATR is designed to be a site-specific exploration of VP’s intimate Poolside Gallery where artists will respond to and utilize the gallery’s characteristics.

The theme for MATR this year is Withdrawal, and is a part of a year-long program celebrating and exploring VP’s 40th anniversary, what we are referring to as our Mid-life Crisis™. The VP mid-life crisis™ series will feature programs from the six stages of a typical mid-life crisis: Denial, Passion; Replay, Depression, Withdrawal, and Acceptance.

In celebration of VP’s 40th anniversary, the Withdrawal residency will honour VP’s tradition of technology-based artistic expression through commissioning an artist (or team) to create an immersive work that encapsulates elements of VP’s past, present and/or future by withdrawing elements of research about VP and placing them into new contexts. This recontextualization can envision new trajectories and technologies, reimagine histories and futures, or develop a present through historical sampling and remixing. Artists can choose to develop algorithmic or data-driven works, immersive A/V works, or any other technology-based installations.

About the Artist

Lawrence Bird is a multidisciplinary artist. His work is frequently lens-based; it extends today to media art, film making, architecture and, recently, printmaking. His work is informed by training in spatial practice and theory – he holds a professional degree in architecture (McGill), a Master’s degree in City Design & Social Science (London), and a PhD in History & Theory of Architecture(McGill). His work has been installed or screened at ISEA 2017 (Manizales) and ISEA 2023 (BCN), CTM Vorspiel (Berlin), Espace Architecture La Cambre Horta (Brussels), Inter/Access Gallery (TO), Trinity Square Video (TO), Furtherfield Gallery (London, UK), Greenwich Royal Naval College (London, UK) and the Forks National Historic Site (Winnipeg). Lawrence has curated events and installations at the WNDX film festival, RAW:Gallery of Architecture & Design, and Grand Parade (Halifax). In design, Lawrence has worked with Sputnik Architecture, pico Architecture, Pentagram Design (UK), Tsui Design & Research (Emeryville) and Bohlin Cywinsky Jackson (Philadelphia). He has taught at McGill University, University of Manitoba, Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Kanazawa International Design Institute (Japan). He also writes on his interests for ARP Books, Intellect Books, Leonardo, Azure, furtherfield,
and other venues; he’s a Leonardo peer reviewer.

Artist Statement

This residency will speculate on the history and future of Video Pool. An excavation of material and digital artefacts drawn from Video Pool’s archives will guide the intervention in Poolside Gallery. Projection-mapped video will serve to collapse the distance between architecture and media, and imagine Poolside as a ground zero for future growth – expanding outward into adjacent spaces in Artspace, the city, and the world.

My work focuses on intersections of image, materiality and space. Often projecting my work in architectural contexts, I am fascinated by how the image can become the patina of a building; and how it breaks down as architectural materials do, to form an amalgam of image and matter. Sound is also an important component of this work, usually ambient or image-generated. My work often addresses settlements: cities, rural spaces, and more often hybrids of the two, along with mongrelized industrial / organic space. I frequently explore spaces in video, harvesting imagery from Google Earth and other Geographic Information Systems. In design, as in art, my focus is on the prairie city and the cultural dimensions of regional landscapes. My work is intentionally anti-colonial: I strive to situate myself honestly as a settler of Welsh and English heritage, uninvited but living in Treaty One territory and the Métis homeland. I connect the historical scarring and division of the land – which we see in the impacts of surveys, borders and property lines – with systems of surveillance and image commodification current to our own time. I also have an interest in intersections of early film and contemporary media, focused on blurrings of body, architecture, and image. Time is always part of these stories, and this is what brings me to MATR: rethinking the past while dreaming the future is a struggle that matters to me.