Channel Surfing: Four Works from the Video Commission Residency Online Screening on VUCAVU

Warren Chan
Warren Chan is a video artist and curator with a focus on experimental works that analyze digital and new media technologies. His video art includes I Dream of Vancouver (recipient of the Air Canada Short Film or Video Award at the Reel Asian International Film Festival) and his curatorial work includes .exe, presented by Vtape. Chan received his MA in Cinema and Media Studies from York University, where he researched the usage of A.I. generated images in experimental cinema. In addition, Chan has a decade of experience supporting arts organizations in communications and graphic design-related roles.

Pluetoe Ilunga
Pluetoe, a Winnipeg-based filmmaker and performance artist, has been honing his craft since 2013. He studied video game and software programming at the Vancouver Film School, which he mentions as another artistic medium he plans to explore in the near future. Through film, computer programming, and photography, Pluetoe is constantly experimenting with new ways to express himself artistically.

Sarah Boo
Sarah is a Toronto-based multimedia artist who spent her formative years immersed in virtual worlds of various shapes and sizes. Her internet and video works aim to make sense of her experiences of memory, space, and time in a techno-capitalist society. Recently, she has spent much of her time thinking about online sound environments and their ability to foster digital intimacy. She is currently in the Digital Futures program at OCAD University.

Jaye Kovach
Jaye Kovach (she/her; they/them) is a queer, disabled, butch trans woman, and a multimedia and performance artist living as a white settler on Treaty 4 Terrirtory (Regina, Saskatchewan). She graduated from the University of Regina in 2013 with a BFA in Visual Art. Since then, their practice has expanded to include a growing tattoo business that, using trauma informed approaches, centers creating a safe space and comfortable tattooing experience for marginalized bodies. (To see more of Jaye's tattoo work, follow @ihaveasickness on instagram.)

Jaye’s work has received local and national recognition. In 2019, she was featured in the spotlight section of Canadian Art’s FEMME issue. In 2020, they attended the Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency. Her performance work has been presented at Queer City Cinema/Performatorium, a queer media and performance art festival based in Regina, Saskatchewan, that attracts international artists and film makers. They perform as part of Homo Monstrous and Forced Femme, bands that blur the line between music and performance art. She is a current participant of Tender Container’s Peer Mentorship Platform, Do Trans People Dream of Nonbinary Sheep?.

Jaye is currently facilitating the Capacitor project, a new programming channel for Two Spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming artists with a connection to Saskatchewan, with the University of Saskatchewan (USask) Art Galleries and Collection. Funded by the Digital Now Initiative of the Canada Council for the Arts, the one-year pilot project is intended to produce the space and capacity necessary for a community that has disproportionately experienced violence, misrepresentation and exclusion within the province and its art spaces.