Wired In: VF Gamemaking Residency Keynote
May 21, 6:30-8PM
Hybrid (Online with watch party at InterAccess) | Register here
Led by Casper Sutton-Fosman
How does technology reconcile with the conflict between planned obsolescence and the quest for immortality? What does your body feel like in the times of Bryan Johnson’s “bio-measurements” and Neuralink Corp?
Moving through media analysis, curatorial research, and creative nonfiction, Casper Sutton-Fosman explores the fantasies and realities of the modular cyborg body, a politics of disposability, the necropolitics of labour, and the role of digital technologies in the production of selfhood.
This event is hosted in support of the Vector Festival Gamemaking Residency, curated by Bracy Appeikumoh, and is open to all.
To celebrate the start of the residency, please also join us for a screening of Ghost in the Shell (1995) on May 19 at 7:30PM.
The keynote speaker will join the event remotely over Zoom. In true cyborg spirit, participants are invited to join online or at an in-person watch party at InterAccess.
About the Speaker
Casper Sutton-Fosman is a curator, artist, and academic based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Their work centres conceptions of identity through a trans and disabled lens, questioning the fraught meanings of representation and exposure. Tracing pathways of labour, medicalization, and desire, Casper’s research foregrounds materiality and community. Casper has curated, exhibited, and held residencies in Toronto and New York, and was named InterAccess’s 2024 IA Current Emerging Curator. They hold an MFA from OCAD University and are currently a doctoral student at Concordia University in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program.
Casper was part of the Gamemaker in Residence cohort for the Vector Festival’s 2024 iteration, deu(s ex) machina.
About the Curator
Bracy Appeikumoh is a scholar archivist artist whose work centers reimagining desire and pleasure wholly divested from the diktats of empire and all of its baggage. Her erotic fiction takes place in queer futures embodying queer pre-colonial pasts; her non-fiction ponders how we get here. She is burdened by the urgent need to restore, preserve, and disseminate indigenous ways of being and knowing. Octavia E. Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Claudia Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Zora Neale Hurston, Assata Shakur, Nina Simone, Marion Stokes.
About the Gamemaking Residency
Where are your guts? is a video game residency supporting the development of conceptual games, ending in a public showcase opportunity at Vector Festival. With technical and curatorial support, gamemakers in residence explore technologies pushed to the forefront of dystopian imaginings and the warnings against them, asking how we could create symbiotic systems for the good of our bodies, our ecosystems, and our self-actualizations.
About Vector Festival
Presented by InterAccess, this year's festival digs into the guts, the gunk, and the gears of the mechanical bodies that make up our technologies. The 14th edition of Vector Festival will search for parallels between computer and human bodies, looking at how we overheat and sweat, bleed coolant, and are circuited through our veins. In an era of thinner phones and hidden wires, the physical footprint of our technology is obscured, erasing the reminder for maintenance and care. How does this impact those with insulin pumps at their hips or prosthetic arms that require batteries? Can we push back against the techno-optomist desire to create posthuman bodies by seeking to understand the machines already in our homes?