Codes of Contact initiative is an incubator for arts organizations engaged in the presentation of arts and cultural works. As arts and cultural organizations deploy technologies and digital strategies, it is imperative to make those experiences accessible, inclusive and engaging. Through a network and collaboration-based approach, a network of arts organizations will be working together, learning from each other and supporting each other as they explore the impact of digital technologies on the presentation of artistic and cultural productions.
Codes of Contact will run from September 2020 till March 2022 and include digital sessions, workshops and a funded opportunity to build, pilot, evaluate and assess a program or project around digital presentation strategies.
If you have any questions or want to talk through the application please reach out to us atif@reelasian.com
2020 applications are now closed.
This is a collaboration between the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, OCAD U and Digital Justice Lab.
This initiative is supported by the Digital Strategy Fund. at Canada Council For the Arts.
Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD)
OCAD University is the largest and most comprehensive art, design and media university in Canada. At OCAD U, the Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) is committed to supporting the early-career advancement of all students and recent alumni. The CEAD delivers specialized programs and services that connect individuals to meaningful opportunities, communities of practitioners, skill-building resources and facilitated learning experiences.
Cinevolution
A grassroots, women-led, migrant-driven non-profit arts organization, Cinevolution’s mission is to:
Founded in 2007, Cinevolution has been committed to making experimental film and media art accessible for all since its inception, with a particular focus on connecting and empowering immigrants and other historically marginalized communities through community festivals, participatory media art projects, film screenings, workshops, and live performance events.
Sitting at the nexus of art, academia and community, we seek to decentralize art while connecting people across cultural, political, geographic and linguistic boundaries in order to foster media literacy, stimulate critical discourse, and cultivate creativity. Our work is powered by the belief that art can transcend cultural, social and linguistic divides to transform both the artist and the audience.
Digital Justice Lab
The Digital Justice Lab’s mission is to focus on building a more just and equitable future. We engage with diverse communities to build alternative digital futures, here in the nation we know as Canada. We work alongside technologists, community activists, and policymakers to shape a better understanding of technology and its impact on communities across the country. Through capacity building, public engagement and continuous collaboration we support communities in making informed decisions around digital issues.
FIVARS – Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories
Focusing on curating the best immersive story-driven content from around the world with the aim of exploring and nurturing this platform for new narrative forms. FIVARS was the first Canadian festival of its kind featuring many world premieres and launching successful experiences that have gone on to win Oscars and Lumiere Awards. Over its 7 year history, Fivars has showcased over 200 works from over 40 countries.
Unlike most immersive story programs that are tethered to an existing conference or film festival FIVARS stands as a wholly independent VR and AR stories festival now available through a platform that requires nothing more than a web browser (supported) mobile device, and ticket to the show.
FIVARS strives to continually update platforms and websites to make them accessible for all.
Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference & Expo
VRTO presents The Flotilla; an international symposium, exhibition and think tank for immersive business, education, enterprise, creators, philosophers! The Flotilla comprises different spaces, strategies, aesthetics, technologies, and we embrace them all as we strive to move towards an interoperable future. Featured discussions include everything from the Virtual Economy, Game & Experience Design, Business & Enterprise, Virtual Humans, to Education & Training, WebXR/Spatial Web, and more!
Like FIVARS, VRTO regularly updates platforms and websites to ensure they are accessible for all.
MUTEK
Launched in the year 2000, MUTEK is dedicated itself to the presentation of live electronic music and real-time audiovisual performance. After 20 years, the festival’s commitment to the ongoing mutations and variations of contemporary digital creativity remain, with its eyes and ears still fixated on what comes next. The festival extends now to 6 days and nights—and integrates the professional Forum into the architecture of the week to enrich conversations and encounters with current technologically driven practices and philosophies. Plugged into a global circuit since inception, creating an international rendezvous for artists and publics alike, the festival thrives on creating a context for discovery and exchange. Faithful to its values of inclusion and accessibility, MUTEK is committed to a more equitable and representative programming of all diversities. It also magnifies Montréal, not just as its urban backdrop, but as the source of so much of its creative soul; the local is always elevated in dialogue with exceptional artists from around the world. MUTEK has built a unique model over the years that has proven seductively exportable. Tentacles stretch across 4 continents, to 6 other cities now, with each satellite adapting the festival’s template of values as a means to inspire new ways of engaging with the richness of electronic and digital artistry.
Subtle Technologies
Subtle Technologies is a Toronto-based platform for community-building and knowledge-sharing at the intersections of art, science, and technology. Organizational activities invite a curious public to engage with ideas at the leading-edge of Canadian creativity while acting as a physical node for collaboration and exchange between diverse communities working across disciplines. Annual programming includes strategic partnerships, emerging arts practitioner awards, and satellite events ranging from lectures, to workshops, to mentorships that educate and uplift the next generations of makers and thinkers. Support and consultation are provided to projects generated by these encounters. Get involved by learning more about the organization and its opportunities at subtletechnologies.com
Tamil Archive Project
Tamil Archive Project (TAP) is a migratory collective which prioritizes the participation and experiences of all genders from racialized communities in the Greater Toronto Area with histories of marginalization. We came together to document, provide, and animate different forms of care which exist in Black, Indigenous, and other racialized cultures since 2016. Our collective emerged out of a need for makeshift forms of belonging in diasporic spaces by reconfiguring contemporary art practices as part of communal care. Our mandate is to take programming to the streets and neighbourhoods without art spaces as well as provide interventions in existing ones. We wish to reimagine how art can be fluid in under-resourced areas through crossing physical and social barriers to participation in such spaces. We believe the archival function of our collective plays a key role in reminding us that there are legacies of resistance and art to draw from in our neighbourhoods.
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival
The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival is a unique showcase of contemporary Asian cinema and work from the Asian diaspora. Works include films and videos by East, South and Southeast Asian artists in Canada, the U.S., Asia and all over the world. As Canada’s largest Asian film festival, Reel Asian provides a public forum for Asian media artists and their work, and fuels the growing appreciation for Asian cinema in Canada.
Trinity Square Video (TSV)
Trinity Square Video (TSV) is a space to re-imagine media arts. Founded in 1971, it is one of Canada’s first artist-run centres and its oldest media arts centre. Our activities are guided by a goal to increase our members’ and audiences’ understanding and imagination of what media arts practices can be. Trinity Square strives to create supportive environments, encouraging artistic and curatorial experimentation that challenge medium specificity through education, production and presentation supports. As video- and digital-based practices have become increasingly present across disciplines, TSV engages artists and curators in critical investigations into the changing conditions of perception, materiality and the virtual. Trinity Square’s programming is guided by three priorities: 1) promoting an expanded definition of media arts; 2) promoting the meaningful engagement of diverse voices in all levels of our operations; and 3) supporting and nurturing the production of new works by artists and curators.
Sign up for Industry Bootcamp and meet professionals from various fields, companies and organizations through panels and seminars, followed by Q&A with our experts.
This free two day workshop seeks to demystify the process of writing for television by leading participants through the nuts and bolts of a TV writer’s room. Ins Choi will lead nine participants through the process of pitching ideas, developing stories, outlining and scripting.
Sign up for Industry Bootcamp and meet professionals from various fields, companies and organizations through panels, seminars or one-on-one consultations!
Call for Submissions for RA:X: Puncta! Part of the 26th Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival (November 9-20), Puncta is an in-person, multi-disciplinary exhibition that takes up explorations of fracture to unsettle dominant coded narratives of cohesion and uniform Asianness within Canadian nation-state multicultural frameworks.
Sign up for Industry Bootcamp and meet professionals from various fields, companies and organizations through panels, seminars or one-on-one consultations!