When: Friday, April 10, 2026, 3–4:30pm
Where: JHB100 (1st floor), Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St George Street, Toronto.
Note: This is a free public event. Please register via the Eventbrite link.

This presentation explores an art–science research-creation practice that uses biophysical sensing as a medium for interactive and computational art. Central to this work is The Source (biomeci.com), a biosensing platform developed to enable artists and researchers to incorporate physiological signals directly into responsive media systems. The Source supports real-time capture of multiple biophysical signals, including electrocardiography (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), and respiratory effort (RSP).  

Professor Mark-David Hosale (Computational Arts, York University) will introduce The Source and demonstrate how physiological signals provide insight into affective and physiological states and how these states can be used to shape audiovisual, haptic, and multisensory outputs in interactive artworks and performances. 

Ilze Briede [Kavi] will present her academic research and artworks that use The Source, including the collaborative works, Somatic Interventions (2022) and Reimagining Living Ontologies (2024), both of which have resulted in scholarly publications. She will also discuss her current PhD research exploring brain data (EEG) and cybernetic feedback systems in artistic practice. 

Together, the presentation examines how biophysical signals can function not only as measurements of the body but as expressive materials within embodied and cybernetic media systems that expand the sensorium of computational arts. 

To learn more about the speakers, visit our website.

Registration

This is a free public event. Please register via the Eventbrite link.

Acknowledgements
This event is organized by the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group Performing Gestures, Producing Cultures: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Human Movement.
Sponsored and hosted by Jackman Humanities Institute.
Presented in partnership with ArtSci Salon (artscisalon.com/) and BMO Lab (bmolab.artsci.utoronto.ca). 

BMO Lab Diagonal Speakers Series: Creative Research in Emerging Technologies

When: Thursday, Mar. 5, 4–5:30pm
Where: BMO Lab, University College,15 King’s College Circle, room H-12   Map to BMO Lab

Artistic Director Caden Manson presents an overview of Big Art Group’s evolving practice through the lens of the company’s current project, FIASCO. Framed by the forthcoming 2027 book on Big Art Group from Northwestern University Press, the talk traces the ensemble’s history, the development of Real Time Film, and the pedagogical and working methodologies that have shaped its hybrid approach to live, media, and networked performance. Situating this lineage within contemporary conditions shaped by algorithmic culture and generative AI, Manson examines embodiment as a material and relational practice within technologically saturated environments, and failure as a structural strategy for interrupting repetition, exposing system logics, and pushing back against statistical normativity in probabilistic models.

Co-sponsored by the BMO Lab, the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama, and University of Toronto Mississauga’s Department of English and Drama.

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2025 marks an inflection point in our technological landscape, driven by seismic shifts in AI innovation.

Who’s Afraid of AI? Arts, Science, and the Futures of Intelligence is a week-long inquiry into the implications and future directions of AI for our creative and collective imaginings, and the many possible futures of intelligence. The complexity of these immediate future calls for interdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together artists, AI researchers, and humanities scholars. 

In this volatile domain, the question of who envisions our futures is vital. Artists explore with complexity and humanity, while the humanities reveal the histories of intelligence and the often-overlooked ways knowledge and decision-making have been shaped. By placing these voices in dialogue with AI researchers and technologists, Who’s Afraid of AI? examines the social dimensions of technology, questions tech solutionism from a social-impact perspective, and challenges profit-driven AI with innovation guided by public values.

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Mind the World

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Suzanne Kite – Director, The Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI
James DiCarlo – Director, MIT Quest for Intelligence
N. Katherine Hayles – James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature
Moderator: Matt Ratto – Associate Dean, Research and Professor in the Faculty of Information, U of T

What are the merits and limits of artificial intelligence within the larger debate on embodiment? This session brings together an artist who has given AI a physical dimension, a neuroscientist who reckons with the biological neural networks inspiring AI, and a humanist knowledgeable of the longer history in which the human has tried to decouple itself from its bodily needs and wants.

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Staging AI

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Kay Voges – Artistic Director, Schauspiel Köln
Roland Schimmelpfennig – Playwright and Director, Berlin
Hito Steyerl – Artist, Filmmaker and Writer, Berlin
Moderator: Brendan Healy, Artistic Director of Canadian Stage

How is AI changing the arts? To answer this question, we bring together theatre directors and artists who have made AI the main driving plot of their stories and those who opted to keep technology secondary in their productions.

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Recognizing ‘Noise’

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Marco Donnarumma – Artist, Inventor, Theorist, Berlin
Jutta Treviranus – Director, OCAD University, Inclusive Design Research Centre
Eryk Salvaggio – Media Artist and Tech Policy Press Fellow, Rochester
Moderator: Avery Slater – Associate professor of English at the University of Toronto

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Life with AI

Thursday, October 24, 2025

Jeanette Winterson – Author, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Great Britain
Leif Weatherby – Professor of German and Director of Digital Theory Lab at  New York University
Jennifer Nagel – Professor, Philosophy, University of Toronto Mississauga
Moderator: Nora Young – senior technology reporter with CBC News

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Social history & Possible Futures

Thursday, October 24, 2025

Memo Akten – Artist working with Code, Data and AI, UC San Diego
Beth Coleman – Professor, Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, U of T
Matteo Pasquinelli – Professor, Philosophy and Cultural Heritage Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Moderator: Karina Vold – assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, U of T

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Michael Newman, Goldsmiths, University of London
January 20, 2026 at 5:30 pm
BMO Lab, CDTPS, University of Toronto

Building on his earlier engagement with drawing as trace in Derrida and drawing on drawing as disegno and scribble in the Renaissance, Michael Newman will explore the double nature of drawing: as trace of what has passed, associated with memory, and as generativity, associated with the future. An archaeology of drawing made using chance (Marcel Duchamp, John Cage) will lead to consideration of its relation to probability and randomisation in AI. Partnerships between human artists and AI, involving bodily gesture and choreography, show that imagination may be conceived not as a faculty of the individual subject, but rather as inhering in relations, leading us to consider AI’s potential for imagination. Artists’ practice with AI generativity may open up radical transformations in the relations between humans and machines. However, returning to the trace will also raise inescapable questions of finitude and ethics.

Michael Newman

Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing at in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds degrees in English Literature and Art History, and a PhD in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary artists as well as thematic essays on the wound, the horizon, contingency, memory, drawing, and nonsense. He is co-director of the new Drawing Centre for Humans and Machines at Goldsmiths University in London, U.K.

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LOCATION:

BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and Artificial Intelligence 
University College, University of Toronto

DIRECTIONS: https://bmolab.artsci.utoronto.ca/?p=3341

Who’s Afraid of AI? Arts, Science, and the Futures of Intelligence is a week-long inquiry into the implications and future directions of AI for our creative and collective imaginings, and the many possible futures of intelligence. The complexity of these immediate future calls for interdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together artists, AI researchers, and humanities scholars.

In this volatile domain, the question of who envisions our futures is vital. Artists explore with complexity and humanity, while the humanities reveal the histories of intelligence and the often-overlooked ways knowledge and decision-making have been shaped. By placing these voices in dialogue with AI researchers and technologists, Who’s Afraid of AI? examines the social dimensions of technology, questions tech solutionism from a social-impact perspective, and challenges profit-driven AI with innovation guided by public values.

The two-day conference at the University of Toronto’s University College anchors the week and features panels and debates with leading figures in these disciplines, including a keynote by 2025 Nobel Laureate in Physics Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI” and 2025 Neil Graham Lecturer in Science, Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer.

For more info: https://uoft.me/who’s_afraid_of_ai