SCI_ART 2026 Symposium Kelowna
AFTER THE DATA / CULTURAL CLIMATE FUTURES
Livestream OCT 8, 9:30 am - 4:30 pm
Photo: The Prospect of an Ontic Leak © Pawel Janicki
OCT 8, 2026
9:00 am - 4:30 pm
Critical Future Studio/Lab
UBC Innovation Precinct Annex 1
3505 Spectrum Court Kelowna, BC
Register Here on Luma:
luma.com/k5z83pud
Presented by:
The EU Delegation to Canada, UBC Okanagan, and Critical Future Studio/Lab
With support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
SCI_ART 2026 Kelowna brings European and Canadian artists into conversation with researchers to examine artistic practice as a mode of inquiry. Moving between environmental sensing, fieldwork, biological systems, documentary practice, immersive environments, computation, and scientific imaging, the day asks how artists observe changing worlds and how the methods and instruments they use shape what can become perceptible and knowable.
Rather than positioning art primarily as a means of communicating scientific knowledge after it has been produced, Art as Research considers artistic practice as a site where knowledge itself can emerge through observation, experimentation, situated encounter, technological mediation, and critical interpretation.
Symposium Schedule
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Dr. Suzie Currie, Vice-Principal and Associate Vice-President Research and Innovation
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Dr. Megan Smith, UBC Okanagan Impact Research Chair in Societal Resilience and Immersive Futures
An introduction to the research questions shaping the Kelowna program and to the Critical Future Studio/Lab as a site for interdisciplinary research creation. The opening positions artistic practice not only as a means of interpreting scientific knowledge, but as a research process capable of generating questions, observations, experiments, and new ways of understanding environmental and technological change.
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Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter (Canada) · Serena Marija Akram (Malta) · Carlo De Gaetano (Italy/Netherlands)
Guiding question: How do artistic and scientific practices make environmental transformation perceptible and experiential?
Environmental change is sensed through bodies, organisms, instruments, images, archives, and computational systems. Sensing Environmental Change brings together practices that examine how information about changing environments moves between scientific observation and lived experience. Moving across microbial systems, physiological and environmental sensing, sea level research, archives, and speculative climate futures, the conversation asks what constitutes environmental evidence and how artistic research can move between measurement, interpretation, embodiment, and imagination.
Research Respondent: Dr. Lael Parrott, Professor, Biology and Sustainability, UBC Okanagan (TBC)
Dr. Lael Parrott is a Professor in Biology and Sustainability at UBC Okanagan whose research examines complex coupled human and natural systems. Her work uses ecological modelling, spatial analysis, and systems approaches to understand landscape change, biodiversity, conservation, and the relationships between human activity and ecological processes.
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Sylvia Grace Borda (Canada) · Matjaž Tančič (Slovenia) · Julia Jung (Canada)
Guiding question: What forms of knowledge emerge from being in a place, observing it, moving through it, and working within it?
Fieldwork begins with presence. Fieldwork and Situated Research considers artistic practices built through sustained observation, documentation, movement, encounter, and engagement with specific environments and communities. Through Borda’s immersive observation of North Pacific intertidal environments and Tančič’s documentary research with people and infrastructures preparing for possible off-world life, the session asks how knowledge is shaped by where the researcher stands, whom they encounter, what they choose to document, and how long they remain.
Research Respondent: Dr. Jodey Castricano
Dr. Jodey Castricano is one of the lead researchers in the Post-Antropocentrism & Critical Animal Studies Research Group (PACAS), a collaborative project between UBC Okanagan and the University of Exeter, supported by a UBC Okanagan-Exeter Excellence Catalyst Grant. PACAS is a network of activists, scholars, artists and writers who are invested in anti-speciesist and social justice research that advances human knowledge to improve nonhuman animal lives. Their research promotes the immediate and long-term societal changes needed to end our rapid killing of billions of nonhuman animals and the environment.
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Ernst Logar (Austria) · Paweł Janicki (Poland) · Dr. Matija Vigato (Croatia)
Guiding question: How do the instruments we use to observe and represent the world shape what becomes visible, and therefore knowable?
Scientific and technological instruments do more than extend perception. They establish particular ways of seeing, measuring, organizing, and interpreting the world. Instruments of Seeing examines artistic inquiry through remote sensing, satellite imagery, computational systems, interactive media, photogrammetry, and immersive environments. The conversation asks whether these technologies simply reveal realities that already exist, or participate in constructing the realities we are able to perceive.
Research Respondent: Dr. John Desnoyers-Stewart, SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Critical Future Studio/Lab, UBC Okanagan
Dr. John Desnoyers-Stewart is an interdisciplinary artist/researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Critical Future Studio/Lab. He integrates artistic practice with engineering knowledge to create innovative artworks to connect people and evoke new perspectives on our shared physical reality. Through his art and research, he explores positive social applications of mixed reality, investigating its potential to connect us more deeply to ourselves, each other, and our surrounding physical reality.
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Dr. Emily Christina Murphy, Assistant Professor in Digital Arts and Humanities, UBC Okanagan
Dr. Emily Christina Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at UBC Okanagan and Director of the CFI funded ReMedia Infrastructure for Research and Creation. Her research explores multimedia cultural memory through humanities, embodied, and computational methods, with particular attention to how performance, digital media, and other forms of cultural production are documented and preserved. Her current research examines approaches to multimedia preservation, archival practice, community knowledge, and research data management.
A short provocation on documenting and preserving research creation. Drawing on the experiences and materials generated across SCI_ART 2026, Murphy considers what constitutes the research record when knowledge emerges through temporary encounters, conversations, experiments, technologies, performances, and prototypes. The provocation asks what should be documented, what may resist documentation, and how the cultural memory of interdisciplinary research can be carried forward.
Guiding question: What remains after the experiment, and how do we preserve the knowledge generated through research creation?
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All SCI_ART 2026 Artists · SCI_ART 2026 Residency Reflection
Participating artists: Serena Marija Akram · Sylvia Grace Borda · Carlo De Gaetano · WhiteFeather Hunter · Paweł Janicki · Ernst Logar · Matija Vigato · Matjaž Tančič
Co-moderated by: Dr. Megan Smith, SCI_ART Lead 2026 · Dr. Emily Christina Murphy SCI_ART Observer 2026 · Simon Pribac, Founder of SCI_ART
The closing roundtable brings the full SCI_ART 2026/Kelowna artist cohort together to reflect on the questions, encounters, and exchanges that have emerged across the residency. A visual slideshow documenting the week will run throughout the conversation, moving through scientific and cultural site visits, workshops, studio activity, public programs, conversations, experiments, and informal moments shared by the cohort.
Using this collective record as a point of departure, the artists will reflect on how their thinking and practices have shifted through encounters with one another and with the different research environments experienced throughout SCI_ART. Co-moderated by Megan Smith and Simon Pribac, the conversation returns to the central proposition of Art as Research and considers what the cohort is leaving the residency thinking differently about, what artistic methods can reveal, and which questions, experiments, or collaborations should continue from here.
Guiding question: What can artistic research allow us to know, perceive, or question that other forms of research cannot?