Camille Turner is a Toronto-based
media/performance artist and cultural producer whose practice explores
the social dimensions of technology. She is one of the founding members
of Year Zero One, a collective operating as a network for the dissemination
of digital culture. The group's projects include: teletaxi,
a site-specific mobile media art exhibition in a taxi cab equipped with
GPS and interactive touch screen and transmedia,
a project showing artists' works on video billboards in the city of Toronto.
She has presented her work in socially engaged media at the International
Exposition of the Dak’Art_Lab
at La biennal de l'art Africain Contemporain, Dakar, Senegal and Skinning
our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture at the Banff New Media
Institute in Alberta, Canada. She co-wrote Year Zero One's Forum issue
#13 Enguage:
Socially enguaged media with artist/community activist, Jennifer La
Fontaine.
Her
interest in collaborative projects has led her to participate in Interaktions-Labor,
an experimental media arts research lab in an abandoned coal mine in Gottelborn,
Germany where she has collaborated for the last two years with Brazilian
born composer, Paulo C. Chagas on Heisse Glut, a sound/media and performance
project.
Camille has a strong
interest in helping to facillitate access to tools and skills that will
enable communities who have been left out of the digital mainstream to
represent themselves and make their voices heard in a world in which power
is increasingly defined by technological fluency. She participated in
the boot-up of The Container Project, a mobile media arts lab in a shipping
container in rural Jamaica initiated by mervin Jarman from the (h)activist
group, Mongrel and The
Story Project, which she co-facilitated with Jennifer La Fontaine,
enabling a group of 30 women from diverse cultural origins to tell their
stories using digital media. She is currently the artist-in-residence
with Central Neighbourhood House, a mutli-service social agency in St.
James Town neighbourhood in Toronto's downtown east end where she is working
to develop a digital storytelling centre.
Her ongoing performance project, Miss
Canadiana (Red, white and beautiful tour), a series of live, site-specific
performances, has travelled to cities in Canada, UK, Germany, and Senegal.
Like many Canadians, her cultural identity has been defined through the
guise of "multiculturalism", as a fetishized display of "diversity"
rather than an integral part of the fabric of Canadian culture. In response,
she transformed herself into Miss Canadiana, an icon that challenges assumptions
about Canadian identity and normative beauty. The public becomes a part
in this project that blurs the line between "reality" and fiction.
Miss Canadiana is included in the exhibition Racing
the Cultural Interface: African diasporic identities in the Digital Age,
curated by Sheila Petty and presented by Neutral Ground gallery in Regina
and Mount St Vincent gallery in Halifax.
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