We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The project team extends its thanks to the University of Victoria Libraries' Historic Computing Lab for their support.
Contributor biographies
Oliver Hockenhull (Project Lead) is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, and media artist whose career has long moved at the edge where cinema, computation, and critical thought meet. He was part of the WebWeavers team that built ANIMA, one of Canada’s earliest cultural websites and among the first web projects in British Columbia, and has worked with digital culture since the formative years of the public internet. His early hypertext and new media writing, including work produced through the Centre for Image and Sound Research, was taken up by universities and research communities interested in hypermedia, navigation, and information aesthetics.
Alongside his internationally exhibited films, Hockenhull has pursued a parallel practice in interactive and computational art: VRML environments, morphogenetic programming, stochastic video structures, experimental media installations, and experimental web projects. He was a founding member of WebWeavers, co-directed Digital Earth with Thecla Schiphorst, and developed work using Java scripting, L-systems, hypertext authoring, and algorithmic image processes. His films and installations have screened at venues including MoMA, IDFA, the National Gallery of Art, Hot Docs, and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. He has also taught and lectured on film, hypermedia, and digital culture at institutions including UBC, SFU, and Northwestern University.
Shauna Jean Doherty (Project Manager) is a curator and writer compelled by the social history of technology. She has curated media art-focused exhibitions since 2009 in spaces that include InterAccess (Toronto), Arsenal Contemporary Art (Montreal & Toronto), The Art Gallery of Ontario, VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver) and the Museum of Vancouver. Her written work, which has been published by Esse arts + opinions, Canadian Art Magazine, the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and C Magazine, has addressed topics including sonic warfare, cyberfeminism, and post-internet aesthetics. Her latest curatorial project, Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story was launched in 2025 by InterAccess and Digital Museums Canada. She currently works as Programs and Communications Coordinator at the University of Victoria, on Vancouver Island.
Nick Fox-Gieg (Web Developer & Restorer) is an experimental animator in Toronto. His awards include SSHRC, Eyebeam, and Fulbright Fellowships, an Engadget Alternate Realities grant, and the jury prize for Best Animated Short at SXSW 2010. His videos have also been shown at the OIAF, Rotterdam, and TIFF festivals, at the Centre Pompidou, and on CBC TV; his XR work includes projects for the University of Waterloo, Google Creative Lab, and Framestore; his research has been published in Leonardo, Organised Sound, and the proceedings of SIGGRAPH. His art practice has been supported by grants from Bravo!FACT, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the arts councils of Ontario, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and West Virginia. Fox-Gieg holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a PhD from York University.
Zainub Verjee (Featured Artist & Essay Contributor) is a pioneering multidisciplinary artist whose five-decade practice draws on Fluxus and second-wave feminism. Working across video, sound, conceptual, and installation art, she explores the point where form, politics, and everyday life meet. Language is both medium and method in a body of work that persistently tests the boundaries of discipline, institution, and ideology.
For Verjee, art, work, and life are inseparable. Her practice spans civic intervention, institutional critique, and cultural policy, insisting on art’s role as a public good, moving fluidly between gallery, street, and state.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at MoMA, New York, the Venice Biennale, the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and Centre A, Vancouver, and is held in public and private collections.
Also a prolific scholar, curator, and critic, Verjee’s writings on artist labour, postcolonial aesthetics, and cultural infrastructure have shaped contemporary discourse. A Senior Fellow at Massey College and Fellow at McLaughlin College, she is a Member of the Order of Canada, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the recipient of multiple honorary doctorates.
Kate Armstrong (Essay Contributor) is a Vancouver-based artist, writer, and independent curator with over 20 years of experience in the cultural sector with a focus on intersections between art and technology. As a curator she has produced exhibitions, events, and publications internationally. She founded the early internet art organization Upgrade Vancouver, collaborated with the Goethe Institut to develop the nomadic project space Goethe Satellite, and was an Artistic Director of the 21st International Symposium on Electronic Arts. Armstrong has served as president of the board of directors at Western Front, curator, and board member at New Forms Festival, and is currently Trustee and Chair of the Acquisitions Committee at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Armstrong’s artworks are held in collections including Rhizome, the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University, and the Library of the Printed Web. As Director of Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design she specialized in cross-sector partnerships and founded the Shumka Centre for Creative Entrepreneurship, which helps emerging artists and designers realize complex real-world initiatives, with the goal of updating our cultural, social, and economic understanding of the impact art and design-led activities can have in the public sphere.