Colin Clark

Colin Clark is a media artist, design researcher, and the Associate Director of OCAD University’s Inclusive Design Research Centre. His work is concerned with issues of access to and agency within technology-mediated creative practice. Working alongside open communities, Colin looks for ways to design, build, and sustain cooperative, reciprocal software systems—especially by those without access to conventional programming expertise. Colin is the founder of Lichen Community Systems, a non-profit committed to building and sharing open cultural and creative systems.

Colin's artworks explore the ways that technologies produce new temporalities and senses of time, often by combining and repurposing sonic processes in the production of visual media. He develops and improvises with his own algorithmic and process-based video and audio software, investigating the relations between digital, natural, and human systems. In addition to 20 years as an electroacoustic and film music composer, Colin has focused since 2012 on creating digital cinema, video installations, and software-supported generative media art. His artistic software frameworks and tools aim to address the systemic gaps between prototyping and production (including the visual vs. textual programming dichotomy), supporting realtime interoperability across many different platforms and device capabilites, and enabling "continued design," in which systems can continue to be changed in unanticipated ways by their users, throughout lasting lifetimes. His current focus is Signaletic, a data flow programming environment for creating high-performance audio on embedded devices (e.g. Eurorack modules) and the Web.

Colin's music has been performed by Arraymusic, the neither/nor collective, the Draperies, and his own ensembles, Lions and Fleischmop. He has composed soundtracks for films by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof and R. Bruce Elder that have been shown at film festivals internationally. Colin holds an MFA from OCAD University in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design. He has been a member of Toronto's Loop Collective since 2001.

Contact: colin at colinclark dot org