Colin Clark

Colin Clark is a creative technologist, inclusive design researcher, and media artist. His work is concerned with access to technology-mediated creative practice. As a co-founder of Lichen Community Systems, a non-profit cooperative research studio, Colin designs and develops accessible technologies and helps cultural organizations with creative access technology, software architecture, and community engagement. As a Research-Creation Fellow with the Kinetic Light Dance company, Colin develops new technologies that provide full access to the artistic process by disabled audience members and performers—including wireless and wearable haptics, spatialized audio, inclusive motion tracking, and multi-layered audio descriptions tools.

Colin's artistic practice as an improviser, composer, and video artist explores the ways that technologies produce new temporalities and senses of time, often by combining and repurposing sonic processes in the production of visual media. Colin is the author of several prominent open source creative coding frameworks, including Flocking, osc.js and Signaletic. He performs with Bitstance, a networked electronic music ensemble for which he designs and builds his own generative signal processing hardware and software. A significant aspect of his practice-based research involves exploring new modes of programming and designing artistic systems. Colin's compositions have 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.

As a researcher, Colin's work has focused on the direct design of technology by communities. Partnering with disability, civic, and cooperative labour organizations, this involves critically examining the practices and methods of inclusive design, adapting them to support worker and community ownership of the design process and resulting systems. This research program has been driven by significant grant-funded projects such as Data Communities for Inclusion, and Weavly. Resulting from these projects is the Community-Led Co-Design Kit, an open resource documenting new methods for socially engaged designers.

Contact: colin at colinclark dot org