As the fast-moving artistic director of Artengine, Ryan Stec leads a blazing trail of humanity interfacing with technology. His work reached a crescendo recently with the hugely successful Electric Fields festival. Thankfully, Ryan found time for three breathless conversations with us for the Guerilla Q&A.

How’s it going Ryan?

It’s going very well. I am trying to change that habit of sighing and talking about how overwhelmed I am. I do feel that way somewhat, but it's not really anyone's fault but mine. I am most definitely addicted to the forward motion of being overly busy.

As we type [early October], you're in Toronto. What are you doing there?

As I type back it is later in October. I am back in Ottawa. I was in Toronto twice this month for two different creative projects. One of them was for my own artistic practice and another was for Artengine. The project that I was doing was the result of a residency at a francophone media arts center called Le Labo in Toronto. With the support of the SAT in Montreal, I was paired with a sound artist to produce a multi-channel audio-visual project for the Nuit Blanche festival. It ended up as a project called Swim using 20-foot x 5-foot projections and quadraphonic sound. The audience sat in blue beach chairs positioned in the sweet spot of the surround sound facing the 20-foot screen. The installation involved two separate computers controlling the audio and visual elements. It was a 15-minute work somewhere between immersive video and ghetto IMAX.

The second trip to Toronto was to bring some of the new artist/instructors from Artengine to Interaccess (a similar, but more mature version of Artengine) to finalize their training and create new workshops for Artengine. We had a great group that included Michael Ashley (recent U of O Visual Art Grad), Nathan Medema (from if then do), Sean Lamothe (Squelchbox—circuit bender extraordinaire) and Elizabeth McKinnon (of Collective Gulp). The public can look forward to great new stuff in the winter at Artegnine!

You wear many hats. Do you define yourself as an artist or producer or artistic director? Or do you give not a whit about such distinctions?

Internally, I am usually an indistinguishable mix of creative producer or curator and artist, but outside its different story of course.

The hat I wear at Artengine is informed by my artistic practice, but I try to maintain a clear separation there. At the risk of sounding over inflated about the position I have at that little artist-run space, I do believe that what I do is in the vein of public service. We are funded by the public and there is an appropriately long arm between us and the government, but we still operate with that idea in mind. It would be inappropriate for me to blend my practice with the work I do there. This is sometimes very difficult as I am working hard to create an artist-run production space that I would like to see exist as an artist. I may not get to fully engage with it as an artist, but I get a lot of joy from seeing it contribute to the creative practice of other artists.

In my work as a creative producer it is always an interesting pull because I get very excited about the projects I am working on, like the upcoming Electric Fields Festival, I think I could just keep doing this forever. Then I get special opportunities like Le Labo where I can set aside the time to just be an artist, to focus on the process of creation, and not on promotion or funding or logistics.

What kinds of themes do you explore in your personal work?

My personal work has covered all kinds of stuff. The first documentary I made 1998 with my friend Jake Hanna was about shopping mall Santa Clauses. The next one was about my father and his bastard childhood. All the while I was interested in breaking down the video signal to see what I could do with the beautiful destruction of perfectly clean video signals.

So in general the last few years have led me towards aesthetic and technological experimentation. I have been constantly exploring how to implement visual creation into a musical or performative framework. Heavy concepts and meaning have been absent from my work. I am not sure when they will return.

Do you consider yourself more of a filmmaker or technologist?

This one’s funny. Did I mention this idea already of considering myself a digital landscape painter? I think media artist is the best title. I am most comfortable with the moving image, especially when that image is not fixed (as in recorded). Another term that would be fun to explore using would be Video Composer. Or maybe AV Maestro.


We are back at it now, in conversation 2 ... I suspect that many Guerilla readers don't fully understand what Artengine is and does. Can you help?

Artengine definitely has many faces. Let see how fast I can type this out. We are an artist-run server, which means we provide server space and technical support. From NetArt to web promotion, we have it all on artengine.ca. You can learn about the artists who are online members in the community section of our website, but you can also see creative and informative NetArt projects like Cheryl L'Hirondelle's artinjun.ca, which was re-launched in a 3.0 version during the Electric Fields Festival.

We are also a production center. We are finishing the touches on a new digital and electronics lab located at Arts Court called M70. It is equipped with a variety of high-end tools that are designed to be used in a modular fashion by media artists. Some of that equipment includes a new Crown amplifier which allows us to do up to eight channels of sound. We also have two 3000-lumen HD projectors which can be used in conjunction with our very powerful Mac Tower that has three graphics cards that let you could control up to six separate video outputs. These are definitely the big special items but the list goes on. We are trying to offer ways to extend the tools that many media artists already have.

Who can experience all this great stuff? Only Artengine members?

We are a member-based organization, but it is very easy to become a member. You can do it online even. We have different levels of membership depending on what you need. On-line memberships for instance give you space on our server, while our Producing Memberships give you free access to the tools of production. Our tools however are not like other places. We have multi-channel amplifiers that can be used in conjunction with an open source media lab. We also have all the odds and ends you might need to build your own Atari Punk Console.

In November, you were in the midst of a wonderful festival called Electric Fields. What is it and how did it come about and what is your role?

In a nutshell it is a broad-based festival that covers the variety of work being produced at the crossroads of art technology—from subtle and contemplative installations to large-scale performances.

My role is producer of the festival and the co-curator alongside Philippe Hamelin from SAW Video. SAW Video hosted the last year of the festival in 2005, and Philippe played a large role in collaborating on the creative direction. I also spoke a lot with Jason St-Laurent, who was SAW Video's previous programmer and founder of the festival, about how to develop the festival. As an organization [Artengine], we saw the growth of the festival as a key element of our own growth. As I write this we are in day 5 of the festival and it is going really well. It is a strange bag of mixed feelings to see the success of the festival mixed with the impending cuts to so much of the municipal support of the arts.

When and how did you first get into technology?

I am part of that generation that grew up through the cross-over from rabbit ear antennas in elementary school to Hotmail accounts in university. But I was not a boy genius on bulletin boards at the earliest entry points of networked computer communications. There was a PC in my house before cable television, but I think I mostly secretly played Leisure Suit Larry so I can't claim some sort of early revelations about the personal computer. I guess I was probably one of the first kids to hand in papers printed off a dot matrix printer. I think this kind of “advanced user” label best describes my relationship with computers. I have never really had the mind to change technology at any fundamental level.

My brother and I talk about the parallels between sport and art all the time, and the response above makes me think of the tension in my life between being a coach or manager and being a player. I recognize greatness and excellence in other artists and have a great deal of respect for their talents and perseverance. I truly enjoy being able to contribute, in any small way, to the completion or evolution of their work. So sometimes, even though I truly love those times when I feel like I am actually being an artist. Right now I think I might be a better manager than player, but thankfully this is not sports and I may still produce some insightful work in the next decade or two.

Ok, to begin conversation 3, how did Electric Fields turn out? What did you learn?

Electric Fields went really well. The response from the community was great and I think one thing we learned is that many people in the region where craving a festival like this. We drew together different audiences from different communities and had some dedicated people who came to everything we did. I think it was a great step forward for Artengine both within our twin cities and outside. We brought a lot of artists from coast to coast here, but especially Montreal and the feedback with all of them was how surprised they were by this little festival in Ottawa. It’s always a loaded compliment, but I think it shows off how Ottawa’s contemporary and media arts community is really starting to contribute on a national scale.

I also learned that 2800 watts of sub-bass sounds fuckin awesome in a century-old church. It’s worth checking out our blog artengine.blogspot.com to see the pictorial adventures. From the details of our mustaches to the grandeur of St. Brigid’s.

What does the success of Electric Fields say about the success of Artengine?

The success of the festival helps create a good feedback loop for our creative direction. A festival like this is something we have been building towards since I was hired two and half years ago. If it flopped it would have forced us to pull back and re-evaluate the core of the organization, but for the most part it worked. We can instead start to identify what we need to make us and the festival stronger. Of course getting those things is always trickier than identifying them.

I also think the festivals success helps keep that current trend of cool nerds alive. We are pretty nerdy at Artengine so we need to come up with ways for the rest of the population to see us as cool. Thirty feet of projection across the alter of a church helps distract people away from the fact that we are at the back just twiddling knobs and pushing buttons.

Can you describe some of the upcoming work at Artengine?

I think the next big thing I am looking forward to is sleep and over-consumption during the holidays. After I recover (and hopefully not get cut out of a job) it will be time for our new winter workshop series. People will have the chance to learning about electronics, acoustics, composition, programming and generally how to be an electronic artist or at least a reasonable facsimile of one.

What are the goals for further development at Artengine?

Artengine’s growth is a heady mix of caffeine, vodka and over-achievement in the face of personal insecurity ... or to use dryer language, our growth comes from a strong foundation in democratizing creative aspects of technology with the help of growing local, national and international interest in digital and electronic art.

In a general sense, the impact of the organization is that we are expanding the creative capacity of the media arts in Ottawa and Gatineau. We talked about our lab space as kind of grey box in the sense that it was meant to exist somewhere between the white cube of the gallery and the black box of the theater. In general, this grey area of artist practice is where we want to have the most impact and be at the heart of some of the most innovative projects in the city. This of course requires a kind of two-fold approach where we augment the experience of the producing artists locally with new facilities but also educate the audience on the potential of electronic art in a global sense.

Sooo many goals really. For now we would like finish up the lab so it is ready for artists to use in January. A new workshop series in the winter. A new Graffitti Research Lab here in the spring. A science and art symposium in the fall of 2009. This is the off year for Electric Fields as we recharge of 2010. In the loftiest sense, I would love to see the eventual development of an Ottawa Media Arts Institute. Something a bit like the SAT in Montreal. Something that would have an impact nationally and ensure that the quality of work in Ottawa was not a surprise for people from elsewhere but an expectation of the city.

For more on Ryan Stec and Artengine, visit www.artengine.ca.