July 25 – 27, 2025
Factory Media Centre (366 Victoria Ave N. Hamilton ON)
Presented by Critical Data Studios in partnership with Factory Media Centre, Expanded Data brings together an international group of media artists and researchers to reimagine data, code, and computation through cultural aesthetics and data paradigms, including lo-fi, glitch, speculative design, anti-computing, counter-archives, queer data, trans data, and artificial life.
Program
Friday, July 25
7:00 – 9:00 PM EST
Open Public Event
Showcasing groundbreaking research, the exhibition highlights the crucial role that artistic and experimental interventions play in reimagining expansive data futures. Interact with the artists and learn about their work.
Participating Artists: Sofian Audry, Marilène Oliver, Stephen Kelly, Chris Myhr, Blair-Attard Frost, and Sari-Sari Xchange
Sunday, July 27
7:00 – 9:30 PM EST
Open Public Event
Celebrate the closing of Expanded Data with lo-fi, drone, live coding, and networked music.
Participating Artists: Your Winters Are Like Summers Here, Luis Navarro Del Angel, Cymatiste, Eyeduh, and Pirarán
DAY 1: Saturday, July 26
Artificial Life, Cybernetics and Small Life
ROUNDTABLE: Artificial Life, Cybernetics, and Human Computer Interaction
2:00 – 3:30 PM EST
Online Event: Register Here
This roundtable examines how life is understood, created, and manipulated through data-driven processes, considering the social aspects of living systems as life as we know it and as it could be.
Participants: Nell Tenhaaf, Michelle Bunton, Swati Mishra, and Erin Gee
KEYNOTE: Sofian Audry
4:00 – 5:30 PM EST
Online Event: Register Here
Sofian Audry presents their research-creation practice at the intersection of media arts, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. Rooted in a transdisciplinary approach bridging art, technology, and the humanities, their work explores fragile autonomous agents evolving within unstable environments. Developed through iterative experimentation, these works engage indeterminacy, emergence, and relationality as central aesthetic strategies, disrupting dominant narratives of control and optimization in generative AI. Rather than pursuing efficiency or productivity, Audry’s systems unfold through ongoing negotiations between human and nonhuman agencies. By exploring the material and behavioural complexities of more-than-human systems, Audry proposes alternative approaches to computation that are less extractive and more speculative, where art becomes a site for rethinking intelligence, agency, creativity, and experience. Reflecting on how such co-creation interplays between agents involved in creative processes reshape artistic inquiry and open up post-anthropocentric modes of practice, this presentation contributes a practice-based perspective to critical dialogues at the convergence of media arts and artificial intelligence.
DAY 2: Sunday, July 27
Data Imaginaries, Radical Futurities,
and Speculative Interventions
KEYNOTE: Marina Otero Verzier
9:00 – 10:30 EST
Online Event: Register Here
Computational Compost addresses the environmental impact of data storage and proposes a synergy between technology and ecology. Through metabolic processes, Computational Compost links the immense computational energy required to decipher the origins of life with the terrestrial cycles that sustain it. As supercomputers simulate the genesis and expansion of the universe, the heat they produce triggers irreversible transformations, influencing organic life through ongoing processes of composition and decomposition. These dynamics intertwine vast cosmic timelines with computational and earthly systems, positioning data storage architectures beyond a human-centric framework.
ROUNDTABLE: AI Imaginaries, Radical Futurities, Speculative Interventions
11:00 – 12:30 EST
Online Event: Register Here
This roundtable explores AI’s (im)possibilities through speculative thinking and critical reflection, challenging us to reimagine and refuse the generated future of AI.
Participants: Blair Attard-Frost, Carmela Leganse, Devon Mordell, and John Fink