Joel Ong

Joel Ong (PhD, MSc.Bioart) is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment, developed from more than a decade of explorations in sound, installation and socially conscious art. His conceptual explorations revolve around metaphors of distance, connectivity, assiduously reworking this notion of the “environment”—how different tools and scales of observation reveal diverse biotic and abiotic relationalities, and how these continually oscillate between natural and computational worlds. His works have been shown at internationally at the Currents New Media Festival, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Seattle Art Museum, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, the Penny Stamps Gallery and the Ontario Science Centre etc. Joel is Associate Professor in Computational Arts and Director of Sensorium:The Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University, in Toronto, Canada. His research has been funded by such as SSHRC, eCampus Ontario, Women and Gender Equality Canada.

Joel Ong
Joel Ong, Untitled Interspecies Umwelten, 2021, (photo still of live microscopic feed). Courtesy of the artist

From the Archives

  • 2023 / core / exhibition

    Group Exhibition
    more-than-human

    more-than-human features ten contemporary artists who explore human-natural relationships through technology, promoting new ways of understanding the natural world.  Each interactive artwork uses digital media to challenge, excite, and shift our collective understanding of the more-than-human mind. Inspired by an ethics of inclusion that acknowledges the rights of nature, the exhibition questions what it means to be alive and have agency.