Artist Talk: Michelle Bunton, Expanded Data Artist in Residence

Michelle Bunton is a practicing artist, award-winning curator and roller derby player currently residing as an uninvited guest in Katarokwi-Kingston, Canada. They hold a BFA from Western University and are currently completing their MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University.  Bunton works at the Vulnerable Media Lab and Ayatana’s Biophilium: Science School for Artists, and they previously held a curatorial position at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. At Agnes, they worked on a number of projects, including Drift: Art and Dark Matter, in partnership with Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB.  

Bunton considers collaboration to be a necessary condition of their curatorial, artistic and academic praxis, prioritizing kinship-building with both human and other-than-human interlocutors. Their work for Expanded Data is a critical investigation into the mathematization of slime mold’s other-than-human intelligence into the Slime Mold Algorithm (SMA), a type of swarm-intelligence (SI) optimization algorithm that focuses on the foraging behavior of Physarum polycephalum. Through speculative design, queer coding and science fiction, they will work toward the creation of an alternative Slime Mold Jamming Algorithm (SMJA) that instead prioritizes slime mold’s queerer characteristics, including non-dimorphic sexuality, trans-species chemo-tactile communication, non-hierarchical sociality and embodied collective action. By embracing these qualities and translating them algorithmically, this project contains the potential to expand and queer the boundaries of swarm-intelligence (SI) optimization algorithms.  

The artist in residence is a collaboration between the Faculties of Humanities and Engineering, supervised by Drs. Andrea Zeffiro and Stephen Kelly. 

About Expanded Data: From July 25-27 at Factory Media Centre (Hamilton, ON), Expanded Data gathers an international group of media artists and researchers to reimagine data, code and computation through cultural aesthetics and data paradigms, like lo-fi, glitch, speculative design, anti-computing, counter archives, queer data, trans data, and artificial life. Follow updates about the event through @criticaldatastudio + www.criticaldatastudio.com