Digital Craft:
Between Matter and Code
Lecture series instigated by Vincent Isabel
Lectures
September 24 to October 14, 2025
On site and online
Digital Craft: Between Matter and Code is a series of lectures that aims to demystify and highlight the many creative possibilities offered by electronics and digital technology, while fostering encounters and dialogue among curious individuals, enthusiasts, and professionals.
For this occasion, Vincent Isabel has selected and brought together artists interested in electronic, digital, and sound art. The goal: to create a space for casual encounters and exchanges around these practices, where artists can share their approaches, techniques, and methods. Each session will take the form of a conference combining presentations of artistic projects, technical demonstrations, knowledge-sharing, hands-on exploration, and open discussions.
This is an invitation to discover digital approaches through various projects, offering a deeper understanding of the unique artistic practices of artists who integrate these mediums into their own interests and narratives.

Vincent Isabel · September 24, 5:30PM (French)
Vincent Isabel is a DIY artist, sound artist, and performer based in Quebec City. His practice explores the web of relationships and myths between the body, the environment, and technology. He uses assemblages of electrical circuits, salvaged objects, and organic materials to create instruments and noise-based systems. In doing so, he provokes and harnesses the loss of control as a driving force for performance; spaces of error and glitch become moments of poetry, challenging the power dynamics between the human and the non-human. This body of creations and performances proposes alternative imaginaries and relationships with technological objects, and a return to their materiality.He works in a craft-based and DIY manner, playing with the arrangement of raw materials and new media. He leads workshops on DIY electronics, programming, and the use of microcontrollers. A 2024 graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University, Vincent is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Laval University and is collaborating with the Avatar Centre as part of the artist-in-residence program.Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Stéphanie Letarte · September 30, 5:30PM (French)
“I’m just getting started on an electronics research project where I’m trying to build circuits and components using materials like copper, silver, and pyrite. My approach involves experimenting with basic principles of electronics to create interactive sound devices. In particular, I use circuits based on oscillators combined with photoresistors to generate variable frequencies. These light sensors allow the rhythm and pitch to vary in real time, making each object responsive to its environment and to movement.During the event, I will present various prototypes: small frequency-based instruments, playful objects, and sensory experiments. I will explain how they are built, to make the process accessible and reproducible. The audience will be invited to handle the objects, explore the sound effects, and imagine with me other forms of DIY electronic games. My intention is to share this curiosity about sound experimentation and the possibilities offered by simple, DIY electronics.” – Stéphanie Letarte

Rafael Zen et Khalil Alomar · October 7, 5:30PM
Rafael Zen is a Brazilian-Canadian multimedia performer, experimental sound artist, and educator based in Vancouver, from the stolen territories of the Guarani and Xokleng communities, in the stolen territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh communities. With an MFA in Contemporary Artistic Processes (Brazil, 2016), they are currently researching New Media and Sound Art at Emily Carr University. Their work explores colonial-capitalistic-narcissistic hauntology, queer futurities, eco-dreams, and decolonial storytelling through multimedia performance, noise composition, sound theater, and stage design. They also work as a creative director at Why Whisper Studio alongside Khalil Alomar, co-curating Durations Festival, a volunteer-run sound art and live performance event that supports emerging artists with free venues and resources across nine editions (Vancouver, 2023–2025). Rafael’s performances often channel the malfunctioning cyborg: a hybrid of body and electro-junk, expressed through DIY circuitry, interactive sonic systems, noise-making masks, and multimedia performance. Recent projects and collaborations include the Vancouver Biennale, BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, Emily Carr University, Vancouver International Film Festival, SUM Gallery, the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology, What Lab, Lobe Studio, rEvolver Festival, Stand Festival and Theatre Replacement.

Khalil Alomar is an experimental interdisciplinary media artist whose practice explores sound as vibration, memory, witness, and relational force. Based on the unceded Coast Salish territories, he creates immersive sonic environments, tactile installations, and collaborative compositions that merge analog circuitry with digital frameworks, speculative storytelling, and more-than-human co-creation. His process often involves sculpting sound with Max/MSP, designing custom systems that respond to weight, touch, and movement through contact microphones, sensors, and circuitry. These responsive environments cultivate intimate, nonverbal relationships between body, object, and ecology, allowing sound to emerge as a language of care and attunement. Drawing from legacies of experimental sound and informed by decolonial, queer, and ecological thought, Alomar’s works are speculative terrains where alternate futures can be rehearsed, where slowness and listening become forms of resistance. Through installations, performances, and collaborative projects, Alomar constructs spaces that resist extractive modes of listening and invite entangled ways of being. His projects range from sonic sculptures that transform plants and everyday objects into resonant collaborators, to eco-futurist performances and terrarium-installations that reimagine the boundaries between artificial and natural systems. Whether building interactive soundscapes, co-leading research groups, or curating experimental festivals, Alomar treats sound as both political and poetic, a force that can challenge inherited systems while nurturing new forms of kinship and ecological care. Across his work, sound is never only aesthetic—it is speculative, relational, and transformative, offering a way to imagine just and livable futures in collaboration with human and more-thanhuman worlds.

Florence-Delphine Roux · October 14, 5:30PM (French)
Florence-Delphine Roux is a digital and sound artist originally from Quebec City and based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. She holds a master’s degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Villa Arson in Nice, France. Her work explores the intersection of art, science, and technology, with a focus on the medium of radio. Her creations take the form of listening experiences, immersive sound installations, performances, video art, and radio works.“Driven by a sound-based practice that draws particularly on material gathered from recordings made largely outdoors, Florence-Delphine Roux’s work is largely rooted in a reflection on the possibility of playing with textures imperceptible to the eye—notably electromagnetic fields—thereby contributing to a disruption of reality.With the aim of developing a practice of fiction, the artist also ventures into the field of radio production, with the ambition of creating a ‘cinema for the ear’.” Text by Frédéric Bonnet




