Buffalo Rising is an Augmented Reality piece that imagines the buffalo returning to all landscapes; prairies, urban, rural, and seascapes. In the late 1800s the buffalo were slaughtered in both the United States and Canada as a way to starve Indigenous Nations into submission, or straight up genocide. Buffalo Rising features seven beaded, felted, and tufted buffalos that roam your immediate landscape through your screen.

Carrie Allison is a nêhiýaw/cree, Métis, and European descent visual artist based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She grew up on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Allison’s maternal roots are based in maskotewisipiy (High Prairie, Alberta), Treaty 8. Situated in K’jipuktuk since 2010, her practice responds to her maternal Nêhiýaw/Cree and Métis ancestry, thinking through intergenerational cultural loss and acts of reclaiming, resilience, resistance, and activism, while also thinking through notions of allyship, kinship and visiting. Her practice is rooted in research and pedagogical discourses. Her work seeks to reclaim, remember, recreate and celebrate her ancestry through visual discussions often utilizing beading, embroidery, handmade paper, watercolour, websites, QR codes, audio, video and most recently animation.

Learn more about Carrie Allison


Access Notes
‍You can only access Buffalo Rising on a mobile device with the Instagram app. 

To access Buffalo Rising from this website:
• Click the link above on your phone, it will open the Instagram app
• Click “Continue” to accept the Terms & Conditions.

On your phone screen you will see the seven (7) buffalos roam around your surroundings, whether it be your living room, a busy street corner, or a seascape. The buffalo are 3D renderings based on 2D beadings by artist Carrie Allison, which travel in a slow circular pattern. They are shiny beads in shades of brown on brown felt, with white beaded hooves and tufted hair behind their ears.
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‍You can also access Buffalo Rising directly in the Instagram app:
• Open Instagram, click the magnifying glass, and search for @iotainstitute
• Click the three stars directly above the grid of images
• Select “Buffalo Rising”

If the filter opens on a front camera, click the bottom right icon of two arrows forming a circle, to switch to the back camera. Once you flip the camera you will tap the screen to activate the filter.

Once you find a place for the seven (7) buffalos, click the circular button to take a photo, or hold it down to record a video. You can record the video for up to 60 seconds at a time. You aren’t able to control the movement or the size of the buffalo.

Before you post, you’re welcome to tag us by clicking the screen and typing “@iotainstitute.” You can share the photo or video with your followers by clicking ‘Your Story’ or ‘Close Friends’ you can also save the video to your device by clicking the three dots on the top right, then click save.

Need support? Click here!

Lonely Hearts Call is an interactive phone application that allows you to experience a morse code message as light flashes and vibrations. As queer people language that describes our identities and our bodies can be liberating - a moment of recognition, or violent - an erasure of our identity. Lonely Hearts Call shows how language can betray us - we are exposed by the flashing light, our bodies shaken by the vibrations of the morse code message. But language can also make us - the light revealing our bodies on a dance floor, the bass of a dance track aligning or breathing and heart beats. Amid rising violence towards queer people and the loss of queer spaces from our communities Lonely Hearts Call is both a lament and a call to connect.

Lou Sheppard’s work is responsive, investigating the material and discursive contexts of a site and their affect on bodies and environments. His research is evidenced through graphic notations, scripts and scores which are then performed in collaboration with other artists and in community gatherings.

Learn more about Lou Sheppard


Access Notes
‍To access Lonely Hearts Call, click the link above on your mobile device. You will be greeted by a landing page with this white text on a gradient of pink and blue:

Lonely Hearts Call is an interactive artwork by Lou Sheppard featuring morse code messages with light flashes and vibrations. Users with light sensitivities are invited to turn the brightness down on their device as needed and desired. Be sure your phone is not on “Do Not Disturb,” and turn on notifications to feel vibrations.

When you click “Don’t you wanna dance?” you’ll be taken to a black screen with a blurry dot flashing in morse code–the blue flashes are slightly longer, and the pink flashes are slightly shorter, representing dots and dashes. Your phone will vibrate to the rhythm of the morse code composition, which spells out lyrics from Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” You are invited to hold your mobile device close to you to feel the vibrations and witness the colourful strobe lights.

After the composition is over, you can click “Don’t you wanna dance?” again and you will be taken to a page where you can enter your own lyrics (with no punctuation, letters only), and create your own haptic morse code composition.

Need support? Click here!

Entangle your tender mushroom hyphae with the soul of the universe and enter the Mycelial Dimension.

Ruth Marsh (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working in immersive, digital, world-building; installation and drawing based practices. They are a non-binary person of settler ancestry and are based on unceded Mi’Kmaq territory in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (also known as Halifax, Nova Scotia). They are interested in playfully queering the intersections between DIY culture and science fact/fiction/fabulation to ponder positive mutations and imagine-with bodies and environments.

Learn more about Ruth Marsh


Access Notes
You can only access Mycelial Dimension on a mobile device with the Instagram app. 

To access Mycelial Dimension from this website:
• Click the link above on your phone, it will open the Instagram app
• Click “Continue” to accept the Terms & Conditions.

Need support? Click here!

DX Drone Machine
This contemplative interactive musical web instrument is built upon a library of contact microphone recordings from the RCI (Radio Canada International) radio towers, that can be played in real time by multiple people from around the globe. Just as EM waves are not constrained by the boundaries of nation states, this project invites people from various parts of the globe to play together across borders, conjuring the ghosts of radio towers and contemplating the molecular memory of that metal.

Learn more about Amanda Dawn Christie

Remembering Her Voice
In this augmented reality piece Jordan invites you to come sit at his grandmother’s table. For him this was a place to learn, reflect and grow. He learned so many stories while visiting his Nan over games of radio bingo, cups of tea, moose pie, tea buns and even rolling cigarettes. This piece brings one of Jordan’s circular paintings to life and provides a deeper look into the usual 2D pieces he is known for.

Learn more about Jordan Bennett

Learn more about Jennifer Willet‍

WHOLE NEW WORLD/FOR SOPHIE is dedicated to the late artist SOPHIE. It is about finding and creating new worlds, as well as a rumination on collective mourning.

Learn more about Séamus Gallagher‍