There’s no doubt that Ryan Stec is a key figure in Ottawa’s (even Canada’s) electronic arts community. He’s a busy man, but I was lucky enough to catch him for an evening phone call last month to talk about some of his works and his view of the techno-art community.
Ryan Stec makes electronic art.
“I don’t like the term new media art,” he said. “[Electronics] is a whole other area … there are codependent values in the work. It’s about democracy, experimentation and deviation rather than creating art.”
Stec is the creative director at Artengine, a non-profit, artist-run centre located at Ottawa’s downtown Artscourt that supports arts and artists exploring technological innovation.
He came to Ottawa from Winnipeg in 1996 to study communications, and got involved in the arts world in 1998, he said. He has worked mostly with video art, making short films, feature documentaries, as well as experimenting with live video and visual design.
He said it’s easy to talk about his CN Tower project as one of his proudest achievements. For Toronto’s 2009 Nuit Blanche Festival, Stec collaborated with DJs Jokers of the Scene and If Then Do as well as a Toronto radio station to create a sound and light show using the CN Tower as his canvas. Stec lit up the CN Tower from top to bottom with pulsing, colourful lights. At the same time, bystanders could tune in to the radio station to hear synchronized music.
Now, Stec’s time is divided between his job at Artengine, his personal endeavours, and his partner and their new baby.
“There’s a division between my artistic director job and my personal artistic vision. There’s a disconnect, but lots of overlap,” he said in an interview.
Stec said the project taking up a lot of his time these days is a prototype of something called a ‘Light Radio’ that would implement and expand on the materials used in the CN Tower project.
He is collaborating with the band If Then Do to create a light radio installation with a sound component.
Stec said it is in the early development stages. “It’s not really that crazy of an idea,” he said. “Ideas are extremely valuable, but the challenge is to implement them.”
He said it will probably take until the summer to complete the project.
Stec is also involved in the technological arts community in Ottawa.
Stec said he thinks the community is growing, but said “it’s a very elusive thing to measure.”
For Stec, electronic art projects like the CN Tower and Light Radio don’t really fit into the traditional artistic discourse.
“We’re trying to redefine what that category is. We don’t know where we fit in galleries … It can also frustrate us because it doesn’t make it easy,” he said. “We don’t want to talk about whether what we do is art or not.”
He prefers to look at it as a way of breaking down boundaries and pushing things in new directions.
“It’s about redefining our relationship to technology,” he said.
