Five Canadian Artists Reimagining Technology in Contemporary Art
A growing number of Canadian artists are redefining how technology operates within contemporary art—not simply as a digital tool, but as both subject and material. Across practices that span photography, sculpture, installation, and moving image, technology appears not only on the screen but within the very substance of the work: as sculptural materials, rendering engines, algorithms, and as interactive elements. What distinguishes these artists is not just their engagement with technology, but the sophistication with which they translate its structures—its speed, its fragility, its architectures of perception—into compelling visual and physical forms. Each, in their own way, demonstrates an exceptional sensitivity to how technological systems shape contemporary life, positioning their work at the forefront of current artistic discourse.
Potrait of Sara Cwynar captured by CULTURED Magazine, September 2024.
Sara Cwynar, a Vancouver-born multimedia artist whose work in photography, video, and installation engages deeply with the circulation and accumulation of images. For over a decade, she has developed a distinct visual language rooted in the collection, archiving, and re-presentation of found materials, drawing from both dated and contemporary commercial imagery. Her work reveals the shifting power of images over time—their ability to seduce, their inevitable obsolescence, and the rapid cycles through which they are replaced. Increasingly, her practice reflects on how concepts of agency, desire, and power are constructed and reproduced through visual culture. In recent years, Cwynar has expanded into immersive installation and moving image, as seen in projects such as Baby Blue Benzo, where obsessively constructed environments merge photography, film, and performance. Her compositions often draw directly from internet search engines and algorithmically generated terms, translating the logic of digital sorting into physical form. Through this process, she slows down the speed of contemporary image culture, offering a critical reflection on the excess and structure of an image based economy in the digital age.
This summer, Cwynar will present Baby Blue Benzo at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto as part of MOCA’s Digital Futures Residency, transforming Floor 2 into a hybrid theatre, photo studio, and showroom. Working across photography, film, performance, and a collage-like treatment of space, she disassembles images to reveal the power they exert over personal and collective imagination.
Portrait of Emily Hermant courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver.
Emily Hermant, born in Toronto and currently based in Vancouver, explores the material afterlife of digital communication. Her practice centers on the breakdown and repurposing of communication systems, resulting in works that embody what she describes as a “soft collapse,” where fragility and resilience coexist. Using recycled communication wires, Hermant produces intricate compositions that often depict celestial imagery, sourced digitally and manipulated through glitching software before being translated into tactile form. The resulting works resemble woven textiles, their richly textured surfaces built through the meticulous placement of coloured wires. Her sculptural works further extend this inquiry, constructed from the plastic casings of ethernet cables and presented as multi-sided objects that reveal both surface and internal structure. The presence of cable jacks in these sculptures underscores the latent communicative function of the materials, even as their original purpose has been displaced. Hermant’s work invites a reconsideration of the physical infrastructure underpinning digital life, shifting attention from the immediacy of virtual experience to the slow, material processes that support it.
Emily Hermant is the inaugural artist in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s new Vancouver Now! exhibition series, highlighting artists whose work is both timely and closely tied to this city. On view August 7–November 22, 2026.
Vilhelm Sundin, COPENHAGEN C, 2021, Video Projection and HD-Screens courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery.
Vilhelm Sundin, Swedish-born and Vancouver-based, produces work that operates at the intersection of photography, film, and simulation, creating scenes that blur the boundary between observation and fiction. Using industry-standard architectural rendering and CGI software, Sundin constructs highly detailed, photographic-like scenes and durational videos that depict familiar yet subtly impossible scenarios. His works often unfold within environments inspired by everyday spaces—offices, alleys, and urban streets—infused with a quiet, cinematic atmosphere. In The Office, First Light and The Office, Night, he repurposes architectural visualization tools to stage psychologically charged moments: early morning light illuminating empty cubicles, or a solitary figure lingering late into the night, suspended in a state of exhaustion or introspection. In The Alley, he extends this approach through 3D rendering software, layered overtop of video and photographic documentation. His rendered environment is animated by understated human gestures, such as a figure walking while reading a newspaper or another absorbed in the glow of a phone. Drawing from photography, cinema, and painting, Sundin’s work achieves a heightened realism that is subtly destabilized by its artificial construction, reflecting the increasingly mediated nature of contemporary experience.
Jon Rafman, Dream Journal 2016–2017 (installation view at Sprueth Magers, Berlin), 2017. Video with sculptural seating, variable dimensions. Courtesy the Artist.
The work of Jon Rafman, based in Montreal, offers a sustained exploration of the emotional and existential dimensions of life shaped by digital technologies. A multidisciplinary artist working across video, animation, photography, sculpture, and installation, Rafman has gained international recognition for his investigations into the communities and narratives that emerge online. His early and ongoing project Nine Eyes of Google Street View exemplifies his approach, as he navigates the automated imaging system of Google Maps to collect moments of unexpected humanity, vulnerability, and beauty. Acting as a kind of digital flâneur, he reframes these machine-captured images, revealing both the visual language and limitations of the technology that produced them. His later works expand into video essays and immersive installations that explore niche internet cultures, gaming environments, and the psychological landscapes of online life. Works such as Codes of Honor and his Dream Journal series combine real and virtual imagery, drawing from mythology, gaming, and digital subcultures. Across his practice, Rafman examines themes of alienation, nostalgia, and longing, asking what it means to exist within a world where technology structures daily experience and memory is both endlessly stored and perpetually destabilized.
Azza El Siddique, Fade into the Sun, 2021. Steel, expanded steel, water, unfired clay slip, bisque-fired slip clay, enamel spraypaint, slow-drip irrigation system, heat lamps, bakhoo, sandalwood oil, 7.62 x 7.62 x 3.05 m. © Azza El Siddique. Installation view at MOCA, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Azza El Siddique, based in Toronto, approaches technology through a research-driven and materially expansive practice that merges scientific inquiry with sensory experience. Her installations are immersive environments composed of diverse elements, including steel, clay, water, scent, and 3D-printed forms, often described as laboratory-like or otherworldly spaces. Rooted in explorations of mortality, entropy, and systems of power, her work draws on personal history, including her Sudanese heritage, as well as ancient Egyptian and Nubian traditions. El Siddique frequently integrates technological systems into her work, from custom-built irrigation mechanisms that slowly dissolve clay vessels to heat-activated processes that release scent. More recently, she has engaged directly with artificial intelligence, developing and training her own models to generate speculative imagery. For El Siddique, technology is neither purely functional nor purely conceptual; it is an active participant in processes of transformation, shaping both the form and meaning of the work.
Together, these artists offer a compelling portrait of how technology is being reimagined within contemporary Canadian art. Their practices move fluidly between digital and physical realms, revealing technology not as a distant abstraction, but as something embedded in the images we consume, the materials we encounter, and the environments we inhabit. In doing so, they expand the possibilities of what art can be in a time increasingly defined by technological systems—rendering those systems visible, tangible, and open to reflection.