English 
French As part of the podcast series, “ArtsAbly in Conversation,” Diane Kolin interviewed David Bobier, a Canadian media artist, founder of VibraFusionLab in Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada.
This post presents the resources that David Bobier mentioned during the conversation.
David Bobier
David Bobier is a self-identified hard of hearing media artist and is the parent of two deaf children, now adults. His work has been exhibited internationally and has been the focus of prominent touring exhibitions in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. He has established and is director of VibraFusionLab, which emphasizes a holistic approach to considering vibration as a language of creation and exploration and to investigating broader and more inclusive applications of the sensory interpretation and emotionality of sound and vibration in art making practices. Through VibraFusionLab and in his own art practice Bobier aims at creating opportunities of greater accessibility in art making, art appreciation and in viewer experiences of art practices and presentations.
Learn more about David Bobier and VibraFusionLab
VibraFusionLab
VibraFusionLab is an innovative centre for arts-based vibrotactile research and creative practice. It is a media arts centre providing opportunities for the creation and presentation of multi-sensory artistic practice, partnering with other arts and technology-related organizations in order to achieve this. As an interactive creative media studio VibraFusionLab promotes and encourages the creation of new accessible art forms, including the vibrotactile, and focuses on inclusive technologies that have the potential of expanding art-making practices in the deaf, blind, disabled and hearing communities, and for creating more inclusive experiences for deaf, blind, disabled and hearing audiences.
Visit VibraFusionLab’s website
Jesse Stewart
Professor and Head of Music at Carleton University in Ottawa, Jesse Stewart is an award-winning composer, percussionist, visual artist, researcher, and educator. He has published widely on subjects including jazz, improvisation, hip hop, and experimental music in academic journals including American Music, Intermedialities, Black Music Research Journal, and Contemporary Music Review. He co-edited a book about Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument. He has given over 100 public talks at conferences, colloquia, and festivals around the world including numerous keynote presentations. He is committed to fostering community health through music, art, and education.
Learn more about Jesse Stewart
Gordon Monahan
Gordon Monahan’s works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.
Visit Gordon Monahan’s website
Marla Hlady
A Senior Lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, Marla Hlady draws, makes sculpture, works with sites and sounds and sometimes makes video. Hlady’s kinetic sculptures and sound pieces often consist of common objects (such as teapots, cocktail mixers, jars) that are expanded and animated to reveal heretofore unexpected sonic and poetic properties often using a system based approach to composition.
Centre[3]
Centre[3] is an artist-run centre that supports artists in the creation, production, presentation, and dissemination of contemporary art, and fosters engagement with the wider community through artistic social practice and research. Centre[3] is committed to positive social change through artistic social practice among artists, community members, and organizations.
Erin Ball
A neurodivergent, double below knee amputee, Erin Ball is a circus artist based near Kingston, Ontario, and the artistic director of Kingston Circus Arts. Erin created a course to strive to welcome the Mad, Deaf, Neurodivergent, Chronically Ill, and Disability community into the realm of circus (and movement-based) arts as artists, audiences, etc. Erin travels internationally to perform, teach, and collaborate. Erin has been a movement-based artist for 15 years and has co-produced and co-choreographed shows with numerous artists and access providers.
Travis Knights
Born in Montreal, Canada, Travis Knights is a Tap Dancer, a Performer, a Choreographer, a Speaker and a Believer. Travis Knights is realizing his dreams, pounding rhythms on wood floors all over the world. His talent and dedication have earned him audiences in Shanghai, Dusseldorf, Paris, New York, and Vancouver to name a few. He had the privilege of performing in Tandem Act Productions’ ‘Diary of a Tap Dancer’ at the Apollo Theatre, and the touring show ‘Wonderland: A Tap Tribute to Stevie Wonder’, created by Ayodele Casel and Sarah Savelli. Knights was a featured Tap Dancer in the Opening Ceremonies to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. In the same year he toured North America with the raucous and rowdy internationally acclaimed Australian Tap Dance show, Tap Dogs.
Visit Travis Knights’ website
Carbon Movements – Excerpt of an article about the show by Liz Nicholls
The concept for the show is the inspiration of the ever-adventurous choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, the co-founder of Good Women Dance (and poised to be artistic director of the Brian Webb Dance Company). And it stars Deaf performer Connor Yuzwenko-Martin. Two years of research and experimentation in the making, Carbon Movements enlists the technological ingenuity of David Bobier and Jim Ruxton of the VibraFusionLab in Ontario. We of the audience wear Woojer vibrotactile belts, high-tech seatbelts wired to the central score. At dramatic moments in the production, in sync with loud industrial buzzing sounds, your ribcage vibrates, in a rhythm linked to the unfolding visuals on the stage.
Chisato Minamimura, Scored in Silence
“Scored in Silence” is a solo digital performance that unpacks the hidden perspectives of Deaf people from the handful that survived the horrors of the atomic bomb atrocity in Japan in 1945. Survivors of the A-bomb are known as ‘hibakusha’. The work is based on Minamimura’s research and original film of elderly Deaf people with lived experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the heart of the show is cutting-edge visual and vibration technology: Woojer straps worn by audience members offer a tactile vibrotactility of the haunting sound composition; and Holo-Gauze a projection material that creates a 3D holographic illusion, reflecting the live performance, sign-mime, animation and film footage of Deaf hibakusha.
Learn more about Scored in Silence
Jenelle Rouse
Jenelle Rouse, an independent non-traditional applied linguistics researcher and body-movement dance artist. She has more than a decade experience of teaching under her belt as a classroom teacher at a bilingual school for the Deaf in Ontario Canada. In addition to Ontario Curriculum, she also taught American Sign Language Curriculum classes for various grades. Jenelle currently brings a BA with honours (Toronto), BEd – a member of the President’s List (Oshawa), MA and PhD (London) into her passion of learning, collaborating, and creating. Other than an advocator with a variety of “behind the scene” roles, Jenelle works part-time as an adjunct professor of several post-secondary institutions for at least three years in some provinces to engage candidates in their respective fields. She also works as a co-director of various groundbreaking projects as well as a member of change-making organizations. Although American Sign Language is a main focus, Jenelle is a firm believer that having sign language as a base is of utmost importance for every Deaf child’s ability to access to a variety of contextual resources that recognize and promote their sign language acquisition.
Learn more about Jenelle Rouse
Jim Ruxton
Jim Ruxton received a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa. After working for a few years as a high frequency design engineer he began to pursue his interest in the arts by attending and graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Since then, he has been working as an artist and engineer in installation, performance, theatre, dance and film and collaborated with many other artists throughout his career. His company, Cinematronics, has helped numerous artists realize their technically ambitious projects and provided special effects for numerous films, tv series, commercials and science museums. Jim uses electronics in multiple creative ways, whether it be in creating interactive systems, developing evocative lighting installations or robotic systems. He is also a member of the VibraFusionLab Collective. Jim is passionate about bringing people together from different disciplines to facilitate work that extends beyond traditional genres.
Tangled Art Gallery
Based in Toronto, Tangled Art + Disability is boldly redefining how the world experiences art and those who create it. We are a not-for-profit art + disability organization dedicated to connecting professional and emerging artists, the arts community, and a diverse public through creative passion and artistic excellence. Our mandate is to support disability-identified artists, to cultivate Disability Arts in Canada, and to enhance access to the arts for artists and all audiences.
Deirdre Logue
For the past 25 years, Deirdre Logue’s experimental film and video works have focused on the self as a subject. Using ‘performance for the camera’ as a primary mode of production, her self-portraits investigate what it means to be a queer body in the age of anxiety. Logue has produced upwards of 60 short works and several video art installations; Enlightened Nonsense (1997-2000), ten hand- processed works about childhood worries; Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes (2003-2007), twelve reflections on aging, breaking down and reparation; Id’s Its (2012), an ambitious suite of thirteen installations exploring the power of the abject; and Euphoria’s Hiccups (2013) an intentionally intense site specific work incorporating 20+ small video screens, still imagery, sound and psychoactive plants. Logue has also worked in collaboration with artist Allyson Mitchell to produce Hers Is Still A Dank Cave: Crawling Towards a Queer Horizon (2016) an experimental narrative video collage, green screen mash-up of lesbian ontology and queer utopia.
John Gzowski
Composer, sound designer, musician and instrument maker John Gzowski worked on over 300 theatre, dance and film productions for which he has done composition, sound design, live foley, live music and as musical director. He has played banjo for opera in Banff, studied Carnatic classical music in India and played oud and guitar in jazz and folk festivals across Canada and Europe. His theatre work has won him 6 Dora’s, from 18 nominations for companies like Stratford, Shaw Festival, Luminato, National Arts Centre, the Mirvishes, MTC, the Arts Club, Canstage, Soulpepper, Dancemakers, Red Sky, Tarragon, Factory Theatre and YPT. Gzowski has played on numerous CD’s, with recent releases with Patricia O’Callghan, Tasa, and Autorickshaw as well as a Juno nomination with Maza Meze. He has run Canada’s first microtonal group, touring Canada playing the works of Harry Partch, composed and performed with several new music groups and worked as co-artistic director of the Music Gallery.
Ailís Ní Ríain
Ailís Ní Ríain [pronounced A-lesh Knee Ree-un] is an Irish composer and writer. Musically, Ailís works broadly in the areas of concert music, music installation, electroacoustic and music-theatre. Her interdisiplinary approach has led to numerous collaborations with writers, dancers, performers, visual and theatre artists. Her musical work has been commissioned, performed and broadcast worldwide. In 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers and a portrait album of her work was released by NMC Recordings in 2023 receiving many favourable reviews.
Visit Ailís Ní Ríain’s website
Vanessa Dion Fletcher
Vanessa Dion Fletcher is a neurodiverse artist from Lenape and Potawatomi. Her family is from Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiitt (displaced from Lenapawking) and European settlers. Reflecting on an Indigenous and gendered body with a neurodiverse mind, Dion Fletcher looks for knowledge in materials and techniques. Since 2017, Dion Fletcher has used porcupine quills as a primary medium, creating two-dimensional quillwork pieces and expanding the medium through photography, sculpture and performance. Dion Fletcher teaches community workshops in quillwork, beading, and creative writing. She has been working with TDSB schools since 2009 and began partnering with Blank Canvases on elementary school murals in 2025. She regularly teaches studio and seminar classes at OCADU, McMaster University, and Toronto Metropolitan University.