While the festival may be over, Team Vector is pleased to announce that we were awarded the Media Projects Grant from the Canada Council to the Arts, to all artists who have not received payment for the festival to date (we're still working on it), please stand by. We are adjusting artists' fees based on this new development.

We are grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support with this project.

Team Vector will now be working on new programming and our catalogue/ journal for a fall release.

Well friends, Vector 2013 is done, and we've finally begun editing and posting our documentation today.

We begin with our photographic documentation for the entire festival, which you can find on our new flickr page.

Also, after much discussion, Team Vector has decided to leave this tumblr site up as a document of how Vector first came together and as an archive site for the first edition of the festival.

We've relocated our activities to a new Team Vector Blog, which will now house our updates, calls, news, documentation and more.  So give us a follow or pop by now and again to see what the members of Team Vector are up to.

Vector 2013 was the end of a long road for us, but we have also agreed that it was just the beginning of a longer journey together.  In the fall we will be launching the first edition of the Vector Annual, a digital and / or print journal and catalogue documenting Vector 2013's proceedings, as well as housing critical writing on intersections between game and art cultures.

Vector 2013 was a smashing success!  We want to thank all of our artists/ volunteers/ panelists/ curators/ moderators/ venues/ sponsors and audience members for making Vector 2013 one great weekend full of conversations about game based artworks.   Over the next days and weeks, Team Vector will be posting highlights of the festival on the vector site, and will be making announcements related to new programmes we're developing for exhibition/ showcase outside of the festival proper.

Last night we had a great turnout for our opening reception and Queen West game art crawl here in Toronto last night.  Visitors followed Team Vector curators from Interaccess (Other Worlds Exhibition) to Propeller (net.works Exhibition), and finally onto Bento Miso for the Ludacy Exhibition.  Special suprise guests from NYC Corset Lore and glomag provided some live chipmusic at the event at Bento Miso.

Team Vector is thankful to all of you who came out and showed your interest and support in the festival.  And guess what? There's still two and a half days of programming left to go!!

For more info on what's happening, you can download a PDF of our schedule, or pick up an Vector Festival Event Guide at Interaccess, Bento Miso or Propeller.

Also, please note that if you're planning on coming to any of our screenings or performances (these events are ticketed) that our online advance sales are now closed.  HOwever, tickets for all of these events will be available at the door, with screenings costing $5 and performances $10.

Join us tonight at 5pm at Bento Miso for our first panel discussion.  Games +Art: Play +Practices, an examination of the relationships between game players, game designers and game art makers. After the panel, come over to Propeller for our machinima screening Meditations on the Medium, exploring the relationships between games, art, and machinima.

Finally after the screening, join us at Interaccess for Playing Personae, and evening of performance centered around gender issues in gaming culture.

Join Us for another day of excellent art works!

We've officially begun our programming for Vector, with our day zero screening: Stranger Comes to Town, the Avatar and Indentity. Thanks to our programming partners VideoFAG!

As Vector unfolds this weekend, please use the hashtag #vector2013, and talk to us via twitter at all of our events!

All pass holders can pick up their passes at Propeller at any time during the festival, or at any ticketed events at the door.

Vector begins tomorrow with our special screening Co-Presented by VideoFag.  A Stranger Comes to Town: The avatar and identity, begins at 7pm at Propeller, at 984 Queen St. West.  Tickets for the screening are $5 and can be purchased on our eventbright, or at the door.

Propeller is also home to the net.works exhibition (which we finished installing tonight, pictured above), a survey exhibition of a wide range of creative practices centered around games.  In addition to screenings and exhibitions, Propeller also plays host to the pop up shop, which will now be selling Local No 12's great card game about video games; Metagame

We believe that metagame is the perfect game to be promoting at the festival as it is designed as a means of creating a critical dialogue about games between game players.

** Also we were just featured on Akimbo.ca, an arts, culture and technology site in Canada.  You can read it here!

With a little over 24 hours until our first event, Vector has already been receiving some attention from media outlets.

Creative Applications.net posted this Interview with Vector Co-Director Skot Deeming yesterday on the origins of the festival, the state of the 'new arcade' and issues of representation in gaming.

And Toronto Magazine Broken Pencil posted this interview this morning.  Talking about the state of the medium as an artform and how we might interpret that.

And If you're coming to Vector this weekend, and want to tweet about it. Please tag us (@vectorgameart) in your tweets. or use the hashtag #vector2013.

We want to hear from you, and if you have questions, we'll respond right away! 

It's getting so close now we can taste it!  Team Vector has spent the past several days installing exhibitions for the opening receptions and art crawl which is on Thursday at 7pm, starting with Interaccess and moving to Propeller then finally Bento Miso.  We have a few surprises in store for attendees as well.

Just a few quick updates.

All level 3 passes are now SOLD OUT!  As are BOTH the glitch.jam and the chip.jam workshops!  However there are plenty of Level 2 passes left as well as spots in our Board Game remix.jam workshop and our micro twine.jam workshop.

As as a teaser for today, we'd like to show you a preview of some of the work from Vector's Ludacy exhibition, happening in the new gallery/ arcade space at Bento Miso. Ludacy is a bit of an experiment, conceived by Team Vector member Christine Kim.  No stranger to the world of game jams and incubators for first time game makers, many of which take artists and encourage them to make games; Christine wanted to do something a bit different.

What happens when you take game makers and ask them to make pieces of new media/ game based installation art?  This is the central question in the Ludacy exhibition.  Christine invited three DIY game makers in the Toronto scene: Damian Sommer, Cale Bradbury and Alex Martin and has been working with them on taking their games off screen and into gallery space.

Last night, Team Vector began to install artworks for the exhibitions.  Speaking of exhibitions, today we are going to discuss the Other Worlds Exhibition, which will be at InterAccess for the duration of the festival.

Co-Curated by Prosthetic Knowledge (Rich Oglesby) and mrghosty (Vector Co-Director Skot Deeming), Other Worlds features.9 works that revolve around the construction and exploration of digital spaces.  Here is a preview of two of the pieces you find at Other Worlds!

In the Night Journey, players find themselves into a vast black and white landscape, without any explanation. Leaving the players free to explore the mountains, desert, sea and forest, the game uses an interesting mechanic to encourage players to take it slow.  Whenever the player moves to quickly, the game begins to blur, obscuring the detail of the environment, encouraging a slow, exploratory and introspective interaction with the piece. By BIll Viola with programming and design by Tracy Fullerton.

Team Vector is very excited to show this piece, as it is the first time it has even be publicly available for play in Canada. 

Ed Key & David Kanaga's Proteus was recently made available on the Steam network as has been the subject of rave reviews from game fans and critics alike.

Players find themselves on an Island, free to explore its hybrid pixelated/ 3D beauty.

Other Worlds also features the work of: Luis Hernandez, Alex Myers & Jeff Thompson, Lea Albaugh, Arcane Kids, Alan Kwan, Cyril Lecomte-Languérand, and Axel Shokk.

Due to time constraints and a rather hectic install schedule, we cannot talk about all the other great art work at this exhibition right now.

With four days left until Vector 2013 gets underway, we're hauling equipment, installing work, and otherwise running around the city getting everything in place.

Today we received an update on one of the performances happening at our Playing Personae: Embodied and Engendered Performances event, which is on Friday February 22nd at 10pm.

Daniele Hopkins and Kyle Duffield will be performing Itagaki Interface, a work in which the artists use their own bodies to challenge exaggerated representations of the human body in the fighting game Dead or Alive, by Tomonobu Itakagi. The game features hyper feminized and hyper masculinized bodies in one on one combat.

In the performance, the artists wear modified game controllers on their chests, essentially acting as human game controllers.  The audience is confronted with the challenge of having to play one another in the game, by manipulating the controllers worn by the artists.  This piece is a hybridization of 70s body-centric performance art and new media interactive performance, challenging us all to consider the ways in which our bodies are represented in interactive media. Daniele and Kyle have been posting process pictures on their blog recently, but today they posted a final photo of the working prototype of the controller bra.

Team Vector is very excited for what will prove to be a challenging and confrontational performance. Join us for Playing Personae on Friday February 22nd, where artist Angela Washko will also be performing her work "Chastity and The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft".

We've created this handy one page PDF of the entire schedule of events for Vector 2013 for easy reference. Please note that our initial schedule we posted yesterday had an error in it.  The Feminism in Games and Games Art Panel is from 3-5 on Saturday, Feb 23rd, not from 2-4. 

With less than a week until Vector's first film screening, A Stranger Comes to Town: Identity and the Avatar, we'd like to take the time to update you all on a few things.

1.) Vector Student Level 3 Passes have been sold out!  However, Students can still take advantage of our Level 1 (all screenings and performances) and our Level 2 (All screenings, performances, plus 1 workshop) Student Passes.    Click here for All Festival Pass info.

2. Both glitch.jam and chip.jam are almost sold out!  If you wanted to learn how to make video game glitch art or low-fi 8 bit electronic music, we recommend you reserve your spot now.

3. And finally, we just wanted to share with you some of the amazing work that will be featured in Vector's Pop-Up Shop, located in the front of Propeller during the festival.

Pop Sandbox's new arcade cabinet for their political game PipeTrouble, which takes a classic video game and uses it to discuss the politics of natural gas and oil pipelines, will be featured in the Pop Up Shop area!!!  The Game officially launches on Feb 27th, but you can play it for free all weekend long at Vector in advance of the launch!

In addition to Pipetrouble, the Pop Up Shop area will feature zines, CDs, DVDs, games and more by game artists who are participating in the festival as well as other members of the International game art community.

Anna Anthropy, whose game Dys4ia is part of our networks exhibition has sent us copies of her choose your own adventure zines: The Hunt for the Gay Planet and Starwench.

As well, Santa Cruz based artist Max Capacity has sent us copies of his pixel/ glitch art zines: Pixel Smut and his Apezilla Double Digest.

Copies of these zines and other great collectible works by artists and designers from around the world will be available for purchase (in limited supply) during Vector 2013.

Team Vector wants to thank the Liaison of Independent FilmMakers of Toronto for allowing us to rent equipment for Vector 2013 at a discounted rate.  We very much appreciate the support we've received from community organizations in Toronto, including LIFT.  Without the support from these groups, we would not have the resources necessary to run this festival.

Thank You LIFT! and Thank you everyone!  Vector is now only 7 days away, while we have a long way to go to be ready for the fest, rest assured we are getting there. It's going to be a great 5 days!

If you're planning on attending Vector, we have a variety of passes for our ticketed events, which can be purchased on our event bright page.  Vector Festival Passes offer you the opportunity to attend all of our events with affordable prices.

Partnering with OCADu's Digital Futures Initiative, all students at OCADu can recieve $7 off the price of any student festival pass, making it affordable for those living on a student budget.  OCADu students need only select and purchase the pass, and enter the code: OCADUVECTOR during the checkout phase.

In addition, we are also offering discounted workshop fees for all members of Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Center.  Card carrying IA members can select the workshop they wish to attend, enter the code, IAMEMBER to recieve $5 off. 

We have a very special announcement to make to all OCADU students who wish to attend Vector 2013. Last Night, OCADU's Digital Futures Initiative signed on to be our latest sponsor!

Due to a number of circumstances, we have had to relocate our special pre-festival screening, Stranger comes to Town: Identity and the Avatar from VideoFAG, to Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts. The screening will take place at the same time as previously scheduled (7pm) and will be remain a co-presentation between VideoFAG and Vector. In this program, the politics of the avatar in relationship to identity will be explored by examining massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), technologies of biometrics and the border that separates our real and digital identities.

In order to ensure that Vector runs as smoothly as possible, Team Vector is currently seeking volunteers. There will be a range of volunteering duties to be covered, including gallery attendants, door staff for ticketed events, technical assistants for installing and dismantling artworks, staffing the pop-up shop and more. We depend on our volunteers to ensure the festival runs smoothly, successfully and safely.

If you are interested in volunteering for the Vector, please send an email to: [email protected] with a note about what you would like to do to help out. Please use the subject line Vector Volunteer.

Or you can attend our upcoming Volunteer Information meeting on Monday, February 11th, at 7pm at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts at 984 Queen St. W.

All volunteers are given the opportunity to attend and participate in all of the events at Vector free of charge in exchange for their time and work.