Portrait of Don Ritter,

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Don Ritter is a 2024 winner of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Video directed by George Fok.

A presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.

The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm’s-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) “to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.”

For more information, visit: https://en.ggarts.ca

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Transcript:

As a child, I really was a pyromaniac. And my largest fire, I secretly started when I was six years old. I started a large collection of 40 trees that were adjacent to my father’s lumber company. Fifty years later, I started using fire in my artwork, specifically projections onto buildings. At that time, though, I was really trying to use fire as a symbol. Specifically, fire as an ancient symbol for death.

After I finished studying at University of Waterloo, I then began my graduate studies at MIT, and that was the first place where I had an opportunity to combine my interests in art, psychology and electronics engineering. And then eventually I started incorporating interactivity into the work, which today is being called artificial intelligence.

But a real pivotal moment was a class on interactive music systems, where I was paired with a pretty famous musician from New York named George Lewis. And the goal was I would create an interactive video system that we’d control by his improvisational trombone playing. A lot of my works are using elements that maybe contrast each other from aggressiveness to some things that are gentle.

But in my writings, I write about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, and specifically about the human condition. When I did my psychology degree, my specialization was in social psychology, and social psychology is concerned with the individual. So, things like racism, sexism. These are these are fields of investigation. My interest has always been: why are these humans doing such evil things to each other?

But in a way, I guess I’m making a small attempt to encourage people not to be so aggressive towards each other, but I’m purposely doing it in a really provocative way. Everything I do, I’ll say it’s play. I can play with stuff, but it’s serious play.

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