Matt Soar

Associate Professor & BA Program Director at Department of Communication Studies
Concordia University

Matt Soar’s scholarly background is in media and cultural studies. He is also an intermedia artist, graphic designer and writer. His research and creative activities center on design, visual culture, cultural production, the politics of representation, and media literacy.

As a co-director of Korsakow development, he promotes film-making using Korsakow software. The open source software was invented in 2000 by Berlin-based artist and documentary filmmaker Florian Thalhofer and is used to create data-driven interactive narratives. Matt’s recent Korsakow film, Ceci N’est Pas Embres, has just been selected for Montreal’s International Documentary Festival (RIDM), as has Florian’s new film Money and the Greeks. Matt has previously given Korsakow workshops at Concordia, York University (Toronto), NYU, USC, RMIT (Melbourne), and the University of Western Sydney to name a few. He has also contributed an essay about web docs and Korsakow to an upcoming scholarly collection called New Documentary Ecologies, which should be published by Palgrave 2014.

Matt has additional films credits, including Outsiders, an animation for which he did the voice-over narration, reached the final six in the Short Film competition at Sundance London 2013. Excerpts from Ceci N’est Pas Embres also appear as a contribution in Quickened: A Lyrical iBook for Postindustrial Doing, designed and edited by Adrian Miles (RMIT), and published in the online journal Axon. (The iBook requires an iPad for viewing.)

As a curator, he recently supervised AMERICAN COLOUR, a two-channel installation created by artist Josh Bonnetta. The show ran from February to May, 2013 in the Communication Studies Media Gallery at Concordia. He also co-curator, with Perry Bard, of DEMOCROSCOPE, a group video/installation show at the Joyce Yahouda Gallery that ran in November 2012, and he contributed to Archives & The City at the FOFA Gallery in October 2012.

As a Principal Investigator on a SSHRC Research/Creation in the Fine Arts grant he has worked on Proof in Process: An iterative approach to experimental film and video in the age of transmedia, now entering its third year. His teammate is Monika Kin Gagnon with collaborators Florian Thalhofer, Phil Hoffman, and Midi Onodera.

For more, see Matt Soars work at my page on the Research@Concordia portal.