Lauren Warrington, 2025 Winner of the InterAccess Media Arts Prize
InterAccess is pleased to announce Lauren Warrington as the 2025 winner of the InterAccess Media Arts Prize.
Lauren Warrington is an artist and researcher from Saskatoon who works with sculpture and digital space. Her practice is grounded in her experiences as a "mixed race" Chinese Canadian on the prairies and explores the complexities of how cultural memory is created, stored, and concealed, as well as the possibilities of its recontextualization through digital and physical forms. Through her work, she positions the body as an active site of memory and identity formation; it is both a repository and a medium through which diasporic identities are negotiated and expressed. Her research on archives and materiality challenges pre-existing historical narratives and reframes the significance of personal and collective memories, which move through bodies, objects, and spaces as critical sites of knowledge.
Warrington's practice contributes to a broader discourse on emerging technologies as sites of access and speculative infrastructures that have the potential to hold and transform cultural knowledge. Her installations consider how technological systems are mobilized to articulate diasporic subjectivities as layered, iterative, and moving. Through the interplay of virtual and material forms, she builds spaces that offer frameworks for continuous re-making, relationality, and narrative multiplicity.
Lauren holds a Master of Visual Studies in Studio Art from the University of Toronto, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and a Bachelor of Science in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of Saskatchewan. Lauren is also a founding member of Biofeedback Collective, a three-member artist collective focused on creating programming for underrepresented and emerging artists on the prairies.
As the 2025 prize winner, InterAccess will present a solo exhibition of Warrington’s work, On Tracing Memory, opening in January 2026.
We would also like to congratulate the following prize finalists: Aliyah Aziz, Marko Cindric, & Jasmine Liaw. Finalists will be featured through public artist talks and performances in Winter 2026.
Aliyah Aziz is a multidisciplinary storyteller, poet and musician who uses light to talk about shadows, and sound to physically move them through us. She uses disruption as a tool of resistance, embracing glitch and static to channel the friction that exists between the surface and the depth of the technology that we engage with. Aziz’s expressions take many forms, from multimedia moving collages of archived material, experimental sound and poetry compositions, interactive media installations, to performance art. She considers her practice to be an exploration of identity and the power that stories hold, from the history of our shadows to the projection of our futures.
Aziz works with experimental sound techniques and audio archives such as voice loop samples on magnetic tape, as well as electromagnetic frequency statics made audible in combination with spoken word recitations. She is currently exploring live performance in 5.1 using different instruments she has built to direct the power of the “auditory glitch” as a liberating disruption in confronting naturalized instances of dehumanization of the “Other”. Aziz finds that cultural resilience is only possible through resistance, and her work is how she does this, using sound as a material force.
Marko Cindric is a new media artist and researcher interested in the overlooked presuppositions and ideological residues that inadvertently shape discussions on the climate crisis. Synthesizing themes of degrowth, decentralization, and ancestral lifeways, his practice orients itself toward disrupting the age-old tendencies of science and technology toward control, decontextualization, and forceful quantification of a living, interconnected world. Throughout his research, he grapples with a central tension: can our digital technologies be emancipated from the ecocidal military-industrial paradigm from which they emerge? And how can we reformulate our questions in ways that de-centre the human, that we may better honour the sovereignty of our more-than-human kin.
Cindric’s creative practice may, to some, appear paradoxical: while digital technologies serve as his media of choice, his works at their core are deeply critical of the techno-solutionism and computational thinking that pervade contemporary idea-space. For his purposes, the digital is a Trojan horse, an often already-open channel of communication through which to consider topics otherwise prone to aversion or repudiation: challenges to anthropocentrism; interconnectedness, interdependency, and the porousness of the self; ecological unravelling and the societal presumptions (including proposed solutions) that perpetuate it; unquantifiability, uncontrollability, and the sublime; spirituality, psychology, and mortality; and the contextualization of a single human lifespan within the broader cycles and gestures of deep time. Cindric wields human-made systems as his materials in the interest of redirecting attention to, and rebuilding kinship with, the natural and living ones that inspired their invention. As such, relationality, impact, and emergence are recurring motifs within his practice.
Cindric holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in New Media from Toronto Metropolitan University. He is currently pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Digital Media at York University, and is a research assistant at the SLOlab (Systems | Life | Ontologies) directed by Jane Tingley and Dr. Roberta Buiani.
Jasmine Liaw is an interdisciplinary artist, director, and designer in contemporary dance performance, new media art, and experimental film. With Distinction, she holds a BFA (Honours) in Integrated Media from OCAD University and a Diploma Certificate from Conteur Dance Academy. Evidenced in collaboration and community, her work leans into the complexities of transcultural narratives intersecting her Hakka diaspora, and queer theories in temporality and ecology. Retracing oral histories and heritage, she chooses to create relationships between the moving body and new media to unravel auto-ethnographic research and challenge entrenched methods of production.
She is deeply grateful to have presented her work and collaborated with artists both locally and internationally. Between 2023-2025, select presentations include Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, The Asian Arts & Culture Trust with Holt Renfrew, InterAccess's Vector Festival, United Contemporary, Northwest Film Forum, Gallery 44, Pleasure Dome, Images Festival, RT Collective and more. With F-O-R-M Recorded Movement Society’s Technology & Interaction Program, she completed a two-year research exhibition project as their inaugural artist-in-residence. She has also participated in residencies with Toronto Dance Theatre and CanAsian, Canadian Dance Assembly in partnership with Dance Works Toronto, Public Visualization Lab in collaboration with Duplex Artists Society and Shoes Off Collective. This summer, she will expand her research in durational performance and eco-somatics at AADK Spain, curated and facilitated by Dr. Raegan Truax. In April 2025, she published her first research paper in time displacement and dance-technology with Kronoscope: Journal for the Study of Time, led by Emily DiCarlo. Liaw is a recipient of the 2023 Emerging Digital Artists Award presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video for her experimental film work, xīn nī 廖芯妮.
ABOUT THE INTERACCESS MEDIA ARTS PRIZE
Since 1990, the InterAccess Media Arts Prize has been granted annually to a graduating student whose work exhibits excellence and innovation in new media practice. Nominations are adjudicated by InterAccess's Programming Committee, who select a prize winner to be awarded a solo exhibition opportunity, a complimentary one-year studio membership, and professional development and mentorship. Finalists receive a complimentary one-year studio membership to InterAccess and an opportunity for a public artist program.
Header image of Lauren Warrington, For What I Could Not Hold (2025), 3D-printed and glazed raku fired tang yuan, pencil on synthetic paper, found lightbox. Courtesy of Toni Hafkenscheild.