Tristan Sauer

New Media Artist and Curator Middlebrook Prize Winners

  • Toronto ON

Tristan Sauer is a new media artist and curator interested in physical computing, wearable technology, and sculpture.

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Biography

Tristan Sauer is a New Media Artist and Curator critically interested in technology and capitalism, viewing their relationship as a potential modern-day Pandora's box. His work explores the intersections between our digital and physical worlds, and how an inside-out look at internet culture and the mythologies of the digital can reveal more about the human condition. Working with mediums such as wearable technology, electronic sculpture, and net-art, Sauer explores these topics through an afro-futurist lens imagining and critiquing the outcomes of our relationships with technology on our future.

A graduate of the New Media program at Toronto Metropolitan University, Sauer has presented locally at the Plumb, Meridian Art Centre, Gallery 1313, Whippersnapper Gallery, Lansdowne Station, with The Artist Project and Nuit Blanche. He has curated for Long Winter, Symbicocene Gallery, REEL Asian Film Festival, Xpace Cultural Centre, Ed Video Media Arts Centre, and C MAG.

Areas of Expertise

Electronic Sculpture
Physical Computing
Wearable Technology
Afro-Futurism
Technology and Capitalism
Internet Culture
Net-Art

Accomplishments

Middlebrook Prize, Art Gallery of Guelph

2025

Education

Toronto Metropolitan University

BFA

New Media

2020

Nanyang Technological University Singapore

BFA

Game and Interactive Media Design

2019

Affiliations

  • Long Winter
  • Vibe Arts Emerging Artist Roster

Languages

  • English

Media Appearances

RTA New Media alum’s wearable tech collection brings awareness to police brutality

Toronto Metropolitan University  online

2023-02-28

Tristian Sauer, a new media artist and curator and a recent grad of the RTA New Media program, recently launched Your Life Matters, a collection of wearable tech pieces by blcknbrwn. blcknbrwn is an art collective founded by Sauer and media artist Maziar Ghaderi; Your Life Matters was showcased as part of a fictitious performance piece to shed light on police brutality and the disingenuous intersections of capitalism and social justice at The Creative School’s Innovation Studio.

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Tristan Sauer | VIBE Spotlight

VIBE Arts  online

2021-02-08

On this VIBE Spotlight, we’re shining a light on Tristan Sauer, a writer, sculptor, interactive artist and a new member of the VIBE Artist roster. He recently co-designed the RBC Desire Lines Online Gallery, an online showcase of work created by artists in the Desire Lines program, made possible by RBC.

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Tristan Sauer talks politics, technology and the world of installation art

The Eyeopener  online

2020-02-28

Tristan Sauer didn’t see himself in the new media art world before he came to Ryerson.

“Most of my life, I wanted to go into science,” said Sauer.

He saw himself venturing into the world of zoology, specifically ornithology—the study of birds. But once he got closer to graduation, he digressed as a career in art became much more appealing.

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Conferences

From Self-Teaching to Community Teaching: Critical New Media Perspectives

InterAccess  Online

2024-05-26

Praxis in Presentation – Galleries in Conversation

REEL Asian Film Festival  Online

2022-10-22

Tactical Practice: Digital Art and the Ethics of Design

DesignTO  Online

2022-05-03

Curatorial Projects and Exhibitions

Silent Hands of Sun and Sand

Featuring works by Maria Simmons, Patrick Stochmal, Sherri Hay and Tasman Richardson

Ed Video Media Arts Centre | April 5, 2024 - May 3, 2024

Humanity has long been in conflict with itself for the control, commodification, and plundering of resources. Yet, the one most precious to us is also often the most intangible. Time, the seemingly infinite yet undeniably finite resource we all hold and must manage. Our understanding of time as finite is baked right into how we speak about it. Time is wasted, spent, lost, and killed. We understand at a fundamental level that time is always passing, it’s a core piece of knowledge that drives us to persist, desire, and live. Yet, as sacred a level that we hold time, it is an extremely ephemeral and intangible resource. We cannot mine it, or create more of it, we can only preserve it and watch it move by. The artists in this exhibition have employed time in their work as not just a basis for their mediums, but as the medium itself. They explore time as uncontrollable, a medium that creates, destroys, and simply exists as a part of our lives, world, and understanding of both. With every attempt to capture, respect and understand time, the artists explore unique experiences of the concept of time and how it shapes our very understanding of human existence.

Batteries Not Included

Featuring works by Michelle Cieloszczyk, Connor MacKinnon, Cassie Paine, SpekWork Studio and Lana Yuan

Xpace Cultural Centre | January 13, 2023 - February 25, 2023

Play— an essential part of social development and a cornerstone of childhood. Often experienced through youthful fantasies where we wear the world as costumes: we play house, play jobs, play war. The toy aisle stands split down a gendered middle of blue and pink zones. Batteries Not Included explores how systems of capitalism and violence intersect with play and uphold social norms and dynamics of privilege and power. Through their work, the artists in the show subvert, explore and resist these structures through various explorations, references to and forms of play.

A mark here, again

Featuring works by Alexa Hatanaka, Atleigh Homma, Diana Nguyễn, Emerald Repard-Dennison and Paul Wong

RARARA | August 2022

A mark here, again is an interactive digital exhibition that embraces hyperlocality as an access point for community spaces and cultural networks to coalesce. With the impact of diasporic and multi-generational neighborhoods serving as the initial gesture, A mark here, again considers the resiliency, hope, and futurities that site-specific spaces hold for its growing members. The online exhibition features a mix of archival works and new commissions from Alexa Hatanaka, Atleigh Homma, Diana Nguyễn, Emerald Repard-Denniston, and Paul Wong, highlighting pan-Asian Canadian artists who range from emerging to established. These artists’ works experiment with personal histories and broader shared knowledge to support the social change required to fulfill community needs through an activist lens. A mark here, again is ultimately an offering of place-making as the necessary soil for ancestral intuitions to bind with contemporary connections and allow for mutual care to mature and strengthen.

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Articles

Extra Life

C Magazine

2025

The Data Monarch and the Power Dynamics of the Internet

Trick Magazine

2020

“Own a piece of Internet history!” is the tagline that sits beside the entrance to The Million Dollar Homepage, a website with one million pixels, all for sale for a dollar each. It’s long since been filled with everything from links to games, hidden waldos and a whole lot of ads. Most of the links you can click on are long dead, lost to unpaid hosting and forgotten everywhere except here, where their pixels shine on in Internet history. In a way, each of these pixels represents a plot of land that somebody on the Internet owns. This tiny plot of Internet land that so many lay claim to was one of the first examples of a communal distribution of land on the Internet.

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