Tristan Sauer
New Media Artist and Curator | Middlebrook Prize Winners
Toronto, ON, CANADA
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 (7)
Electronic Sculpture
Physical Computing
Wearable Technology
Afro-Futurism
Technology and Capitalism
Internet Culture
Net-Art
Accomplishments (1)
Middlebrook Prize, Art Gallery of Guelph (professional)
2025
Education (2)
Toronto Metropolitan University: BFA, New Media 2020
Nanyang Technological University Singapore: BFA, Game and Interactive Media Design 2019
Affiliations (2)
- Long Winter
- Vibe Arts Emerging Artist Roster
Links (1)
Languages (1)
- English
Media Appearances (3)
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.
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.
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.
Conferences (3)
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 (5)
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.
Colt Classics
Featuring William Luai, Morse Faaks, M.I. Blue, Meghan Cheng, Immigrant Muscle and Joy ponyHAUS | May 1, 2022
Sculpted in Our Image, Forged in Our Minds
Featuring Sarah Boo, Mads Brimble, Benjamin Chang, Cezar Mocan and Andy Wallace InterAccess | Dec 8, 2021 - Feb 5, 2022 Inspired by the myth of the golem and the robot, both reflections of humanity’s dreams and simulations, the exhibition will explore what we can learn about our world and relationships to others from simulated realities. Eroding the dichotomy of the physical and the virtual, this exhibition explores the dreams and simulations of the computer age, and how they attempt to imagine new methods of digital co-existence, with the aim of envisioning more equitable, diverse, and safe futures online.
Articles (2)
Extra Life
C Magazine2025
The Data Monarch and the Power Dynamics of the Internet
Trick Magazine2020 “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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