Byron Peters

As an artist and filmmaker, I work with video, sculpture, sound, text, drawing, and networked technologies, often in long-term collaborations. I’m interested in technologies – be they physical devices or frameworks of thought such as mathematics, economics, and mythologies. My work explores how power and imagination operate through these forms, and how we might reshape them towards more liberatory futures. 

Currently, I'm developing archive-based films that build on my collaborations with the late Sid Chow Tan, weaving together the ethos of community television with ongoing histories of Vancouver's Chinatown and Downtown Eastside. In the past, my films have screened at festivals including Images Festival, True/False, DOXA, and International Film Festival Rotterdam. I’ve received a Giverny Fellowship from the Terra Foundation for American Art, and my writing has appeared in Fillip, SFMoMA Open Space, and other publications.

I've exhibited locally at Or Gallery, VIVO, Centre A, Access, The New Media Gallery, and Artspeak, and also at The Darling Foundry, Para Site, ICA Miami, The White Building, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. I've had the pleasure of speaking about this work at The New School, UCL, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the London School of Economics. 

In my teaching, I aim to create spaces where students can tell stories that matter to their lives and collective futures. As a recent T&L Commons Generative AI Champion, my research explores tools that resist the extractive logics of artificial intelligence. I also teach in Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts (IDEA) at KPU and in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at UBC. I received my MFA from California College of the Arts.