Jol Thoms
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A re/searcher thinking, feeling and sensing beyond-the-human.
Jol Thoms (b. Toronto) is an artist, sound designer, experimental theorist, and researcher. His audio-visual compositions, lecture-performances, and educational experimentations emerge from site-based fieldwork in remote ‘landscape-laboratories’ situated at the forefront of experimental sciences and environmental stewardship. His practice challenges the 'scientific cosmology' of the West and its meta/physics that invents an indifferent, disenchanted universe - believed to be a key source from which the exploitation and expropriation of Earthly bodies is permitted.
Thoms is the founder of 'Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space' relaying artists and musicians compositions 2.5kms deep in - and addressed to - the Pacific Ocean during each full moon.
His practice addresses our troubled relationships with nature, technology, and the cosmos by signalling beyond the purely measurable and quantifiable, and by thinking, feeling, and sensing with more-than-human worlds.
Academic qualifications
- PhD, University of Westminster, London, UK 2021
- Meisterschüler, Städelschule, Frankfurt aM, DE 2013
- Honors BA, University of Toronto, CA 2009
Teaching and supervision
Studio Lecturer
Research interests
Thoms is a transdisciplinary generalist interested in creative and ethical approaches to sentient landscape entities. How can we meet Earthly sentient beings on their terms, in their times, outside of anthropocentric, western, patriarchal and capitalist systems? His practice includes communing with mountains, ice-shelves, forests, and Ocean(s) at sites of western sciences. His research as comparative-cosmology therefore crosses and reconfigures boundaries between the non/human, the ineffable, and the scientific using situating practices and disruptive strategies from quantum field theory, environmental humanities, Indigenous & ancestral knowledge of place, mysticism, non-duality, and feminist anti-colonial science studies.
Thoms’ critical practice advocates for an expanded understanding and ethical engagement with diverse knowledge practices by attending to radical pluralities of sites, phenomena, and experiences in and beyond the measurable and quantifiable.
Featured publications
2022:
Doubling Down on Wicked Problems: Ocean ArtScience Collaborations for a Sustainable Future
In 'Frontiers in Marine Science' Vol.9
2021:
Diffractive Aesthetics and Holographic Literacies
in “Diffractive Reading” New Cultural Humanities, Rowan & Littlefield Pub.
2018:
Phase Velocity and F-T-L in the GVD
in “The Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture”, Fiona Crisp and Nicola Triscott, Eds. Published by Arts Catalyst.
2017:
Intra-acting With the IceCube Neutrino Observatory; or, how the technosphere may come to matter
with Sasha Engelmann, “Anthropocene Review: The Technosphere Issue” - Sage Publishing.
Grants and awards
2022:
Project to Realization Grant for Radio Amnion from Canada Council for the Arts
Commissioning support for one year of operating the project
2021:
Project to Realization Grant for Radio Amnion from Canada Council for the Arts
Commissioning support for one year of operating the project
2018:
Creating Earth Futures project Grant from Royal Holloway University's Centre for the GeoHumanities
A project grant for collaborative the fieldwork and research that led to 'Viriditas: In The Future Perfect'
2016:
MERU Art*Science Award Ed. IV (Bergamo Scienza & GAMeC Bergamo)
Award to produce and acquire a new video work shot in Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso: G24|0vßß
Publications and research outputs
Article
Jung, Julia; Gupa, Dennnis; Hash, Colton; Thoms, Jol; Owens, Dwight; Threlfall, John and Juniper, Kim. 2022. Doubling Down on Wicked Problems: Ocean ArtScience Collaborations for a Sustainable Future. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9, 873990. ISSN 2296-7745
Thoms, Jol and Engelmann, Sasha. 2017. Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory; or, how the technosphere may come to matter. The Anthropocene Review, 4(2), pp. 81-91. ISSN 2053-0196
Book Section
Thoms, Jol. 2021. Diffractive Aesthetics & Holographic Literacies: Transcoding the Gigaton Volume Detector [A Diffracted Photo-Essay]. In: Kai Merten, ed. Diffractive Reading: New Materialism, Theory, Critique. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 235-248. ISBN 9781786613967
Professional projects
For more than two years Jol was awarded Canada Arts Council funding to commission new artists compositions which he transmitted deep into the Pacific Ocean during each full moon. This cosmopoloitcal sound arts project 'Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space' was presented in TBA21's Ocean Space in both the 59th and (opening ceremonies) of the 60th Venice Biennale(s).
From 2020-2022 Thoms participated in the residency and touring exhibition project 'Drift: Art and Dark Matter' generated by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and Nobel award winning SNOLAB. In 2021 his new installation 'n-Land: the holographic (principle)' has been shown across Canada in the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University, Kingston (2021); the Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, Vancouver, CA (2021); Carlton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2022) and in the Art Museum, University of Toronto (2022).
Selected Exhibitions, Screenings, Performances
'Ocean Evening', 60th Venice Biennale Opening Ceremonies, Ocean Space (2024)
'Postscript of Silence', McaM Shanghai (2023-24)
'The Measure of the World' , RADIUS Centre for Art & Ecology, Delft, NE (2023)
Coventry Biennial, Coventry, UK (2023)
23rd International Triennale Milano – 'Unknown Unknowns: An Introduction to Mysteries', IT (2022)
Radio Amnion: An Oceanic Hearing during ‘Ecological Futurisms’ – AmbikaP3, London
Die Vibration Der Dinge – 15th Triennale Kleinplastik, Fellbach, DE
Becoming Fresh and Salty Drops of Water – Ocean Space, Venice, IT (2022)
Othering – Dittrich & Schlechtreim, Berlin, DE
Thoms collaboratively developed and led an experimental ecological arts pedagogy ‘IAK’ for grad and undergrad architect students with artist-architect Tomás Saraceno at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany (2014-16).
Jol's award winning video 'G24|0vßß' was installed alongside work from Susan Schuppli and Ursula Biemann in 'Logics of Sense 1: Investigations' curated by Christine Shaw at Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga (2019)
Thoms participated in the exhibition 'Blind Faith: Between the Cognitive and the Visceral in Contemporary Art' at Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2018)
Research projects
2024-2024:
NaturArchy Mapping Framework
Jol was commissioned by the EU Comission to work on a project reimagining terrestrial representation in light of new legal categories such as 'Rights of Nature', or 'legal personhood for ecosystems'.
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Conferences and talks
2022:
DRIFT with Karen Barad, University of Toronto
Post Keynote conversation at the closing of the DRIFT exhibition in Toronto
2022:
Natrurarchy Summer School, Joint Research Centre/ EU Commission, Italy
Invited as expert speaker on the relationships between ArtScience, Policy, and Climate Catastrophe
2021:
DRIFT Opening Discussion with Denise Ferreira da Silva and Jol Thoms
Thoms and Da Silva discuss the intersections of their recent works exhibited at the Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, Vancouver
2019:
Assembly: Extractable Matters, Arts Catalyst and CREAM, London
Presentation of recent work
2018:
'Behind the Sun' in the Aerocene Symposium during Tomás Saraceno's ON AIR at Palais de Tokyo
A discussion at with the director of the European Southern Observatory and Philosopher Heinz Wismann
2018:
Being In Two Places at Once: art, apparatus, and the geopolitics of remote-sensing. NYU
Thoms, his collaborator Dr. Sasha Engelmann, and Prof. Karen Barad discuss their work in quantum physics and ethics.
2017:
Ecologies of Toxicity
A discussion of DDOS attacks and nonhuman agency at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston
2017:
The Grammar of Things
A discussion and presentation of G24|0vßß at the Society for the Philosophy of Technology, Darmstadt