Jonathan Carroll is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in interactive digital media, music, and performance art. Carroll creates work about labour, technology, and play, with a specific interest in exploring small-scale social histories about these themes. He is currently developing an augmented reality project about the history of illness in his family resulting from industrial waste at the former site of the Sydney Steel Mill in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Collaboration is central to Carroll's practice, whether working with other artists in co-creation or engaging audiences through interactivity and participation.
Carroll attended OCAD University from 2011-2016, where he co-founded the performance art collective Tough Guy Mountain. The collective's work has been supported by the New Museum, the AGO, Rhizome, Eyelevel Gallery, Trinity Square Video, and Emmedia Arts. From 2018 to 2024, he collaborated with Cat Bluemke as SpekWork Studio, creating video games primarily about labour issues. Their work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Milan Machinima Festival, the Art Gallery of Regina, and Interaccess.
For the past decade, Carroll has developed digital art presentation and exhibition applications for galleries and institutions, including Trinity Square Video, Long Winter, and through a five-year Digital Strategy Fund grant at the Mackenzie Art Gallery.
Jonathan Carroll is a multidisciplinary artist working in interactive digital media, music, and performance art, exploring labour, technology, and play through small-scale social histories. Currently developing an AR project on illness linked to industrial waste in Cape Breton. Collaborative practice includes co-creation with artists and audience participation. Exhibited at Venice Architecture Biennale, AGO, and more. OCAD alum; co-founded Tough Guy Mountain and SpekWork Studio.
An ongoing project developing a sound art composition and digital performance tool. The VR software samples environmental sounds and processes them into musical sequences.
A 2:24 animation captured in Unity game engine, using assets from the popular video game Assassin's Creed. Part of a series of interactive "essays" that employ game assets as a lens to investigate representations of history in interactive media.
A 2:08 animation captured in the Unity game engine, using assets from "Gigco: Escape the Gig Economy," a project exploring the gig economy and automation.
Trailer for a VR documentary about frontline workers in Toronto. A street nurse, harm reduction nurse, and social workers discuss mounting precarity due to austerity, vicarious trauma, and compounding social and political pressures. Interview content is expressed through interactive metaphors in VR.
https://spekwork.itch.io/tap-cop
A browser-based idle game exploring themes of defunding the police and reallocating resources to social programs.
https://spekwork.itch.io/coop-copter-scabs
A helicopter simulator created during a game jam that coincided with a refinery lockout in Regina. Players assume the role of a helicopter pilot hired by refinery owners to transport replacement workers across picket lines. The game highlights the risks of unsafe practices by untrained workers, while offering the alternative choice to join the picket line and prevent disaster.
An exploration of art on the blockchain featuring 3D scans of property markers from rural Nova Scotia, minted as interactive objects on the Tezos blockchain using hicetnunc.xyz.