Steev Morgan was born in Montreal in 1957 to British immigrants.

He is a multiple scholarship recipient and graduated with honours from both Algonquin College Fine Arts (’80) and Ontario College of Art, Photo Electric Arts Department (’85) as an inter-disciplinary artist working with video installation, interactive multimedia and performance.

Following graduation he worked as a film and animation technician at OCAD while continuing to make films, videos and multimedia installation works. His videos have screened in Canada, Japan and several European festivals. They have also been broadcast on Japanese television as well as the CBC and TVO. His videos for the Kensington Market punk band Bunchofuckingoofs enjoy a modest popularity on YouTube with several thousand hits each.

In the 1990s Morgan exhibited a number of interactive installations, both solo and in collaboration with other artists. He participated in Welcome to the Electric Skin and Toronto Cybercity, two intercontinental
telepresence installations with his pieces Iterative Environment for Video Robot and CyberCity Hall.

In 1995 and 1997 he curated and exhibited in two group shows of Canadian new media artists at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City (Net@Works and A Life of Its Own).

Often using iterative techniques such as looping, rescanning and feedback Steev Morgan’s work frequently explores the reflexive nature of reality; the cybernetic bootstrapping process whereby consciousness emerges from mere perceptions and thoughts, which in turn begets reality.

His most recent piece, Believing Makes it So, was commissioned by the Images Festival and Charles Street Video in Toronto for a residency on the theme CURSE!. In this piece Morgan departs stylistically from his early abstract visuals and sound to reference the genre of television advertising. The result is a wry “(mis)infomercial” extolling an alterative paradigm to the new world order.

Steev lives with his family near Perth, Ontario. He teaches animation in local schools and youth centres with the assistance of grants from the Ontario Arts Council’s Arts in Education and Arts Education Projects.

Artist Code: 206