Daniel Canty
Daniel Canty is a writer and director living in Montréal, and working in literature, film and new media.
From 1996 to 1999, Canty was part of Vancouver’s pionneering multimedia studio, DNA Media, where he notably wrote the documentary Masks: Faces of the Pacific (1998), and directed the interactive adaptation of Alan Lightman’s novel, Einstein’s Dreams (1999). He then went on to create the framework and direct the inaugural issues of the Banff New Media Institute’s (BNMI) webspace on the digital arts in Canada, Horizon Zero (2001). Over the following years, he wrote, acted as a consultant or directed numerous, art-based or culture-related interactive projects.
Canty’s first book, Êtres Artificiels (Liber, 1997), is a history of automata in American literature. From 2002 to 2005, he co-directed the poetry magazine C’est Selon, He now directs the “La Table des Matières Imprint at le Quartanier.” To date, two collective books have been published, Cité selon (2006), on the city, and La Table des Matières (2007), on eating. Le Llivre de Chevet, on sleeping, will come out in early 2009. The graphic excellence of these books has been recognized by many awards. He also directed, with artist Dana Velan, Nor (2004), an art book on the “ideas of north” of 28 Canadian artists and writers. A novel, Wigrum, collectionneur ordinaire, will be published in the fall. It is the evolution of a web project first conceived in 1998.
Canty is a director of short films, most recently, Antipodes, a brief documentary on painter Rafael Sottolichio, featured on www.whoweare.ca, and two experimental shorts, Méduse and Hôtel de la Mer, portraits of the dreamtimes of an empty cinema and a derelict hotel. This fall he will shoot the short fiction Cinéma des Aveugles, (Cinema for the Blind.)
An occasional commissar, Canty co-founded the Temps Zéro – Mutating Cinemas section at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montréal. He has been programming the BNMI’s Interactive Screen with Susan Kennard for the last three years.
