Sylvia Grace Borda


Sylvia Grace Borda is a Canadian artist working in photography, video, and emergent technologies. Outside of her artistic practice, Borda has worked as a curator, a lecturer, a multimedia framework architect with a specialization in content arrangement and production. Born and raised in Vancouver, Borda is currently based in Vancouver, Helsinki, and Scotland. Borda studied anthropology and fine art at the undergraduate level at the University of British Columbia and digital media at the graduate level, also at the University of British Columbia and photography and video at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally.

Artistic practice

Borda achieved early recognition for her photographic practice. Her first exhibition was a national, juried photography exhibition entitled Photoperspectives '88, which ran from October 28 – November 27, 1988 at the Presentation House Gallery. Adjudicated by Sheila Hall, Geoffrey James, and Russell Keziere, the project was supported by the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Recreation, and Culture. the North Vancouver Community Arts Council, and the District of West Vancouver. Writing for the Vancouver Sun, Elizabeth Godley praises Borda's work as " an otherwise deadly serious exhibit with her cheerful view from Grandma's Window."
More recently, Borda has produced works as a part of Frontiers in Retreat that captures "intimate insights into Finland’s agricultural resources and peoples. Only recently has Finland shifted significantly away from an agrarian-based country where nearly 60% of the population was involved in agricultural production up until the mid 1950s. portrayals of farming reach far beyond the romantic stereotypical notions viewers might hold ranging from new perspectives on Lapland to intensive farming or green house production." This is in line with her recent interests in "re-addressing public views about specific socio-cultural landscapes and how cultural symbols may be co-opted to form new media platforms," an interest which has generated an array of stereo-works and multi-dimensional tableaux produced in Google Streetview. The innovative Farm Tableaux won her the 2016 Lumen Prize, and was a product of the "first explorative artworks in Google Street View in partnership with Google Business StreetView photographer, John M Lynch."

Curatorial work

https://web.archive.org/web/20070806142020/http://www.ontherundesign.com/
http://centrea.org/2003/05/esc-electronic-social-culture/

Research and teaching

Borda has held teaching positions as Senior Photography Lecturer at Salford-Manchester University from January – September 2010, MA Convenor in Photography and Imaging at Queen’s University Belfast, and Associate Researcher in New Media at the University of British Columbia. From 2009–2016 Borda was an Honorary Research Fellow in Visual Arts at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
As an Associate Researcher and Lecturer in Digital Arts at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Borda examined how "cognitive responses evolve over time in relation to a media stimuli" as part of her broader research interests in "examination of popular culture and in the emergence of convergent graphical user interface systems." At the same time, Borda conducted research on "accessibility standards, tools and the plausibility of their facilitation for projects supporting cultural collections". She has participated in research projects on PDA deployment and cultural/visual recognition, examined the Canadian Heritage Information Network's mobile technologies and new wireless enabled catalogue, and was the architect behind EdWeb, an "educational on-line content generation tool, designed to meet England's National Curriculum needs for school children aged 8–13."

Publications