The BBMC (Black Bag Media Collective) is a Toronto-based artists’ collective dedicated to creating innovative and experimental work at the intersection of art, technology, and live performance. The BBMC also produces rock shows, recordings, and live events.

EXHIBITS

BBMC are hosting exhibits across our virtual platforms, including:

NIGHTWALKER

Nightwalker, a photography exhibit by Marcel Levandier

Nightwalker is a collection of black and white photographs by NL based artist, Marcel Levandier. This exhibit explores the nocturnal urban landscape of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. These images document the darkness–street lights illuminating lone figures on rain-soaked streets, objects left in empty parking lots, ghostly reflections on the surface store windows. The photographer captures the beauty and loneliness of the night, and alludes to the stories that lurk in the shadows. Nightwalker was inspired by the Artist’s nightly walks around the city, where he observes the interplay of light and darkness, the contrast of movement and stillness, and traces of human presence and absence. Premiered at the Wrong Biennale.

Nightwalker is featured on Odyssey’s Exhibit B Gallery in Second Life:

SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Odyssey/74/36/22

and in the Odyssey Gallery in VR Chat (search “Odyssey” in the Worlds Menu and look for Odyssey’s orange logo).

Read more here: Nightwalker

HYSTERIA

Hysteria, a machinima by JE Solo, installed on Exhibit A on Odyssey in Second Life.

Hysteria is a dark and satirical animated short that blends magical realism with real-life experience to explore the medical gaslighting of women in Western healthcare. When Mabel’s treatment is abruptly taken away, her search for relief spirals into the surreal. What begins as a fight for survival turns into an uncanny transformation when Mabel discovers unexpected superpowers. Created using machinima, Hysteria is a bold critique of how women’s bodies are controlled, questioned, and misunderstood.

Hysteria is adapted from Solo’s short story of the same name. The short story is about to be released in the Second Edition of Solo’s short story collection Nature, Human (House of Zolo, 2025).

SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Odyssey/35/95/24

Visit lizsolo dot com for more.

VR FORWARD

Debora Alanna, The House of Zolo, Lisa Timpf, TWK Templar, L. X. Beckett, Yuan Changming, and JE Solo.

Artists utilizing Virtual and Augmented Reality platforms as workspaces create unique laboratories for experimentation, innovative sites for performance, and new places of contact. With technology quickly advancing, and online platforms ever rising and falling, Virtual Reality is volatile territory. Artists intrepidly navigate the boundaries of these virtual spaces, seeking to expand beyond them as they create new and exciting ways to experience art and the metaverse.

VR Forward explores poetry, art, and the poetics of space by bringing the work of Canadian artists into virtual reality spaces. This series of installations and events premiered as part of The Wrong Biennale – an independent, multicultural, decentralized and collaborative international art biennial. Artworks remains online, installed in Odyssey’s gallery spaces.

Visit VR Forward installations in Second Life here: SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Odyssey/29/168/21

Find VR Forward in VRChat by searching “black hole experience” or “Starring You…” in the Worlds Menu.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

We find ourselves moving back and forth between digital creation and the more traditional practices that first shaped our understanding of art making. While emerging technologies and virtual environments have expanded how we imagine, build, and collaborate, we feel an insistent pull back to the slower, tactile rhythms of traditional practice. BBMC artists find themselves returning to the grounding gestures of writing, of photography and print, the intimacy of recording sound, and the immediacy and risk of the live stage.

This shifting terrain feels less like a divide and more like an evolving conversation between mediums. As we reignite our exploration of traditional practices, we continue to look towards virtual spaces and digital technology as tools to support, present, and circulate our work. Most recently, this has led us to invest in research on three.js interactive systems, augmented reality, renewed efforts in audio recording, and alternative approaches to staging live work.

Results from our ongoing research will be shared in 2026.

HOUSE BAND

Our house band is Tallulah AF (aka Tallulah & The Man). Releases coming in 2026.