- City
- Toronto
- Booth
- Nathan Phillips Square
Booth 1-2
Rina Chen
Rina Chen is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher working across code, print and weaving. She explores forms of design that enable oscillation between digital systems and material processes, as well as the social and economic implications of these exchanges.
Through visual coding, she explores the generative potential of algorithmic processes as an extension of longstanding human traditions of pattern-making and systems-based creation. Her risograph works operate as bridges between computational processes and physical presence. These prints often become draft notations or blueprints for further textile explorations through weaving, where patterns share algorithmic structures across media. Her work is informed by an interest in free/libre and open-source culture, collaborative knowledge-making, and the social implications of emerging technologies.
As an early-career artist-researcher, Chen’s professional and academic backgrounds include designing cars at Toyota and global backend and application design with UNIQLO; she has studied political science at Queen’s University and is currently pursuing a Master’s of Design in Digital Futures at OCAD University. Alongside her studio practice, Chen’s research critically examines the relationships between craft and technology through histories of textiles, computation, information theory, and decentralized systems like blockchain.
