Daniel Canty is a Montréal-based writer and film director who works in literature, film, theatre and design, and new media. Canty collaborated with the pioneering multimedia studio DNA Media in Vancouver, and directed the inaugural issues of Horizon Zero, the Banff New Media Institute’s website on the digital arts in Canada.
Canty’s first book, Êtres Artificiels (Liber, 1997), is a history of automata in American literature. From 2002 to 2005, Canty co-directed the poetry magazine C’est Selon. He has devised three award-winning collaborative books: Cité selon (2006), on the city; La Table des Matières (2007), on eating; and Le Livre de Chevet (2009), on sleeping. He has also translated books of poetry by Stephanie Bolster, Erin Moure, Charles Simic, and Michael Ondaatje.
Canty has directed several short films. His latest, Longuay (2012), melds the gaze of an ancient French abbey with that of a tablet computer. His Cinema for the Blind (2010) lets the audience slip into oneiric depths behind the cinema screen. Canty also conceives poetic interfaces for the Web and live interaction. He built Bruire (2013), an architectural poetry-reciting machine, and wrote the libretto for Operator (2012), an alphanumeric automata by Mikko Hynninen presented at Lux Helsinki.
Short-listed 2014 Alcuin Award for Book Design in Canada ( Fiction category)
Winner 2012 Grafika Grand Prize (Typography)