Dot Starkey

Dot Hexadecimal Starkey is a visual artist and electronic music composer and founder of the Lost Angles music label. 

Active in the online vaporwave music community since 2015, her background began years earlier playing keyboards in the Cybergoth scene for Hätz and Apriorism before shifting into sample based music and working on live visuals for artists in Toronto. Working with cassettes, VHS tapes, and scratched up CDs to produce recontextualized music, she is currently shifting back into the elements of Cybergoth and Aggrotech music to bridge the two arcs of her career into something new.

Her visual work has been featured in performance art pieces such as “Toxic People” by Esther Splett and Tiffany Paige under their act Jilted Ex, as well album releases for Toronto based artist Leucrocuta, most recently “Chasity Platinum: Dead Scream” released on Grimalkin records. She

is currently working on a multimedia sculpture and sound project titled “The Unicorn In Stasis” through her residency at DAÏMÔN.

“The Unicorn in Stasis” is an exploration of the transgender self through the lens of common 1990s science fiction tropes and aesthetics.

Using 3D art to produce sculpture, imported videos and photographs, and fleshing out a virtual space with animation, the piece represents the isolation and frustratingly clinical nature of medical transition.

The subject of the piece is suspended in a liquid stasis, akin to how transgender individuals are examined both by doctors and the public alike, during their most vulnerable years.

Music accompanies the piece as well as sound design evocative of brightly lit and saturated science fiction, pulling from elements of Blade, Aeon Flux, and Johnny Mnemonic.

As rave music in the genre of breakbeats and digital fusion genres are strongly associated with transgender artists the piece ties these visual and sonic elements together to achieve its vision.