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Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

In C Magazine’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

Review

Siki N. Soberetonari is a writer and artist living in Toronto, Canada. Her work can be found in _Pitch Black Magazine_ and the _Coming Home_ anthology. Siki is a storyteller at the Toronto Biennial of Art. 

Curated by Nehal El-Hadi, Elicser Elliott’s solo exhibition of paintings features vivid colours, portraying longing memories of the people and architecture of his hometown in Saint Vincent. In _Ramon_ (2024), a man carries a bungalow around his torso like a crossbody bag, and walks away from clear skies and green vegetation. Both hands hold the strap of his bag close to his chest; perhaps he is unsure of this journey? Can he continue to carry this home close to his chest, or will he need to put it down when he arrives at his destination? Elliott’s depiction of Saint Vincent is congruent with the kind of architectural design found across former British colonies. His paintings are replete with dense vegetation and palm trees, streets lined with tar and wooden electric poles, two-storey houses with freshly cut lawns and concrete paved paths juxtaposed with shanty homes built with corrugated zinc and wood, and bungalows with glass louvres and drums to catch rainwater. 

Two paintings face each other on opposite sides of the gallery. The first is _Jo_ (2024), a painting of a giant-sized young girl in a white dress. She sits on top of a shack with her head drooped, carrying a fishing rod. On the opposite side of the room is _Waiting way too long_ (2024), which depicts another seated figure, this time a man, with drooped shoulders amid blurred green surroundings. The paintings share an undeniable resemblance, from both figures’ sagging posture through to the palpable sense of longing invoked by their sulking. Steeped in nostalgic longing, Elliott’s evocative depictions of small gestures across the paintings—a hand clasping a bag, hunched shoulders, and turned backs—ring with the affective life of diaspora migrating to and from Saint Vincent.

Writer

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"Neglected Nostalgia" ran from 20 June to 27 July 2024 at BAND Gallery, Toronto.

_C Magazine solicits online review pitches for publication in C Online on an ongoing basis. We welcome reviews from across Canada and internationally, and are especially keen on reviews that engage with art outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. C Magazine offers competitive compensation to our writers. Email your review pitches to pitches@cmagazine.com._

“Neglected Nostalgia” — Elicser Elliott 

Maya Burns lives in Montreal. She has an MA in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories from OCAD University and a
job at _C Magazine._


The effect of _The Plot_ is similar to a theatre adaptation of an English textbook written, rehearsed, and performed by children in the space of an evening. Emma-Kate Guimond’s video performance possesses the curious quality of being earnestly reverse-engineered from a formula of narrative devices. It’s a little confusing, very delirious, and while I left thoroughly charmed, it would be inaccurate to imply the experience was merely or immediately agreeable. Like a young actor-director supplementing performance with explanation, _The Plot_ demonstrates the expediency of language, but, heavy with words and bloated by suggested meaning, the work also illustrates how easy language is to get lost in.

Extended by its careful installation at Centre CLARK, _The Plot_ rests on the premise of a missing original called “The Source.” Wearing the definite article as a mark of true, almost religious singularity, The Source haunts _The Plot_’s three central characters— “The Protagonist,” “The Writer,” and “The Voice Actor” (later “The Dancer”)—who instead waver in the relativity that comes with being a type. The three actors who play them also do so abstractly, tasked with improvising movement in response to a score that’s not heard in the final edit. Taking turns as “The Teller,” characters narrate themselves and each other in third person, which further muddles their identities, and in a matter-of-fact tone that pairs uncomfortably with their surreal gestural vocabulary of prodded flesh and gaping mouths. The Teller’s version of events is at once suspect—subject to subtle variations between accounts, and the distortion suggested by phones, videoconferencing, and a shift from English to French—and definitive. Wielding momentary narrative control, each Teller adds new terms that throw the story, its characters, and the viewer off-course. Made further duplicitous by the appearance of mirrors, cameras, and screens, _The Plot_ presents a quasi-social exercise, shared by characters who are still “figuring things out” and an audience made responsible for discerning them, in reorienting oneself to unstable meaning and shifting perspectives. 

Soliciting the first of many soon-to-be-subverted expectations, the opening lines of _The Plot_ introduce The Protagonist (twice) and her (then his) desire to make a movie. “What are you scared of?” asks his companionable Dog. Rather than a movie about making a movie, _The Plot_, better predicted by the Dog, unfolds one episode after another in thwarted creative partnerships and projects, beset by ego, insecurity, and questionable intentions. The Protagonist asks The Writer, who “he admires both sexually and professionally,” to collaborate. The Writer wants a new voice (!!), hires The Voice Actor, and schemes to steal his (!!!). As it builds—a process the title highlights—_The Plot_ and its characters assume and shed new significations. The Writer, a Tortured (hot) Genius, squints, presses her fingertips together, and transforms. She directs the Dog, now her evil henchman, to snatch the new voice. Supplanting the subtly inscribed politics of gender and voice with the peculiar moralistic brutality of a didactic myth, this climax—also the Dancer’s origin story— works like many uncanny parabolic and allegorical constructions in _The Plot_; it presents familiarly, in the shape of a story with a message to impart, but it never specifies one.

There’s a pervasive sense of non-resolution in _The Plot_. Every obtuse symbol functions to set up the audience because, as Hanako Hoshimi-Caines writes in the exhibition text, the lost Source is “[a] post-structural prank.” In two text-based companion pieces, Guimond put the video’s non-committal symbolism to writing, with the quality of a cipher. On a table across from the screen, fragments of text laid out like evidence of a crime or findings from an archeological dig suggested a deconstructive approach to the work. In these declarative sentences, apparently action cues or qualifications for _The Plot_ and its characters, I found the promise of an explanation. I took the bait. I contemplated everything I’d ever read, lamented it didn’t amount to more, and then stared at my own reflection. Because, in a tidy encapsulation of the punchline, the surface of the table was mirrored. Bobbing beneath text and its double, my head clouded my reading, a personalized lesson in context-contingency and the mutability of meaning.

Not to be contained to something so tidy as a punchline, this essential meaninglessness is also the medium through which Guimond reflects the messy intricacies of interdependence. After The Protagonist enlists The Writer so as to become the filmmaker he knows he is, and after what’s subsequently referred to as “the dog incident,” The Voice Actor (robbed of their voice) makes a name for themselves as The Dancer and stages a debut in which they perform as The Writer (who stole it). Then, in the final scene, a question comes: “Who is the most relatable character?” Answering herself, The Teller makes an overwrought case for The Protagonist, and I realize he was missing through most of the video. It’s an intelligent caricature of the empty-vessel-main-character. But unlike the trope, Guimond’s Protagonist and his peers are written with decisively indistinct personalities. It’s a credit to their actors and the chemistry between them that The Writer, The Protagonist, and The Voice Actor/Dancer emerge as precise and endearing portraits of insecure youth. From within tender and domineering entanglements, embodied articulations of confusion, impressionability, and self-doubt give a human face to _The Plot_’s pitiless indeterminacy, and emphasize the stakes of bearing witness to it.
 
As a victim of _The Plot_’s practical joke, I was made painfully aware of my preconceptions. The work’s screening environment, which was set up like a continuation of the video’s modest theatre setting, rounded out what was a thoroughly self-conscious experience. Effectively recast from gallery visitor to the role of “The Audience,” and implicated by watching it, _The Plot_ also trained my attention to the act of looking and its consequences. Listening to The Teller expose the interior lives of other characters with an unnerving lucidity I never want turned on me, I appreciated _The Plot_’s fickle provocations to look harder, and then ease up, but never look away; asking first to be figured out, _The Plot_ reveals itself to be unsubstantial but cautions against drawing one’s own conclusions. Completely vulnerable to The Teller’s overbearing gaze, without which they would not have stories, The Writer, The Protagonist, and The Voice Actor/Dancer are caught between the threat of being defined and the necessity of being recognized. I empathize with their predicament, because I am in more or less the same one. We all are. 

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_The Plot_ ran from 18 January to 17 February 2024 at Centre CLARK, Montreal.

_The Plot_ — Emma-Kate Guimond

Feature

Chloë p.f. Lalonde is a synaesthetic artist, writer, cultural worker, and caregiver based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. With a background in art education, anthropology, and art-science practices, Chloë’s research is slow and circular, placing an emphasis on sustainability and accessibility in the arts and exhibitions as places of learning.

The pink moon appears in the early springtime a month following the equinox in the northern hemisphere. In the sky, the moon is not pink: there are no changes in the atmosphere, no astronomical events that affect its colour. This moon is referred to as “pink” because it occurs around the times that pink wildflowers bloom. The strawberry moon then arrives in the summer, followed by the corn moon and the harvest moon, and later, the hunter moon. 

The names given to these full lunar cycles have been popularized by _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, which attributes them to Indigenous cosmologies, and colonial American and European sources. [^1] These vernacular names have been used as a way to keep time, inherently entangled with agriculture. 

_“What’s in a name?”_

In Western astrology, named astrological ages reference the position of Earth in relation to the sun and constellations. As Earth orbits the sun, the sun also moves very, very slowly through space, passing through one constellation (from our point of view) approximately every 2000 years. Each constellation is associated with one of 12 zodiac signs, forming a clock-like calendar, or map, of our accessible/visible cosmos. The characteristics of each sign are said to inform developments in human society and culture. [^2]

The current Age of Pisces is characterized by finding solace in the belief in a higher power and the prevalence of religion across societies. In 2024, some say, we are supposed to feel a shift toward the Age of Aquarius, long revered in Western culture that popularized the term for its utopian promise of social progress, advancements in communication, cognition, understanding, freedom, equality, and justice for all. 

In outlining these periods of time, Western astrology seeks to integrate with the cosmos to understand why everything is the way it is and to predict what will happen. Similarly, how might an artwork’s date, name, and seemingly subjective visual and material language still objectively represent the times? 

For Danny Kostyshin, a potter in his 70s based in Vancouver, dating his work is for more than personal archiving purposes, but to infuse the work with its horoscope, embodying time. Since the ’70s, his pottery takes the forms of plates, bowls, and condom boxes that track gay rights, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, safe sex practices, same-sex marriages, and notable figures who challenged this socio-political progress and who challenged popular culture and his friends. I encountered Kostyshin’s work as part of an artist talk, hosted by Craft Parlour, a working group I was part of that was organized by Rebecca La Marre for her artist residency at Western Front. There, I had the pleasure to exchange with many artists who work with earth, performance, activism, artefacts, language, and symbolism. 

Expanding from Kostyshin’s practice, I am interested in looking at how different elements of an artwork, even its name, can be a “horoscope” of the times. In other words, how might abstract symbols, colours, and forms come together to embody a supposed shift of the times, like toward the Age of Aquarius? 

Élise Lafontaine is a painter who works with synaesthesia. She documents a place in time by painting sound that resonates through her body in places of solitude. Her exhibition at Pangée in Montreal, “Lombrives” (all works 2024), recalled memories of her experience in a French grotto of the same name. Forms, like something bodily, appear and reappear from the form of the grotto itself. In some paintings, like _Le grand dôme_ [_The Big Dome_] and _La Carène_ [_The Hull_] there is a straight line that divides the canvases, sometimes painted, other times cut and sewn. A direct channel of sound, or the indication of a presence. An iris-like form appears on many of her smaller canvases: some are named to illustrate specific sounds and sensations, like _Violet noise_, or times of day, like _Un soir à Ronchamps_ [_A Night at Ronchamps_] and _Un matin à Ronchamps_ [_A Morning at Ronchamps_]. The names of larger canvases like _La Galerie Blanche_ [_The White Gallery_] ground her sound studies in specific parts of the grotto. 

How does a name become infused with, embody, and predict social and cultural developments? How does naming become a way of knowing, a way of timekeeping? 

My siblings and I spend a lot of time colouring with our mother, who, at 54 years old, has quite progressed early onset Alzheimer’s. On her own accord, she will only colour in purples and blues. Every other colour is too bright, overstimulating. She makes a gesture with her hands blocking her eyes and ears, kind of shaking her head. My sibling created a playlist of songs for her, titling it _Purple Period_. We play these songs for our mother because she likes to sing along, and it helps her focus, even just for a few minutes. Now, her purple colouring pencil is a short nub, and she has moved on to pink. My sibling made a new playlist: _Pink Period_. At an exhibition at the Maison des arts de Laval, my mom named elements of the artwork—some marks on a painting were decidedly “stinkles”; another sculpture, “Gus.” Is the naming of astrological ages or artworks just as arbitrary as, for instance, neurodegenerative time marked by pencil crayon colours? 

The poetics of a name insinuate a certain metaphor, calling to the art of language that is embraced by an artist. A name serves to create a digestible, tangible link between an abstract work and a viewer, summing up an idea that grasps at something beyond words, solidifying it otherwise in the colour and form the name represents. Some names point to a story, hint at a way of knowing, or embody a sensation. Some are more poetic, the language and composition of words as much of a work as the artwork itself. 

_“That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”_ [^3] 

Under any name or interpretation, an object or a symbol represents the thing itself; what we call it matters not. In considering form as fact, I turn to intuitive drawing, or doodling, as a way of articulating complex ideas. 

Drawing tests are used in various forms of psychology and neurology to reveal cognition, personality type, and individual ways of perception, and to understand or predict behaviour. In dementia diagnoses, drawing a clock is a defining factor; the numbers trailing off a wonky circle reveal that something in this person’s mind is not working the “right” way. The Rorschach test is meant to reveal something about a person’s mind based on what they see in ink blobs. The Wartegg test asks you to complete an image from a simple shape, and where you place your own lines is meant to reveal something about you in relation to a symbol. Tests like these have often been used as a screening factor, like for arriving immigrants to Ellis Island. But where did the symbols involved in these tests gain their meaning? Who has agreed that a wavy line represents emotional capacities, a square represents the home, or a circle your sense of self? 

#####A visualization experiment, or, a drawing test: 

One shape sprawls; round edges of plump tentacles spread, breathing and absorbing like droplets of water becoming one large, flexible, and changing berry-coloured mass. It moves slowly. 

The other is yellow or red, sharp, edges pointy like a star, spiky like a club. Though it’s no weapon, the prongs deflate quickly on contact, like a blow-up toy castle, or an Inflatable Tube Man. 

One is Kiki; the other is Bouba. The names for either shape are arbitrary, determined by neuroscientists, but they do speak to the ways in which English speakers associate sounds with matter, shape, form, gesture, and colour. The stimuli we absorb exudes through our lives, practices, and works in similar ways. 

Common shapes may often be used as symbols of familiar items, and the act of drawing entices a certain set of questions in the drawer’s mind influenced by the size of the shape, and that person’s general experience. Colours add a layer of subjectivity to a drawing; they may provide direct context tied to a material reality or allow the mind to drift, letting senses, intuition, and somatic movements speak for themselves. 

In a figurative painting, the curtains in it might be blue to suggest sadness, or a chair might be on fire to represent an unstable environment. But in a non-figurative painting, the globular shape at the centre might be a pulsating yellow, not because it represents happiness and warmth, or hope for a dark world, but because this is the colour of the sound the artist knew it to be in part of a grotto, or a sort of chartreuse green because it makes my mom want to crack her foot. 

To what extent are we manifesting our own realities? At one time, someone looked to the sky and said, these are constellations, this is the zodiac, we are in the Age of Pisces, and that prior time, that time full of war, was the Age of Aries. 

And this green makes my mom want to crack her foot, and this sound, Lafontaine knows it to be violet. That there is water, and that constellation, that drawing in the sky, is just a bunch of stars. 

An instinctive impulse, a personal truth that becomes materialized—garnering colour and form to create symbols. Yet, subjective to others: that chartreuse green might not make you want to crack your foot, it might make you nauseous and remind you of the colour of the walls inside your dentist office as the plaque was being shaved off your teeth with a mechanical tool, making your entire spine shiver. 

Colour and form can be considered universally evocative because no matter what the initial intent behind them was, you will be able to connect a memory of some kind to them; without being attached to a visual image, they make a mental one appear. 

Thinking through life happenings in colour, form, and symbols holds space for processing multiple cosmologies and temporalities. Naming, an act of language, further adds a contextual framework, like the names of lunar cycles. 

I think of other forms that are seemingly ubiquitous or universal, like the grid: the city as a grid, our streets blocked out, our electrical systems and circuits, pixels on screens, pattern-making, blueprints, macOS Launchpads, calendars. Each square equal to the one next to it. Could it be a symbol for a utopian dream? The grid as a way of seeing, a drawing tool, was popularized by Albrecht Dürer’s 16th century sighting grid. Ancient drawing machines such as Dürer’s were similarly used to facilitate the replication of images: the void grid to be filled one square at a time. 

Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman’s colourful paintings in “Praises Unsung” (2024) at FOFA Gallery appear as part of softly sculpted blankets and plushy duvets, often formed from grids. The hands of caregivers sometimes extend past the paintings, becoming larger than life. A narrative unfolds in these hands, among the gestures and bodies present: a familial tale, an eldest daughter’s plight, her safe space. Yet, painted white and grey grids on some works’ edges suggest an absence, akin to subjects with missing backgrounds in image-editing software. This could suggest the image in question might be altered further. 

The grid also appears in Catherine Desroches’s delicate drawings in “Dans ses reflets, le Monde est beau deux fois” [“In Its Reflections, the World Is Beautiful Twice”] (2024), also at Pangée. In shades of grey, sepia, and colour, Desroches’s grids become foundational structures in flux with concrete architectural elements such as staircases and archways. Drawing without an intent to instil meaning, Desroches makes marks that serve the containing and suggestive purpose of parentheses. Suggesting a desire to ascend, to transcend, such symbols like the grid carry an objective, dissociating power, one that contains multitudes. 

As a weaver I have an inherent bias in favour of this symbol, this way of organizing time—grids block my patterns, when I follow patterns. I colour-code phrases from my journals within grids, draw grids when I do not know what else to draw. But try as I might, my grids are always wonky, warped, waving. 

In this constellation of ideas, I think I’m getting at seeing the grid as an example of a default symbol, a baseline. But ever more so, intuition and bodily knowledge take over and make the grid something else beyond material structure—its edges aren’t hard and defined.
 
Just as the simple truth of humanity passing through time told by the sun and the moon has been layered with symbols and stories in the stars, the same can be said about abstract symbols in artworks. Artworks, framed by the names they’re given, record intangible information, embodying the time and unpacking the ways in which people can perceive the world. As we see with drawing tests, scientists have already been creating informed diagnoses based on a person’s association to arbitrary colour and form. The associations are there. You guessed right: Bouba is the bulbous shape and Kiki, the spikey one. 

What if, instead of resisting or othering these intuitive urges—wanting to crack your foot because of a certain shade of green—we leaned into them? If the grid represents what we are, have been, striving toward in the Age of Pisces, is going off-grid how we get to the great Age of Aquarius? 

[^1]: Catherine Boeckmann, “Full Moon Names for 2024,” _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, April 11, 2024, [https://www.almanac.com/full-moon-names](https://www.almanac.com/full-moon-names) 
[^2]: Celeste Longacre, “What is the Age of Aquarius?,” _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, June 3, 2024, [https://www.almanac.com/what-age-aquarius](https://www.almanac.com/what-age-aquarius)
[^3]: This line and _“What’s in a name?”_ are from William Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_ (c. 1597). 

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Sensory

Memory

Chloë p.f. Lalonde considers how artworks, framed by their names, dates, and personal and universal symbols, might record intangible information about the period and conditions of their conception, by discussing the works of Danny Kostyshin, Élise Lafontaine, Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman, and Catherine Desroches.

Green That Makes You Want to Crack Your Foot

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From October 19, 2024, to March 16, 2025 at the OAG, Jeff Thomas’s exhibition unveils narratives of resilience and survival against the odds.  


“Stories My Father Couldn’t Tell Me: Jeff Thomas Origin” Opens at the Ottawa Art Gallery

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Only half a decade has passed since the early days of generative AI: the days of multimodal systems outputting six-finger hands, AI sound producing nothing but lo-fi gibberish, and not-so-large language models predicting a character, rather than a word or more, at a time. Though seemingly retro by now, it was these glitches and their aesthetics of misrepresenting the world, rather than accurately predicting it, that opened both technological and social cracks for artistic explorations. Now hidden behind neat interfaces and more “accurate” predictions of the world, AI has arguably been “tamed”... or so they want to make us believe. 

It is a sunny afternoon in early November when artist-researcher Beth Coleman invites me for the inaugural exhibition, symposium, and book launch of her work _Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds_ (2023). Coming in from Montreal, where I am pursuing my doctorate in science and technology studies, it feels like a pilgrimage to arrive at the coach house that is home to the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology. Founded in 1963, the centre is where famed philosopher Marshall McLuhan brought his groundbreaking thinking around media, communications, and technology not only to his students, but to the world. At the beginning of the centre’s written constitution, McLuhan writes that “the object of the Centre is to pursue by a wide variety of approaches an investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies.” [^1] And psychic it is, what I encounter once entering the ground floor of the coach house on that sunny afternoon. 

There, framed, on the far wall, a painting. A distorted grimace. Slenderman-like but with an Afro? A person, maybe. Familiar, yet alien. Features perceptible and, at the same time, distinctly exceeding the expected. What we want to see. What we are trained to see, coerced into looking for. In this moment, trying to decipher what I am looking at, it is not the depicted subjectivities that I relate to in this piece titled _Alice Freeman Engineer_ (2023). It is rather the StyleGAN aesthetic that I am holding on to the most. 

GANs, short for generative adversarial networks, are a particular class of AI systems used to generate a variety of different media ranging from text, to sound, to images, and beyond. The project _This Person Does Not Exist_ famously demonstrates the power of GANs to create photorealistic images—created by software engineer Phillip Wang, the website generates a portrait of a non-existent person on each reload. [^2] Seemingly retro by now, early versions of StyleGAN carry a particular aesthetic. Low in resolution with a sort of washed-out quality to them, outputs were veiled in something akin to Photoshop’s soft-focus filter. Depicted features were lacking clear lines, making the borders of subjects and objects appear to melt into each other and with the background. 

Encountering the materialized StyleGAN aesthetic in a physical painting hanging on the wall of McLuhan’s coach house, I am reminded of the collective artistic research laboratories I cocurated in late 2019 and early 2020. Hosted together with the digital arts and electronic music festival MUTEK in Tokyo and Montreal, we brought together interdisciplinary groups of artists, researchers, and technologists to jointly explore the uses and misuses of early generative AI systems in and through artistic practice. Sparked by the lo-fi StyleGAN aesthetic, the memories of working with artists such as Isabella Salas and Lucas LaRochelle draw me in. 
And this drawing in is necessary. The flip side to the rather approachable soft-focus textures and lo-fi aesthetic is the alienness of StyleGAN’s depicted subjectivities. Unlike today’s Midjourney or DALLE, early StyleGAN systems were notoriously bad at making “accurate” predictions of the world. Rather, they presented distorted versions of reality, particularly uncanny when trying to generate humans and lifelike features. Hands with any number of fingers. Floating limbs appearing out of nowhere. Washed-out and distorted faces injecting an atmosphere of ghostly haunting into generated images. 
In the 19th century, German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum coined the term “pareidolia” to describe the human tendency to perceive objects, patterns, and meanings from sensorial inputs where there might be none. [^3] The most common example is people seeing human-like features, especially faces, in the most random places. The somewhat familiar lifelike subjectivities depicted in Coleman’s images trick us into looking for recognizable human features. This initial impulse is followed by a quick disappointment that things are not what they appear to be. The mutation of the familiar into something else is really where the alienness and uncanniness of these images arise. 
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s _Xenogenesis_ book series, Coleman creates a generative AI system that embraces the soft yet uncanny StyleGAN aesthetic in exploring the alien. [^4] In _Xenogenesis_, the main character, Lilith, a Nigerian American woman originally from California, is abducted by extraterrestrials after Earth’s environmental apocalypse. Only by eugenic cross-breeding with the Oankali, the story’s alien species, can Lilith ensure the survival and arguably the evolution of not only herself but humanity at large. It is this cross-breeding that Coleman explores in a series of visual experiments titled Alice. Alice in all her facets is a product of mixing (or shall I say algorithmic cross-breeding) of the Black feminine and “... something else,” as Coleman describes in the exhibition’s accompanying book publication: “animal, alien, what we might call decidedly _non_-human.” [^5] 

It is here, then, where I return to the opening paragraph. _Reality Was Whatever Happened_ resists reduction and futile attempts to “tame” AI. In a way, “taming” these systems becomes the latest colonial rendition of sorting people and things into predefined boxes aimed to accurately reproduce a certain categorical version of the world. This is ultimately where binary utopian/dystopian fantasies propagated in popular discourses surrounding AI emerge from. If we manage algorithmically driven sorting properly, it will lead us to utopia. If not, we receive the dystopian flip side of the same coin. This is really the fundamental question that is currently at stake in binary discourses surrounding AI, art, and creative practice. 

In contrast, by embracing the glitchiness and arguable inaccuracy of generative AI systems, Coleman opens pathways to “other possible worlds,” the wilder places they might lead us to. By doing so, _Reality Was Whatever Happened_ embraces Coleman’s earlier call in the text “Technology of the Surround” to imagine an AI “that can be free—if not to imagine then to generate—speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not.” [^6] Through releasing and following AIs into wilder territories, Coleman’s work troubles the narrative and technological borders of current modes of AI-driven content production. Rather than obsessing with binary futures—the obsession with generative AI either replacing or enhancing human creativity—an Octavia Butler AI explores the multiplicities of alternative worlds, spaces as places, which feral AIs might come to generate. What these territories come to be won’t be known until we reach them—until, as Indigenous technoscience scholar Michelle Murphy wonders, we “produce a world where undecided futures are brought into the present.” [^7] Reality will be whatever has happened. 


[^1]: “Vision + People,” Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, https://cultureandtech.utoronto.ca/vision-people
[^2]: This Person Does Not Exist, https://thispersondoes-notexist.com
[^3]: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch- gerichtliche Medicin, vol. 23 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1866), https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb10087039?pa ge=,1
[^4]: “Xenogenesis Series,” Octavia E. Butler, https://www.octaviabutler.com/xenogenesis-series 
[^5]: Beth Coleman, Reality Was Whatever Happened (Berlin: K.Verlag, 2023), 14.
[^6]: Beth Coleman, “Technology of the Surround,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience 7, no.2 (2021), https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/35973
[^7]: Michelle Murphy, “Speculating on the Future in Postcolonial Social Sciences,” Histories of the Future, Princeton University, 2015, http://histscifi.com/essays/murphy/future-postcolonial-social-sciences 

C158_JONES.jpeg

C158_Jones.pdf

Maurice Jones discusses Beth Coleman’s project _Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds_ (2023), which follows AI into wilder territories beyond binary utopian/dystopian terms.

One Thing: AI Be Wilding: Beth Coleman's Octavia Butler AI

Aman Sandhu is an artist and writer working between Montreal and Glasgow. His installations often include drawing, moving image, sculpture, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that come into view through improvisation.

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Our Third Sun

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Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt

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Hard Limits, Soft Landing

Adrien Crossman is a queer and non-binary white settler artist and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in so-called Hamilton, ON. They are interested in the affective qualities of queerness: how queerness can be felt through specific aesthetics and sensibilities. Crossman cofounded and co-runs the online arts publication off centre and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee's Philosophically Pornographic Practice

Andrea Dávila is a researcher, writer, and museum professional interested in the cultural and disciplinary intersections within art history, focusing on the visual dialogues and continuities within contemporary Latin American art. She graduated from Barnard College, and has held curatorial internships at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in _ARTS.BLACK_, _Art in America_, _Frieze_, _BOMB_, _The Believer_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _C Magazine_, _Studio Magazine_, and other publications. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Terra Foundation Research Fellow for _Threewalls_, a Chicago-based arts organization. Her book, _Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art_ will be published by _The Feminist Press_ in March 2024.


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

Alexa Bunnell is an emerging artist, writer, and fermenter based in Mohkinstsís.

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

Born in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and currently living in Tkaronto, traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda award-winning poetry collection _Wanting in Arabic_, and of _Lyric Sexology Vol. 1_. Her writing is widely published in journals and anthologies, and translations of her work have appeared in French, Greek, and Arabic. She has co-edited special issues of _TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly_, on cultural production, and of _Arc Poetry Magazine_, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary writers. She is also an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and Editor at the _Journal of Critical Race Inquiry_.

Composition: give up your own

eunice bélidor is a curator, researcher, and writer born and based in Montreal. Her current curatorial research focuses on letter writing as creating affective archives; she is interested in the intersection of epistolary writing with care, feminism, anti-capitalism, and racial issues.

What is the Safe Word?

Liliona Quarmyne is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, and organizer based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Mi’kmaq people. From Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents. She performs and creates both as a solo artist and with various companies, facilitates community programming, and is an experienced curator and artistic director. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.


_proxy_ by Mo Glitch: Text

Salena Barry is a writer from Toronto, Canada, who is currently based in London, UK. She was a 2021 Frieze New Writer and a 2022 Jerwood Writer in Residence. She has written for institutions including Delfina Foundation and Site Gallery as well as for publications including _Frieze, ArtReview,_ and _Emergent Magazine._

Weaving Through the Binary: Qualeasha Wood's Textile Inheritances

Jasmine Gui is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist, arts programmer, and PhD student based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She works in paper, ceramics, tea, and experimental book formats through the inter-arts and publishing space Teh Studio. 


Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea

D. St-Amour (they/she) is a writer, book-maker, and recovering arts worker. Since 2011, St-Amour has held curatorial, administrative, and research positions at a range of institutions, including the AGO, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Art Metropole, and Galerie SBC. St-Amour regularly writes about artists’ books and publishing practices through the lens of visual arts and media history, and is slowly publishing a series of queer sci-fi and speculative fiction books through their slow-press project, specific. place (with co-editor S F Ho). Recently, St-Amour completed an MA in Art History/Visual Cultures at York University, and is currently an MLIS candidate at Western University in London. 


Anni Araújo Spadafora (she/ her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her work spans performance, music and sound, and textiles. She regularly studies at the Marshfield School of Weaving (Vermont). Recent project and performance sites include Extrapool (Nijmegen, NL), Milieux Institute (Montreal), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is also a founding member of the band New Fries, who have released music with Telephone Explosion Records (Toronto) and Soul Jazz Records (London, UK). New Fries has toured across Canada and internationally and opened for The Pop Group, Neil Hagerty, The Ex, and Xiu Xiu (among others).


Marking Time Spent Absurdly

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Love Made Object

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_Exploratory Touch_ by Trevor Novak: Text

Holly Chang is an artist, curator, researcher, and writer living in Toronto who has recently completed her MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York University. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation mixed-race identity. She maintains cultural ties with her cross-cultural identity and draws on her hybrid background for inspiration. 


The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar

Suzanne Morrissette is an artist, curator, and scholar from Winnipeg. Her father’s parents were Michif- and Cree-speaking Métis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire Loyalists and Mennonites expelled from Russia. 


Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Trained as an urban planner, they took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies and currently practice as an independent curator, writer, and service designer. Shalaka curates projects for Textile, a hyperlocal project on the Haldimand Tract, and is a Visiting Curator at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery. They currently hold roles at OCAD University and, more recently, at the Blackwood. 


Tilling: The Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice: In Conversation with Luther Konadu

Hannah Hanski (b. 1985) is a Canadian neo-folk artist blending textile and digital media. With a deep belief in the power of narrative, she pursued her studies in Folklore and completed her MFA at Carnegie Mellon in 2017. She currently resides in a church in rural Nova Scotia with her dog, Moshe.


Cat Bluemke (b. 1993) makes art about work and play. She graduated with an MFA in Design for Emerging Technologies at SAIC, and is currently Digital Exhibitions Consultant at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Recently, her practice has spanned augmented reality, game design, performance, and risographic prints.



Jonathan Carroll (b. 1990) is an artist and programmer creating games, software, and performances. His work unfolds as a dynamic collaboration between artists, audiences, and their interactive digital interfaces. He lives in rural Nova Scotia where he creates digital-art tools.

From Algorithms to Aesthetics: Unlocking the Mind of CritBot.AI, Pioneering Critic

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Erin Reznick is a curator, producer, and publisher whose research tends to the assembly of community, specifically in social spaces that negotiate public and private domains. She is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto. She was the Co-Editor in Chief of _Phile Magazine_. 


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“A Political, Ethical, Existence Practice”: In Conversation with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva

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masus wəλəɫəʔos? we hear the brook

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spirit-flesh-soul-icon

Matt Nish-Lapidus’ practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture and its histories and impacts. His work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. You can find Matt under various aliases and collaborations including emenel, New Tendancies, and, < blink >.

Joyful, Poetic Microworlds

Presented by C Magazine and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA)](https://icca.art/)

We’re excited to launch the 3rd annual Indigenous Art Writing Award, an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform three standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

Indigenous writers are invited to submit a single non-fiction text about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, and/or phenomenon therein. Suggested length for submissions is between 1000-2000 words.

The winner will receive $1500 CAD; editorial support to prepare their article for publication in a future issue of _C Magazine_; and a two-year subscription. Each of the two runners-up will receive $1000 CAD; an open invitation to develop a pitch for a different text to be published in _C Magazine_; and a two-year subscription. All participants can request feedback on their submitted work, and will receive a one-year subscription.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should primarily be in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we ask for translations. The award will be adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. 

There is one submission per applicant. Please note that submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere. Complete the [submission form](https://forms.gle/wBGeNxC3R4vxRAke9) by **November 22, 2024.**

Please write to [editor@cmagazine.com](mailto:editor@cmagazine.com) if you require any accommodation during the application process. Note that measures will be taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators. More information about the kind of writing _C Magazine_ publishes can be found on our [Submissions page.](https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions)


###### We are pleased to welcome Mikinaak Migwans and Justine "Tini" Stilborn as the jurors for the 2024 Indigenous Art Writing Award. 

**Mikinaak Migwans** (he/they) Mikinaak Migwans is a member of Wiikwemikoong Unceded Territory, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, and Curator of Indigenous Art in the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Their research focuses on the politics of place-making from the land to the museum, with special emphasis on textile arts in Anishinaabe territory. Migwans has worked with the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts & Culture at Carleton University, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation in M'Chigeeng First Nation, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

**Justine "Tini" Stilborn** (she/her) Justine "Tini" Stilborn is a Regina-based artist, designer, and Brand & Marketing Advisor at OneHoop Indigenous Advisory Services, as well as the Communication & Digital Program Manager for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective. With a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Regina, her work often explores identity through consumerism and global culture, inspired by pop culture, comics, and animation. Her projects include public art in Saskatoon and Regina, as well as a solo exhibition at the Fifth Parallel Gallery. She also serves on the CARFAC SASK and CARFAC National Boards.

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The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. The award is presented by _C Magazine_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones ](link)(ICCA).

Indigenous writers in the first decade of their career are invited to submit a single text up to 2,000 words in length about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, and/or phenomenon therein.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should be primarily in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we require translations. It is free to make a submission. Please note for the purposes of this award, submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere.

The award is adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. The winner receives a cash award and editorial support to prepare their article for publication in _C Magazine_, and the runner receives a cash award. All participants receive a subscription to _C Magazine_.

The 2022 winner was awarded the Momus Emerging Critics Residency, supported in part by [Momus](https://momus.ca/), together with the presenting partners.

Submission

Indigenous Art Writing Award

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Applications are currently closed, stay tuned!

Program Information

Lois Taylor Biggs' feature [_Archives, Bones, and Polaroids_](https://cmagazine.com/articles/archives-bones-and-polaroids) is published in C151 "Greif" (Spring 2022). 

The winner of our inaugural Indigenous Art Writing Award, co-presented with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, focuses on the late artist Kimowan Metchewais, who sought to build a personal photo archive toward his “imagining of a post-[Edward] Curtis world, without ‘ethnographic baggage.’”     

2022 Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner

Presented by _C Magazine_ and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

In partnership with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones, we are now accepting applications for the 2nd annual Indigenous Art Writing Award.




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