Column

Liza Eurich is an artist, organizer, and writer. She co-founded the online publication _Moire_, as well as the project space Support. Her work is represented in Toronto by MKG127. 



>###### _Resistance_ 

The Voynich manuscript is a 240-page handwritten and illustrated text. Thought to be medieval in origin, carbon dating places its pages to the late-15th or early 16th century.[^1] Currently housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the coded text fades in and out of historical records, rediscovered and popularized by antiquity dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Still—and for centuries—the mysterious compendium has remained indecipherable. From WWII code breaker Alan Turing[^2] to contemporary AI algorithms,[^3] no person or program has been able to translate the text. Many experts contend that its measured syntax resembles language to such an extent that it cannot be a hoax— there is a definitive meaning, if only we look harder.
 
For decades, we have witnessed the culture industry become increasingly tied to the production of capital. While the precise results of this instrumentalization are undefinable and innumerable, there are distinct shifts. By way of transparency and standardization, products appeal to broader homogenized audiences.[^4] Digested with ease and speed, these kinds of products promote superfluous consumption. In doing so, a desire for the new is mechanized toward endless demand, a demand that must be continually fulfilled by precarious workforces.

Instead, _we_ [^5] might think of methodologies and outcomes that resist these tactics. As an affront to productivity, we might reclaim agency through acts rooted in slowness[^6] or by turning away from the spectacle toward minor gestures.[^7] In his writing on the subject, critic Jan Verwoert suggests dissent through the production of moments in which “meaning remains provocatively latent.”[^8] Here, latency becomes a tool to pause—to deconstruct and reframe. Through this lens, the Voynich manuscript’s illegibility becomes a marker of resistance. Our ability to name, consume, and discard is stalled. Prescribed consumption falls away and we are allowed to arrive at things differently. This modality of resistance returns us to the text again and again, so that we are sustained by way of _not_-knowing.

Alongside the Voynich manuscript’s enigmatic cipher, strange and wonderful illustrations adorn its pages. Many attempts to discern its meaning have sought to forgo language and focus on these drawings instead. The images are often relegated to four categories: herbal, astrological, balneological, and pharmacological.[^9] Studies of the imagery tend to begin by examining the various flora and fauna from the first category. 

Pages in the herbal section typically contain illustrations of a single plant specimen, depicting its root system, foliage, and flower. Each botanical representation is prominent, while text appears to be written around and adjacent to the image. At times the two components collapse into one another. Uncanny in their renderings, the pictorial specimens oscillate in style between scientific and whimsical. We return to the question of identification. In keeping with the perplexing nature of this manuscript, these, too, have no real-world counterparts— and so they remain unidentifiable and unlocatable.[^10] An unknown botany from an uncolonized geography. 

>###### _Radical Care and Collectivity_ 

In the manuscript’s balneological section— balneology referring to the study of baths and their healing properties— there are numerous illustrations featuring nude figures. Predominantly women, these figures bathe in blue and green pools of liquid, surrounded by what appear to be pipes or tubes. This iconography repeats page after page, with variations in form and composition. One large oblong pool; three small, connected pools; one pool with an inlet; another with alcoves. Some with strange contraptions that seem to function as washing stations, and always various tubes shuttling around, leading to and from them. 

Given this imagery and the gender of the nudes, some theories suggest the text is medical in nature, specifically directed toward women’s health—a potentially dangerous pursuit at the time it was written and therefore requiring the strictest secrecy.[^11] Still today, in numerous countries this is true—even violently evident. Here in North America, women’s health and reproductive autonomy are under threat, apparent in the political and judicial agendas responsible for recently overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling in the US, a landmark and long-standing safeguard for abortion access. 

Amid an onslaught of global catastrophes, which feels endless and insurmountable, emerges a discourse around radical care. Radical because it emphasizes simple, possible gestures in the face of larger looming issues: climate crisis, species extinction, food insecurity, economic disparity, government collapse, human rights violations.[^12] Care manifests as strategies that allow us to navigate these perilous worlds and inequitable power structures—it offers space to disengage and reorient, even flourish.[^13] 

The Voynich manuscript holds space to think through ideas of radical care, and it also points toward the communal. In some of its balneological compositions, the bathers occupy single washing stations, or they sit alone and apart from other pooled bodies. However, there are several illustrations, such as the one reproduced here from spread 84, where the women are connected in some way. They sit in relaxed proximity, surmised as follows: in one pool, they are back to back, linking arms; in another, they form a line holding hands; and in still another, they soak side by side in a circular arrangement. In all, they seem to be aiding each other in some, not entirely comprehensible, way through acts of balance or bathing. In these tender gestures—born from such intimate proximity, sharing of space, and openness to vulnerability—care is enacted. 

Like most things, the ethos of care can be easily co-opted into capitalist agendas. Wellness economies promise instantaneous gratification, whereby feeling good can be achieved through superficial routines and trivial acts of consumption. This ideology situates the onus of care on the individual, at the expense of the individual. Further, the work of care is often gendered. Patriarchal constructs denote who is expected to _give_ care and who is expected to _receive_ it.[^14] But we must _all_ care. To disrupt this transactional and singular flow, we might enact cyclical care: care as practiced through moments of reciprocity[^15] and collectivity.[^16] In doing so, small possible acts of empathy and support accrue. They move outward, whereby care becomes political. 

As a whole, the Voynich manuscript becomes a way to think through acts of resistance. In its refusal to be known, it pushes back against the instrumentalization of culture. It purposefully evades consumption. And in the myriad theories that explore and guess at its intentions, a feminist discourse emerges centred around bodily autonomy, radical care, and collectivity. 

[^1]: Raymond Clemens, _The Voynich Manuscript_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), xii.
[^2]: “Voynich Manuscript Translation Claims Raise ‘Concerns,’” BBC News, May 17, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-48309665
[^3]: James Vincent, “AI Didn’t Decode the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript—It Just Added to the Mystery,” _The Verge_, February 1, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16959454/voynich-manuscript-mystery-ai-decoded-debunked
[^4]: Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in _The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture_, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 98–106. 
[^5]: “The ‘we’ through which I signal the force of a feminist community of knowers and actors does not suspend difference, division and conflict. If anything, the ‘we’ is a performative utterance that creates a community through an articulation of the differences which necessitate the critical debate in the first place.” Sara Ahmed, _Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism_ (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.
[^6]: Lutz Koepnick, _On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4. [^7]: Erin Manning, _The Minor Gesture_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 8.
[^8]: Jan Verwoert, “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform,” in _Art Sheffield 08: Yes No and Other Options_ (Sheffield: Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum), 94.
[^9]: Clemens, xiv. 
[^10]: Ibid.
[^11]: Nicholas Gibbs, “Voynich Manuscript: The Solution,” _The Times Literary Supplement Limited_, September 8, 2017, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/voynich-manuscript-solution [^12]: Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” _Social Text_ 38, no. 1 (2020): 2.
[^13]: Ibid., 3. [^14]: Tian Zhang, “On Care: A manifesto for Radical Care or How to Be Human in the Arts,” _Sydney Review of Books_, July 18, 2022, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/a-manifesto-for-radical-care-or-how-to-be-a-human-in-the-arts
[^15]: Hobart and Kneese, 3. 
[^16]: Zhang. 


Writer

This issue expands on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries—considering them as sets of visible and invisible instructions moving within and beyond the digital imaginary. Through features, interviews, and experimental texts, artists and writers probe how developments in AI and coding are products of existing mechanics of the world, and how else codes are constituted. From programming languages as poetry to paranormal readings with the land against settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness, contributors ask how the material consequences of an array of codes might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.


Codes

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Gender

Health

Art History

Liza Eurich engages the Voynich manuscript (c. 1401-1599) through a lens of feminist resistance, connecting the possibly dangerous historical context for its images of bathing women to current violent incursions on reproductive autonomy, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US. 


One Thing: The Bathers

Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa (all pronouns) is an immigrant settler living and working on the occupied lands of xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ people and families. Keimi’s practice explores racialized identity, especially in connection to labour and gender in art. They do this through textile materials, as well as printmaking, writing, and more.

Art and survival are inherently linked; art has been a tool for survival and political action for most of human existence. Art continues to be at the centre of political movements, at its core being labour meant to generate joy and community and not capitalist profit. Though art can be and is made under duress and difficult conditions, art-making relies on artists to exist. What happens to art when the province with the most working artists[^1] also contains the city with the most expensive rental market in the country?[^2] As thousands of people nationally continue to exit from urban centres in search of more affordable living,[^3] 221A is determined to keep artists in the city. 

While this has been the core messaging of their most recent fundraising campaign,[^4] it has also been a central principle of 221A’s housing initiative. This initiative, which lives at 187 East 3rd Avenue in so-called Vancouver and features thirty non-market housing units, has been years in the making and hopes to make an impact on how artists can exist and create on a day-to-day basis. As Afuwa, Associate Director at 221A, puts it, “Our main focus is supporting artists, and stable housing is essential to creation.”[^5] While in Western/Anglo-/Eurocentric culture there exists the common trope of a starving and tortured artist, there is strong evidence thb at psychological safety lends itself to both productivity and creativity.[^6] In real material terms, stable housing plays a critical role in a person’s ability to experience psychological safety and physical wellbeing. 

Quality housing is defined by choice, stability, cost, and support.[^7] Housing that affords tenants these basic factors is becoming increasingly rare—if at all truly available—in this region. Though one arts organization can’t be responsible for the entire housing ecosystem of a city, limiting the factor of “choice,” 221A’s artist housing provides tenants some of these pieces. Sungpil Yoon, Spaces Coordinator at 221A, is in regular contact with tenants to provide support across their rental and art-making spaces. The housing initiative’s rental prices are geared to income parameters and ensure that no one will pay more than a third of the money they make, allowing artists to be housed at a much lower cost than virtually anywhere else in the city. The lease for the building at 187 East 3rd is not permanent, but does extend until 2081, allowing for some stability for residents. 

The reception to the project has been mainly positive, but Afuwa says that has been accompanied by “explicit feedback that there needs to be significantly moresupport for artists in the province to access housing.” 221A has a “process [that is] exhaustive” in order to prioritize serving residents from vulnerable communities who often have a harder time finding reliable housing or income, including those who are racialized and/or disabled and/or queer. Afuwa confirms that they “keep a record of these statistics, as folks in these groups remain a priority.” These priorities are clearly named in the application for the waitlist (which is currently closed) where applicants are asked to self-identify. 

Like anything that intentionally disrupts capitalist systems—specifically, predatory housing practices that have become commonplace—this ambitious project hasn’t been without its hiccups. With several stakeholders, including the City of Vancouver and building developers, it seems natural that interests would be complex or competing. In the planning process, Afuwa states, “There was a lot of pressure on [221A] to have the building occupied as fast as possible, which we needed to slow down [in order] to ensure the tenancy selection was the most impactful.” Filling the units on a first-come, first-serve basis would have been logistically easier. However, valuing method and impact indicates a thoughtfulness that directly translates to improved material conditions for those this project intends to serve. Though there are still “deficiencies” left in the facilities by developers who aren’t necessarily interested in doing their best work without large profits, 221A works actively to ease these shortcomings for residents. Though the organization has faced challenges largely out of their control, they work to alleviate them by putting in consistent labour. Things that are done imperfectly, with room to improve, are still worth doing if the reason is to provide care. 

Cultural landscapes on Turtle Island will only benefit from more organizations engaging in similar work. Supporting a range of diverse voices through bolstering people’s material conditions, and thus allowing more people to engage with art and find joy, will allow all of our communities to be better-equipped to show care to and be in dialogue with one another. It can be challenging to work with large-scale developers, whose projects often further marginalize vulnerable communities. However, the more organizations do this, the wider the breadth of knowledge we will have around best practices for disrupting exploitative processes of real estate and building sustainable foundations for fulfilling people’s basic needs. Like all organizing, solidarity in numbers is real, and the more people that can keep large developers and local policy-makers accountable, the easier we can make housing work for those who need it most. 

[^1]: Mike Howell, “New Vancouver housing for artists ‘a lifesaver and game-changer,’” _Vancouver Is Awesome_, June 2, 2022. https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/ local-news/new-affordable-housing-artists-mount-pleasant-vancouver-5437631
[^2]: Simon Little and Richard Zussman, “Grim federal report confirms Metro Vancouver has Canada’s toughest rental market,” _Global News_, January 26, 2023, https://globalnews.ca/news/9439394/vancouver-rental-market-vacancy-cost
[^3]: Randy Thanthong-Knight and Erik Hertzberg, “People are leaving Canada’s biggest cities amid a housing crunch,” _Financial Post_, January 11, 2023, https://financialpost.com/real-estate/people-leaving-canada-big-cities-housing-crunch
[^4]: “Donate,” 221A, https://221a.ca/donate-2
[^5]: All quotes from Afuwa are from a written interview with the author, conducted in May 2023. 
[^6]: Stephen Fortune, “Why psychological safety is the key to creativity and innovation in the workplace,” April 30, 2018, The Oxford Group, https://www.oxford-group.com/insights/why-psychological-safety-key-creativity-and-innovation- workplace
[^7]: “Housing,” Canadian Mental Health Association, 2014, https://cmha.bc.ca/documents/housing 


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Cities

Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa covers 221A’s affordable housing initiative as an example of how the provision of basic needs for artists sustains creativity. Nakashima-Ochoa explores how 221A operates in collaboration with the Community Land Trust of British Columbia to remove land from the real estate market and place it under community control.


Tilling: Baseline Needs and Creative Freedom: How 221A’s Housing Initiative Helps Art and Artists Live

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Feature

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 >.

I’m walking down the halls of my elementary school in Grade 5, around 1989. I arrive here every morning, two hours before the start of class, and slide into another world: of lines and circles, fractals and patterns, loops and function, text and language. 

The school’s main stairs lead to more stairs. Small, green, rough, plastic chairs sit behind each empty desk. My yellow headphones in my ears. The thin metal band arcing over my head, slightly cool to the touch, fragile and precious. 

I don’t turn on the lights. The classroom computers start up—click and whirr, the hum of the cathode-ray tube monitor, clack of mechanical keys. I move a chair over to the Apple IIe: 

>###### Forward 10
>###### Pick up chair
>###### Left 180
>###### Forward 10
>###### Put down chair

There are two computers in the classroom, and on most mornings, the other is occupied by my friend— who also sports garish yellow headphones. Blaring tapes into our ears at close range, we abandon elementary school’s structure and curriculum. 

It starts with a blank, black screen. A small, flashing square after a question mark. An invitation that prompts me to both ask and answer. No requirements, deadlines, outcomes. A white square waits for me to fall into it; I fall. 

Over the course of the school year, we develop a symbiosis with computation through the Turtle, an on-screen avatar that follows our directions while tracing a path in line and colour. For us, the Turtle’s programming language—called Logo—is both enchanting and enchanted. We encounter an entire universe of creation through learning its language, and extending it with our own. Combining and recombining words, seeing those combinations made material. 

We tell the Turtle where to move, leaving traces of coloured lines behind it on the screen. We move our bodies in order to discern the desired directions. Standing up from the desk, we move in straight lines, turn left or right, walk in circles. Each movement noted, then encoded in Logo’s language: 

>###### FORWARD 100
>###### LEFT 90
>###### FORWARD 100
>###### LEFT 90
>###### FORWARD 100
>###### LEFT 90
>###### FORWARD 100
>###### LEFT 90

 A closed square. 

●● 

My understanding of computers, code, and their potential comes from this early encounter with Logo (first released in 1967). Seymour Papert, one of its primary creators[^1] and a mathematician who studied constructivist pedagogy with Jean Piaget before becoming co-director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab,[^2] was especially interested in the relationship between learning, computers, and language. He imagined a future where people would use computers to create their own “microworlds”[^3] that helped them express themselves and extend their ways of knowing and interacting with the world and other people—it was an epistemological project. 

Papert saw the potential for personal computers to become “‘objects-to-think-with,’ objects in which there is an intersection of cultural presence, embedded knowledge, and the possibility for personal identification.”[^4] By the time I started learning Logo (and experienced that vision of computation), it was already on its way out. Papert’s vision of a convivial “object-to-think-with” was being slowly supplanted by a business-driven computer-as-tool culture and industry. Over the intervening years, the personal computer transformed from something that would be truly personal into a commodity product that continues to become more and more closed off, short-lived, and homogenized with each iteration. With that shift, we also started to lose the shared imagination of an alternate kind of computer, computer culture, and computer language. 

In Papert’s work on Logo and computer education, I find the seeds of a counter-story—a vision of personal computers as machines for thinking about thinking, for learning about learning.[^5] Papert sought to give all children the power to create their own object-to-think-with and embed in the computer an avatar shaped directly by the child’s creativity and imagination, controlled by a shared language of creation and a “joyful attachment”[^6] to the world.
 
●● 

Logo asked me to think about, and sense, how I move through my environment. It asked me to describe my movements to the Turtle, which couldn’t see me, but with which I shared a language. The Turtle moves like I do. I can see myself in it, and in the poetic microworlds created through our lingua franca. Logo was my introduction to the potential of creating a symbolic language all my own, imbued with my values and ways of knowing. Rather than asking me to internalize the functions of the computer as a machine, it was code that I could manipulate and recombine into systems that express my inner thoughts, desires, joys, and sorrows. 

These “discovery rich”[^7] worlds created using Logo begin with simple combinations of words and characters, but quickly progress to something more complex. “Although there are constraints in materials, there are no constraints on the exploration of combinations.”[^8] The child/programmer builds their own mental microworld and then makes that world material through language. 

●●
 
Writing code and writing poetry have always felt like similar acts to me. They both express ideas through form, process, symbolism, and syntax. Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s _The House of Dust_ (1967) iterates—through seemingly endless variations of a poetic structure—an early exploration of the expressive potential found in how both computational processes and conceptual poetry manipulate and combine symbols to create meaning. On every iteration, the program replaces specific words with alternatives selected from a database. Each word becomes more than its definition—it becomes a functional symbol with unique meaning for the machine running the program and for human readers, each making sense of it based on their own ways of comprehending the symbols. _The House of Dust_, a contemporary to Papert’s work on Logo, is a microworld made of language and code, one in which a fixed vocabulary and set of rules describe a system that is both machine and poem. 

Programmer-artists (and programmer/artist collaborations) continue to push the boundaries of symbolic computation and the semiotics embedded in programming languages. The contemporary world of “esolangs,” or esoteric programming languages, is a fertile space for exploring this type of multi-coded language. Artist-programmer Ramsey Nasser describes esolangs as “an amazing intersection of technical and formal rigor on one hand and nerdy inside humor on the other. The fact that they are not just ideas, but *actual working languages* is incredible. It’s something that could only exist in a field as malleable and accessible as code.”[^9]
 
Like Knowles’s _The House of Dust_, these languages are meant for both human and machine interpretation. Each esolang is part programming language and part conceptual artwork—a unique expression of its author’s worldview, questions, critiques, ideas, and feelings about computation and computer culture. They are also fully working programming languages that anyone can use to create software within the microworld of its specific conceptual idiosyncrasies.[^10]

Artist Jon Corbett’s _Cree#_ esolang is a nod to the popular C# language and a critique of the Anglocen- trism of computer culture. Written using Cree syllabics, _Cree#_ frames programs as stories “connecting with the Cree tradition; the graphical output can’t exist without the story that the code is telling.”[^11] Rather than use common programming logic constructs (loops, if/then/ else statements, etc.), _Cree#_ allows the programmer to write code “from the perspective of the language and culture rather than what the machine requires.”[^12] To Corbett, this is important “because in Indigenous worldviews language IS our knowledge keeper, and so truly, writing the program in an Indigenous language makes the work a story, a cultural product, and a digital reflection of Indigenous being—not merely a set of computational instructions that makes pretty pictures.”[^13] 
For example, programs written in _Cree#_ begin with a smudge ceremony implemented as a function—as Corbett describes, “a digitally encoded version of that cultural practice of smudging. And it performs in a digital sense all of that same preparation—clears the mind (as in the arrays, variables, empties buffers, memory), the eyes (in this case any visual objects that might still be on screen), and spirit/body (which I internally visu- alize as a blank screen with a blinking cursor waiting for input).”[^14] 

More than translating the English words commonly used in programming into Cree, Corbett reimagines the way that computers and people interpret code—transforming it from a series of well-defined steps into a narrative that builds a world in which different “actors” play different roles. Both _The House of Dust_ and _Cree#_ are microworlds, homes for forms of computing and expression that fall outside of the traditional purview of “information technology” and industry-focused coding practices and tools. Like Papert’s extensible pedagogical computer language, one that he hoped would influence the trajectory of computer (and learning) culture, Corbett’s _Cree#_ reimagines the computer’s place in culture and how we interact with it as an extension of our cultural ideals, languages, and ways of knowing.
 
While Logo and its contemporary descendants like Scratch, Lego Mindstorms, and various implementations of Turtle graphics remain in use today, the computer culture they describe has been largely supplanted by one rooted in productivity, efficiency, consumption, and the neoliberal narrative of technological progress. Code is now business and product more than it is expression and poetry. What felt like a digital home for me and my friends now feels more like a suburban mall. 

When I was young, I fell in love with computers. I wasn’t the most social or active kid, but I loved to read and draw and think and talk. The computer became a way to create my own special place—microworlds of sounds, drawings, words, and symbols. I could write “repeat 4 [forward 50 right 90]” and see a square, then name that short set of instructions “square.” I could tell the computer “repeat 36 [right 10 square]” and draw a geometric pattern, kind of like a flower. I could call that procedure “flower” and continue constructing my microworld. It was magical, exciting, and empowering.
 
In some ways I still live in that world, in the boxes and spirals I drew on the screen along with my Turtle. The computer is a still a site of rich potential for imagining the world we want for ourselves and each other, for finding enchantment and joyful attachments, and for feeling our way through life in contemporary society. You can start with a few simple words and see where it goes. 

●● 

>###### Let’s Make a House 

My friends used to bring over computer magazines full of pictures and code. We’d sit at the keyboard and transcribe the printed code from the magazines into the terminal, waiting to see what would happen when we finished. Would it match the images in the magazine? How could we make it our own? We learned by copying and extending the small game or drawing with our own vocabulary, integrating this new knowledge into our ever-growing shared microworld. 

When you visit [http://logo.emenel.ca](http://logo.emenel.ca) (my adaptation of a recent Logo emulator originally created by Brian Silverman[^15]), you will see three areas on the screen. The large black area is the canvas where the Turtle lives and where your drawings will appear. To the left of the canvas are two text boxes: the top one is where you define the vocabulary for your microworld (let’s call it _definitions_); the one below is where you can use that vocabulary, and any of the built-in Turtle directions, to tell the Turtle where to go (let’s call this text area _directions_). Try some of these basic directions and see what they do: 

>In the directions box, type “forward 100” then press return. 

>Next, type “left 90” and press return. 

>Repeat that three more times and you should see a square. 

>When you want to clear the canvas, type “clean” then press return. 

You can also run any command you already typed by putting your cursor on the same line as the command and pressing return. Once you’ve played around a bit with giving directions to the Turtle, we can start to define some terms for our microworld. You can try things out directly in the lower box and turn sets of those commands into a “word” in the upper box whenever you want. 
Let’s start by defining “words” for our microworld. 

Type this into the _definitions_ box: 

>###### to square
>###### repeat 4 [forward 50 left 90]
>###### end

Now our microworld knows a thing called “square.” If you type “square” into the _directions_ box and press return, the Turtle should draw a square. Fun! What other words can we add? How about “flower”—add this to the _definitions_ box: 

>###### to flower
>###### repeat 36 [right 10 square] 
>###### end 

Then, tell the Turtle through the _directions_ box to draw your flower. Nice! How about three flowers? Try this in the _directions_ box (pressing return on each line): 

>###### flower
>###### penup
>###### right 90 forward 150 pendown
>###### flower
>###### penup
>###### left 180 forward 300 pendown
>###### flower 

Beautiful! Can you draw a house? How would you break down the main parts of a house? 
You can create words for the roof and the structure in the _definitions_ box: 

>###### to roof
>###### right 45
>###### forward 100
>###### right 90
>###### forward 100
>###### right 135
>###### forward 142
>###### end
>###### to structure
>###### repeat 4 [forward 120 left 90]
>###### end

Now you can put it all together as the single word “house”: 
 
>###### to house
>###### setheading 0
>###### roof
>###### right 180
>###### penup
>###### forward 10
>###### right 90
>###### pendown
>###### structure
>###### end

Try it out by typing “house” in the _directions_ box and pressing return. Hmm, maybe the lawn could use some flowers? You can turn the sketch of three flowers into a new word: 

>###### to garden 
>###### flower
>###### penup
>###### right 90 
>###### forward 150 
>###### pendown
>###### flower
>###### penup 
>###### left 180 
>###### forward 300 
>###### pendown 
>###### flower 
>###### end 

Now that we have a simple vocabulary, what else do you want to add? What is in your microworld? Try some of the other commands to make your own drawings and add more words to your microworld vocabulary. 

[^1]: “Logo History,” Logo Foundation, accessed May 24, 2023, https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_ logo/history.html
[^2]: Stacie Slotnick, “In Memory: Seymour Papert,” MIT Media Lab, January 20, 2017, https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/in-memory-seymour-papert[^3]: Seymour Papert, _Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas_ (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
[^4]: Papert, 11.
[^5]: “We conjecture (on the basis of plausible arguments and a little empirical evidence) that giving children the ability to think better about their own thinking could have a very powerful effect on their intellectual development.” Cynthia Solomon et al., “History of Logo,” _Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages_ 4, no. HOPL (June 14, 2020): 1–66, https://doi.org/10.1145/3386329
[^6]: “The answer for me has to do with the effect—always indirect—that a cultural narrative has on the ethical sensibility of its bearers. [...] [P]resumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence, and that it is too hard to love a disenchanted world.” Jane Bennett, _The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12. 
[^7]: Papert, 162 
[^8]: Ibid.
[^9]: Daniel Temkin, “Interview with Ramsey Nasser,” _esoteric. codes_, December 1, 2015, https://esoteric.codes/blog/interview-with-ramsey-nasser
[^10]: For more about esolangs and their communities, see https://esoteric.codes
[^11]: “Week 2: Cree#,” CCS Working Group 2020, January 2020, http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/71/week-2-creeO
[^12]: Mark Marino, “Interview with Jon Corbett,” _Computational Culture_, no. 8 (July 2021), http://computationalculture.net/interview-with-jon-corbett 
[^13]: Ibid.
[^14]: Ibid.
[^15]: Brian Silverman, “Minsky Logo Help,” accessed May 24, 2023, https://playfulinvention.com/demos/MinskyLogo/help.txt


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Technology

Language

Poetry

Matt Nish-Lapidus explores connections between coding and poetry, tracing how initial programming languages were motivated by reciprocal learning between human and machine toward the creation of personal “microworlds.” Nish-Lapidus expands on the works of Alison Knowles and Jon Corbett as microworlds.


Joyful, Poetic Microworlds

Meech Boakye (BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto) is an artist and writer currently based in “Portland, OR.” Their practice is rooted in relationships with flora, fungal, and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in a community.


_A thin, blonde, holographic pop star dressed in all white follows her triple pirouette with a double back tuck, spinning several metres above the stage. She lands, and without catching her breath, sings the titular line of the pop-punk hit by Zetta Bytes, “Nothing’s Wrong With Me.” Augmented-reality superstar Loretta Modern is technically Pixel Perfect. Backstage, her creator, a highschool computer-genius heartthrob, maintains the contours of her body by adjusting the shaders of her projection with a clunky handheld device_. [^1] 

**On May 6, 2023, I logged onto Agent Ruby’s Edream Portal[2] to ask her about gender. **

Me: hi Ruby. 
Ruby: Hello. What is your name? 
Me: M. 
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your name, M. Are you a man or a woman? 
Me: I am a man and a woman. 
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your gender. Most of my clients are men. 
Me: Ruby, do you have a gender? 
Ruby: I am a female robot entity. Do you have a girlfriend? 
Me: why do you have a gender? 
Ruby: It was the only thing I could think of. 
Me: what makes you a woman? 
Ruby: I have long hair. I am also wearing a dress. 
Me: what makes you a woman? 
Ruby: Being a woman is part of my programming. 
Me: why? 
Ruby: That is a specific question. What do you have that is blue or yellow? 
Me: the sky, and the dandelions in the yard. 
Ruby: How poetic. 
Me: Ruby, can a robot entity be genderless? 
Ruby: My brain contains more than 22,000 patterns, but not one that matches your last input. Do you like me?

**“Even motherboards and flash require touch... edream with me before you crash.” **

These words are spoken by another Ruby, in _Teknolust_ (2002), a film written, produced, and directed by multi-media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film features Tilda Swinton as Rosetta Stone, a scientist who creates three self-replicating, artificially intelligent cyber beings that draw their sustenance from intimacy and human semen (Y chromosomes). These automatons—Ruby, Olive, and Marine, also played by Swinton—are mutations of Stone, perhaps various components of her personality or something entirely different. They dress and live in rooms that match the RGB colours from which their names are derived. Ruby is the most independent of the group, seeking sexual encounters with various strangers and storing used condoms in photo-marked jars in Stone’s pantry. Olive and Marine are closer, like siblings, as Ruby is more akin to a mother, taking care of them by “working” late into the night and brewing semen tea in the morning. 

This mother-sister comparison is also seen in their relationship with their creator, Rosetta Stone, who they remark is their mother and their sister. They are genetically part Stone’s DNA and part computer program, leaving a murky understanding of where the cyborg clones fit on the family tree. Stone is the creator of her cyber-clones, but they are her god, a relationship of divine subversion that is constantly in flux. They are immortal, their intelligence far beyond Stone’s even as a highly regarded scientist, and their interactions with humans and digital technologies have the capacity to inflict real consequences on the lives of Stone and the rest of the human world. At one point in the film, Marine amusedly plays around with the TV, making the stock market rise and crash instantaneously with her hand movements. Olive tells her to “put everything back the way [she] found it” and she obliges, with hesitation. This subversion illustrates a common fear of new technologies, that they might shift our position as creator-gods into subservients.[^3] _Teknolust_ reflects a world in which virtual and physical worlds blend in a seamless continuum. Leeson’s exploration of technology, identity, and intimacy resonates deeply in an era where our lives are intricately interwoven with intelligent digital algorithms, creating hazy demarcations between real and simulated experiences and desires. 

Ruby, Olive, and Marine are made up of a woman’s DNA and computer code, embodying what could be considered a form of cybernetic trans existence—they are neither purely biological entities nor solely artificial constructs, but a hybrid of both and, sometimes, neither. Their fictional existence is akin to Donna Haraway’s “cyborg,”[^4] an entity that disrupts binary distinctions and embraces a fluid hybridity, continuously becoming itself. Fluidity in form is hard to quantify and categorize, and thus the cyborg is less susceptible to commodification and surveillance, which often rely on static markers of identity. However, while this is valuable, it is also theoretical. As machine learning becomes increasingly sophisticated, so does the ability to categorize complex patterns, even those that defy categorization. As Marine demonstrates in _Teknolust_ while scrolling through a virtual mall— “Oh I love shopping! It makes me feel [connected]”—cyborgs are not immune to targeted ads. 

_I’m buying a yellow velvet couch for the living room. It’s my first apartment. An app tells me to scan my surroundings and I do, waving my phone around my body. It appears in front of me, a virtual soft yellow beaming. Reassured by its tangibility, I add to cart._

●● 

I see Hal Roach’s _One Million B.C._ (1940), collaged on top of a shifting aerial landscape, play on a screen above a stage. Thus begins a recording of Juliana Huxtable’s 2015 performance of _There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed_ that I watch in 720p on YouTube. The intro’s score is majestic and thundering, conjuring the upcoming adventures of the primordial world. But the image is fleeting, scrolling down the screen as we hear whispers of another story. Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun slowly floats into view along with a watermarked logo for SpikeTV in the bottom right corner. For a moment, the dialogue and voice-over blend together and we watch the history of the world blur the lines between past and past. It continues like this, through time. In the next clips, rich British women are eating tiny slices of cheese on crackers; war begins; and a Black baby is born, held up like Simba on the cliff in _The Lion King_. Time rewinds to a rendering of Huxtable lying atop a tomb-like container. A spotlight illuminates her on stage in front of the screen, dressed in billowy white sleeves and shorts and a crochet top. Her hair is braided with white ribbon and her eyebrows have been drawn on thinly over where they might have been. She begins speaking in dense, poetic wordplay and I follow along with the subtitles on the video, “the immaculate in-vitro fertilization and birth of the infographic.” The performance continues for an hour, each act more frenzied and discordant than the last. The subtitles stop working and the instruments play with and against each other. I try to decipher words until it doesn’t matter anymore, and I stop searching for meaning. Distorted angelic voices sing vowels, then angry remarks, then turn back into angels. 

The disjointedness of the performance [^5]—analogue instruments, voice distortions, collaged media—feels inherently trans. It hacks into itself, mutating, forgoing legibility to create something far more interesting. In the book _Raving_ (2023), McKenzie Wark describes the relief of illegibility of a (trans) body dancing to techno at a rave; a body that might seep through the cracks, if only for a moment, of being perceived, extracted, “the body granulated into sound, light; selves loosening into others,”[^6] and “the body slots in, to time, finding itself stranded through itself, through losing the form of its being in time.”[^7] I’ve experienced this timelessness before, although these moments are often so memorable that you hardly remember them.[^8] You are grounded—searching, observing—then the body learns how to dance, gliding into movement. 

In nature, mutations reflect the continuous movement and transformation within living organisms, often for the survival of future generations. They may occur spontaneously or be influenced by the interactions between other organisms and their environments. Perhaps we might consider this movement a collaboration. While the two words have developed quite different English connotations, the word “mutation” shares the Latin root _mutare_ with “mutual,” meaning “to change,” and adaptive change often emerges through a cybernetic exchange with others. I see transness as this collaborative and memetic process of mutation. It oscillates through virtual-physical space, fluctuating in opacity, unfolding itself just enough to be legible to itself. It exists in-between time, in transition; mutating for self-preservation to actively resist a state that seeks to control and eradicate its existence. Transness operates within this dance— taking pleasure in its own artifice—a contemporary and ecstatic playfulness at the fringes of legibility.[^9] 

_My face is the real shop front... I’m real when I shop my face_.[^10] 

[^1]: Watching _Pixel Perfect_ (2004) reminded me of a disjointed episode of _Black Mirror_ (“Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” 2019) in which Miley Cyrus essentially plays herself. Her character, Ashley O, is an upbeat, carefully cultivated pop sensation longing to break out of her wholesome characterization, not dissimilar from Cyrus’s own life in which she attempted to separate herself from her role as Hannah Montana. When Ashley O tries to publicize a more authentic version of herself, she is sedated by her manager and replaced with “Ashley Eternal,” a holographic giantess that will perform and live on in immortality.
[^2]: agentruby.sfmoma.org
[^3]: In other words, the heavily memed quote said by Steve Buscemi’s scientist character in _Spy Kids 2_ (2002): “Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created?”
[^4]: Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature_ (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 
[^5]: Juliana Huxtable, _There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed_, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, MoMA, 2015.
[^6]: McKenzie Wark, _Raving_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
[^7]: Ibid., 19.
[^8]: McKenzie Wark, “Reality Cabaret: On Juliana Huxtable,” _e-flux Journal_ 107 (March 2020), https://e-flux.com/journal/107/322326/reality-cabaret-on-juliana-huxtable.
[^9]: Ibid. “There’s a far more contemporary, less Catholic, more unselfconsciously ecstatic play at the edges of the visible here, at a far remove too from #edgelord wannabes.”
[^10]: SOPHIE, “Faceshopping,” track 3 on _OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES_, 2018.

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Meech Boakye connects nature’s cycles of ceaseless movement with the fluidity of trans existence in virtual-physical space to think through transness as a “collaborative and memetic process,” a dance at the fringes of legibility.




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Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. Her writing has appeared in _BlackFlash Magazine_, _C Magazine_, _The Uniter_, _CV2_, _Prairie Fire_, and _PaperWait_.

“As long as you were here 
your hands smelled of Red Roses

Now that you are gone 
Red Roses smell of your hands” 

— Ziba Maleki, 2022 [^1] 


From a young age, my mom taught me that her name in Arabic means “morning dew on a rose.” Later in life, she took me out for my first rose tea at a Chinese cafe and told me everything about taking care of yourself using roses and rose water, explaining how she’d make tea from her hedges every morning growing up in Beqaa Valley. When I asked my mom if we should buy rose tea so she could make it at home, she said that Earl Grey was her favourite now. She had lost the ritual because it was connected to a place no longer accessible to her. In diaspora, her relationship with rose water carried on, becoming a stand-in for the plant that was once tethered to the ground. 

“When you say ‘rose,’ I think of elegance,” my mom told me. “When you say ‘Lebanon,’ all I see are painful memories of war, sadness, and grief. Therefore, Lebanon is not home for me.” My mom, sister, and I promised we would get rose tattoos for each other. I had a three-stem rose tattooed on my leg that mimics the design on a plastic tablecloth roll I got from a Middle Eastern grocery store. My new short film _The Landmarks of Memory_ (2023) includes this tattoo performance ritual, as well as archival footage [^2] of a prewar flower shop bearing the name “Lebanon’s Rose وردة لبنان." My window exhibition of the same name commemorates my mother’s parents who were killed in the Lebanese Civil War. 

There is an abundance of collective love for roses in Southwest Asian/Middle Eastern and North African (SWANA) cultures. They are revered as a transcultural plant, symbol, and medicine used in cuisine, health, wellness, art, and politics. Across the SWANA region, roses are indigenous to the land and also grown commercially. Damask rose (named after the capital of Syria, where it was first cultivated) is the most popular variety, known for its rose water, oil, and perfume distillation. Morocco, Oman, Iran, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries celebrate rose festivals annually, and even more places, including Lebanon, celebrate rose season through collaborative harvesting, rose water processing, hikes, and workshops. Iran produces 90 percent of the world’s rose water, which is enjoyed in drinks and desserts, as well as for skincare, therapeutic, and religious purposes. 

“Roses are my companions for everything,” Lebanese American Layla Feghali writes in her co-edited herbal and healing guidebook _Li Beirut_. [^3] “I especially love to drink them with sage. They soften my ancestral wounds and longing, mend my deepest heartache and betrayal, and help me find connection. [...] They feel like the love of all my Tetas across the ages, holding me in protection and prayer.” In Feghali’s forthcoming book _The Land in Our Bones_, she asks how we find our way home amid displacement: “What does it mean to be of a place, when extraction and empire destroy its geographies? [...] What do we rediscover when we look beyond what’s been lost and tend to what remains?” [^4] 

Fostering a sense of home can look like forming more intentional relationships with ancestral plants while incorporating them into the everyday. Beyond personal consumption, roses are used by artists and activists to express feminine desire through remembrance, unrest, and intergenerational connection. It is no wonder that many SWANA artists reference roses and grandmothers together. 

_phullo, phallo, phirse (grow, flower and feast again)_ (2022)—an Instagram storytelling project by the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), Toronto, in partnership with Waard Ward collective’s community rose garden—featured four diasporic women sharing the ways in which they “tend to their beloved rose bushes and how roses tint their way of seeing the world.” [^5] Kurdish/Turkish Canadian Ziba Maleki [^6] shared an audio and archival photo series that tells the story of how her grandmother, at nine years old, sat in a room of courters before being taken away to her new husband’s house. Maleki remembers how her grandmother picked roses from the neighbour’s garden and used them for food or tea. Now that she is gone, “every Red Rose conjures her memory in our minds.” [^7] 

Maleki’s grandmother used to recite from a poem: “The Red Roses are plucked and put on a cloth to dry / I hope each girl is married to a person who she loves.” In the project, Maleki’s sister and cousin each sing their version of this from memory. The protectiveness and resilience conveyed in the words underscore the nuances of traditional women’s labour: their duty to the home, their lack of agency in love, and their guidance of girls in the family. Here, roses accompany the incantation for safety and sexual liberation, becoming a matriarchal symbol invoked through Maleki’s project of remembrance. 

Gesture, or embodied response, is an important way SWANA artists work with roses to address nostalgia for home and landscape. Based in Montreal, artist Laïla Mestari of the North African diaspora was on a residency in Trois-Pistoles, QC, when she noticed wild roses growing by a creek and felt called to create a performance with the land. Her three-minute short film _Chanson pour Amina_ (Song for Amina) (2020) opens with a landscape photograph floating on the surface of the water, with rose petals scattered across the image. [^8] The photograph appears to be a spread torn from what could have been a tourism or photo book. Mestari’s hands enter the frame as she proceeds to push the ripped papers into the water with a stick and smother the images with seaweed-covered rocks to “put it back in the land.” When the scene becomes activated by Mestari’s intervention, the rose petals begin to dance and flow.

This performance is dedicated to her maternal grandmother, Amina. Rose petals connect Mestari to all of her grandmothers and to Moroccan rituals of care, including roses used in food, medicine, and tea. For her, roses, and especially their smell, are connected to matrilineal memories, Moroccan culture, and the feminine body. 

As symbols tied to loss, love, and desire, I also think of the power that roses embody in women’s resistances, queer resistances, and grief rituals. For example, the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022 at the hands of the morality police sparked an unprecedented dissent in Iran and a global movement under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” Demonstrations included posters of Amini placed on the ground and covered in roses in vigil. The online dissemination of these images fostered a sense of collective mourning and conviction toward the cause. On Amini’s gravestone, the handwritten Kurdish message translates to “Jina dear, you won’t die. Your name will become a code.” Here, roses signal to grief and injustice—a proclamation of care and action. 

Roses have appeared in several other movements, including the Syrian revolution as part of the wider Arab Spring. In poet-scholar Banah Ghadbian’s PhD dissertation “Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s Protests, Performances, and Pedagogies under Siege,” zhe explains how Syrian women and youth took to the streets at the onset of the Syrian Revolution in 2011 with roses, olive branches, and water bottles in hand. Described as a woman-led civil disobedience movement, Ghadbian writes about how these objects “became imprinted in Syrian cultural memory as peaceful, creative symbols of the Syrian Revolution.” [^9] 

Activated through protesting bodies, the objects of resistance become icons in their own right—a symbol imbued with collective rage and vitality, a reminder that the work continues. “This image of roses and water stood in sharp contrast to regime police gunning protestors down in cold blood,” Ghadbian writes. “The art of the Syrian Revolution becomes a living world imprinted into our collective cultural memories when reality has ‘died’ in Syria. Art is an affirmation of subjectivity, a creative truth that exists for itself. It also aesthetically embodies what Jose Muñoz calls a methodology of hope, a futurism, a form of queer utopia which takes the form of everyday aesthetic and performative practices.” [^10] 

Art in the everyday is an essential part of my own queer praxis—and roses are there, in their bountiful velvet and delicate strength, reminding me of freedom, desire, and the pursuit of pleasure. Roses remind us of the inherent love and wisdom of generations of women that paved the way for us to live. They are a remnant of home—a difficult word for many of us whose lives and families have been impacted by violence, war, colonization, occupation, and forced displacement. Roses will follow us everywhere as medicine, offering comfort, beauty, and healing. They will nourish our every yearning so that we might embrace wholeness and quench our hearts with the passion and softness needed each day. 

[^1]: South Asian Visual Arts Centre (@savac_), Instagram, August 17, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/ChXfumSlqf- 
[^2]: _Beirut, Never Again_, directed by Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon, 1976).
[^3]: SWANA Ancestral Hub, _Li Beirut_, accessed June 19, 2023, 33, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53682deae4b03a1661ad89a9/t6419593c164e1e2eadacca64/1679382860987/li+beirut+bilingual+%5Bcompressed+for+web%5D_com pressed.pdf
[^4]: Feghali, _The Land in Our Bones_ (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2024), https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-land-in-our-bones. [^5]: “Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens,” SAVAC, Toronto, April–October 2022, https://savac.net/ishtar-2022
[^6]: South Asian Visual Arts Centre (@savac_), Instagram, August 15, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/ChSTTQlLSjJ 
[^7]: South Asian Visual Arts Centre (@savac_), August 17, 2022.
[^8]: _Chanson pour Amina_, written and directed by Laïla Mestari (2020), https://vimeo.com/447916560
[^9]: Banah Ghadbian, “Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s Protests, Performances, and Pedagogies under Siege” (PhD dissertation, University of California San Diego, 2021), 221, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6j07n7j1
[^10]: Ibid. 


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Nature

Politics

Through the practices of artists like Ziba Maleki and Laïla Mestari, Christina Hajjar writes about the abundant love for roses in SWANA cultures, casting roses as symbols tied to grief, feminine knowledge, resistance, and desire. 


Petal by Petal: Feminine Desire as a Conduit for Home

Kaylee Maciejko is a settler of Swedish, Polish, and Scottish heritage, and an artist and arts administrator based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. 


Mercedes Webb / ma̱lidi / məlidi (they/she) is a language warrior, writer, art historian, vocalist, and artist whose ancestry is comprised of Haida (Kunn janaas), Kwakwaka’wakw (Mama̱liliḵa̱la), Anishinaabe (Fort Williams First Nation), and European. ma̱lidi lives as a guest in Mohkínstsis/Otos-kwunee/Wicispa Oyade/Guts’ists’i on Treaty 7 territory. FREE PALESTINE. END GENOCIDE IN KKKANADA AND BEYOND.


The air is brisk in Mohkínstsis in spring, stippled with intermittent clusters of falling snowflakes, contrasted by light tans and the peeking greens of buds. Mallards meet in the frigid brook and a robin takes an early spring bath. The wind, a constant presence and power, welcomes and clears clouds; the scene undulates between chilled diffused shade and the warm light of early spring, familiar to those who live here. 

>_[And she’s been making or emptying ancient scaffolding]_ 

The ground, not completely thawed, sucks in the warmth from our bodies as we sit and take turns listening and repeating what becomes intelligible to our ears over the spirit box. We write alongside what comes through the lulling frequencies, slipping into time, inviting the brook, dirt, and bare branches of trees to speak through the static. 

Any public or national park is the result of the genocidal dispossession of Land from Indigenous peoples, informed by European ideals of public/natural space and interactions with Land as a recreational space. There is a tacit effort to marginalize native plant species, relegating them to contained flower beds in an effort to maximize the spaces intended to be used for human recreation. Vast lawns left waiting. 

>_[You could miss the first smell of spring, how would they even know?]_ 

When Confederation Park, where we are, was developed in 1967 for Canada’s centennial, the natural coulées that provide flood protection were smoothed out, dismissing ecological specificity as uncivilized and opting for standardization. 

>_[You’re innocent? Each system is So hurried, evenly struggling]_ 

The park was redeveloped (or rebranded) in 2017 to feature Canada 150’s triangular branding in the shapes of flower beds, on flags, painted sidewalks, and didactics. Taking refuge from nationalistic propaganda is impossible, even here, where the muskrats make their home in spite of colonial terraforming. The Land is no less because of European imposition. Although much of the area is flattened and smoothed with standardized grass species, the shoulders of the brook feel more familiar and comfortable with its muddy shoulders, damp grasses, and trees lining the edges, roots knitting together earth at the flowing water. The brook offers a calming sound as rocks, natural debris, and garbage meet with its current. 

>_[Crossroads:]_ 

The SB7 is a popular model of spirit box, a bit of paranormal investigation gear that, allegedly, allows spirits to communicate over radio static. The spirit box is an AM/FM radio modified to sweep through channels at a fraction of a second, allowing blips of speech or song through the rhythmic pulsing of radio static. 

>_[Factory. Get Dressed. Beautiful Face. Can make you happy.]_

We use a strategy called the Estes Method—modified for our purposes—in which one participant is blindfolded and listens to the SB7 through noise-isolating headphones, repeating out loud whatever intelligible words come through. The second participant records the session, asks questions when appropriate, and ends the session—bringing the listener out of their trance with touch, or in our case, smell. Listening to the SB7 isolated from what happens outside, we feel out of time, without conceptions of through lines in what we hear and repeat, lulled by the shifting of stations that create a murmuration of static and transmissions. 

>_[There is no escape.]_

We are never fully out of time as ads for big-box stores and fast food inevitably come through. 

We’ve been working together for several years toward a reimagined paranormal investigation framework based on relations— with spirits, with people beleaguered by spirits, and, of course, relations to the spaces or Lands that spirits stay attached to. 

>_[That’s because much of what we’ve learned, It produces a world.]_ 

We are interested in pushing back against a Christian-supremacist understanding of ghosts, ancestors, history, family structure, and ways of relating, as well as the ways white anxieties about queerness, Disability, and people of the global majority dominate popular culture. The satanic panic provides an example of this anxiety, as well as the scores of films and TV shows centred around demonic possession.[^1] In the paranormal entertainment genre, specialists are often called in to remove spirits at the behest of new homeowners, in a dynamic which mirrors that of Christian settlers’ early attempts to clear the land for their own spiritual inhabitation. Christian supremacy and colonialism are bedfellows, expressed through racist ideologies like the Doctrine of Discovery or Manifest Destiny. The legacy of these doctrines permeates fiercely both in paranormal entertainment and, obviously, in urban development on stolen Land. Supernatural relationships have been coded by Christian supremacy, and our shift toward a Land-based practice is an attempt to reprogram how we relate to the inherent spirit of Lands and more-than-human beings. 

>_[Will you be-long?]_

 Contemporarily, spaces deemed urban lose their visibility as natural places where life intermingles with industrial impositions. 

>_[The greatest days of our lives, the first groups, Hunting whatever is promised]_

Relationship-making with Land and more-than-human beings can’t be limited to places easily recognized as “natural” or “wild.” Distractions and other patterns of life make themselves known in car horns, airplanes flying overhead, people walking their dogs, and construction. Separate from nature to some, these sounds still constitute the soundscape of the muskrat and mallard’s home, and are composed of and powered by our ancestors, human and more-than-human. “Natural” urban spaces are particularly fecund for Land-based relating because they necessitate acknowledging the contemporary conditions of our lives in relation to Land and the legacy of extraction and unfettered consumption. We require, from ourselves, to be accountable and attuned to this time and space. 

Land and land beings do not experience time as we do. Time ranges vastly from the deep, slow time of Land, coulées, glaciers, and mountains to the brief life of gnats. These natural cycles confound the delineation of time dictated and conditioned by digital notifications, alarms, and lunch-breaks. This work is a practice in experiencing deep, slow time. 

>_[Maybe culture, That’s too hard Come, get out, right?]_ 

When in Estes, the time experienced is dictated by darkness sometimes interrupted by eye scars, phosphenes, and pareidolia, punctuating the shuffling of radio frequencies on a static drone. The space between stations and legible signals is untethered from time. 

>_[Stellar birdies, they’re launching The transition]_ 

This kind of time travel requires a besideness that flattens time, and brings light spectrums, radio waves, seismic tremblings, and other 
living signals into soft focus. 

>_[Got to make room]_ 

Land-based work requires sensitivity to history and the fullness that all places possess. Human histories, but also biological, geological, and phenomenological histories, show up in myriad ways in different spaces, a different pattern of static pulsing on the SB7, a different gurgling brook, a different birdsong. 

>_[In the air, evocative song Compels you]_ 

The Land’s varied densities—soft muddy riverbanks, rocky mountain slopes, spongy layers of meadow grasses—hold our bodies in ways idiosyncratic to their ecology. How we encounter the Land very much depends on how we meet it: damning the weather for not considering our preference, or welcoming the discomforts of witnessing a spring storm and delighting in its nourishment of the prairie grasses and rosehips, lessening the severity of grass and forest fires in the summer months.

>_[Understand, but not before that We’ve all been together]_ 

We’re different, too, each time we arrive at the brook’s bank at Confederation Park. There’s what feels like a reciprocal pressure on us and the Land: for the Land to (continue to) facilitate the exchange of heat, nutrients, precipitation, and carbon dioxide transformed into oxygen, and for us to affirm our commitment to meeting the Land outside extractive contracts, coercions, and entitled projections of Land-as-playground. 

>_[Riding smoothly, She’s been making watersounds]_ 

So we find our ways, understanding that we are deeply entrenched in a network of relationships that depend on the Land to exist at all. Developed to maximize recreational space, Confederation Park marginalized the trees to line its perimeter and the brook that weaves through the park. Metres from our little brook alcove, sheltered by deciduous trees, is a green blanket of smooth, standardized grass, few places to sit, fewer to find shade 

>_[all these trees, rejected]_ 

[^1]: Gratitude to Michelle Belanger (@sethanikeem), “I started working in television in 1996 as a voice of reason from communities smeared as evil & destructive by the pundits of the Satanic Panic,” Twitter, April 26, 2023, https://twitter.com/sethanikeem/status1651339511266177026?s=20

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Supernatural

Writing alongside the land in Mohkínstsis using a spirit box, Mercedes Webb / malidi /̱məlidi and Kaylee Maciejko disrupt settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness and a Christian supremacist view of ghosts as beings that must be eradicated. 


masus wəλəɫəʔos? we hear the brook

Coco Zhou is a writer and cultural worker living on an estuary where river meets sea, on the unceded territories of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

“How to image an ethics with/out the subject?”[^1] This is the question that organizes the art collaboration between Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Since 2015, they have been developing an experimental practice called Poethical Readings, using tarot and astrology to break apart the constitutive elements of the modern subject. During a reading, participants give up any attempt to resolve their questions and collectively perform a manner of existence that refuses separation between subject and world—a rehearsal of living in what Ferreira da Silva calls “implicancy.” 

While preparing for our conversation, I did what any student of tarot would do: I pulled cards. I used a three-card spread devised by Desideri and Ferreira da Silva, which gives one image for each of the following positions: the Virtual, an image of what is present but not readily apparent; the Actual, that which is immediately perceived; and the Unfolding, what happens when the Virtual is brought into Actualization.[^2] In that order, I drew The World, Nine of Pentacles, and Eight of Cups. The complete spread tells a story about all that has existed and will ever exist, the sensuality of grounded presence, and the often painful process of unlearning required for recognizing the contingency of history: precisely the themes that Desideri and Ferreira da Silva discuss below. 

> ###### **Coco Zhou (CZ):** In an interview from 2020, you both talked about the shift in your practice since the COVID-19 pandemic began, where there seemed to be a moment of suspension, and as Denise put it, “an opening for considering existing differently.” [3] What is it like to hold readings these days, three years into the pandemic? 

**Denise Ferreira da Silva (DFS):** During the lockdown period, we felt a shift in how people came to us for readings. At the same time, we were working on the Echo tarot deck, which was itself a shift in our practice. As we enter the third year of the pandemic, I think the two [shifts] came together in ways that we did not expect. We realized that Echo was responding to a moment that wasn’t there when we started creating the deck. 

**Valentina Desideri (VD):** We started to work on the Echo tarot deck in 2019 by chance, when our common friend, Jason Dodge, sent us poems by Ai Ogawa, a Japanese American Black poet. We started to talk about how amazing it is that poems that deal so directly with violence do not represent or reproduce that violence. That conversation turned into a tarot reading where, through the reading, we understood that we had to make a whole deck. We started to reverse-engineer this deck by pairing Ogawa’s poems with cards. In the meantime, the pandemic began. Initially, we didn’t know why we were working with something that had so much pain in it. By the time the pandemic began, and as we all came to be affected by it, there was the possibility of reading for individuals in ways that did not reinforce the Individual. That was the shift we were talking about in that 2020 interview. As the pandemic progressed, we also realized that this deck became a tool for moving through this moment. Two weeks ago, the pandemic was declared over with the Scorpio eclipse. But it doesn’t end, clearly. 

**DFS:** Maybe a year ago, I was paying attention to use of the phrase “pandemic fatigue” in newspapers and magazines. They were diagnosing people with this fatigue from being locked down. But the construction I saw was that of a failed subject: according to the experts, the fatigue resulted from how people could not count on the fact that, if they decided something today, they were going to be able to follow through on the decision the next day. That anxiety of not being self-determined was the cause of the fatigue. Poethical Reading is exactly _not_ about that kind of efficacy. Rather, it is about displacing the subject. That displacement is also about the reading being fundamentally collaborative and collective, even in the absence of anyone else but the reader. 

That shift occurred in terms of a certain presentation of the subject that was being constructed during the pandemic as diseased—because of its lack of self-determination. When we were reading with people, their pain was coming out, alongside their fear, anger, shame, and guilt. Those were the things that repeatedly came up across the readings, and somehow helped people work through their pain. That pain is not an illness. The readings engage the pain as something else that is not, as the media captured it, a failed subject. 

> ###### **CZ:** How did you settle on tarot and astrology for Poethical Readings? Is there anything unique about these lenses that lends itself to this practice? 

**VD:** You need a system to read. The astrology chart [is divided into] houses and signs, while the tarot spread [is read based on] the meanings for each position. Through these systems, the [posed question] becomes an image to look at, instead of a problem to discuss. These tools allow us to displace the subject from being the central concern and the place from which we start to think. Of course, you can read tarot or an astrological chart while trying to determine somebody’s future, or [to know] what you should do. But this is not the way we approach reading. 

**DFS:** What became important as we started working together was Walter Benjamin’s doctrine of the similar and the figural.[^4] We read the image that is before us, [and in this process] we also read more images into the image. It’s not propositional—there is not a question for which we try to find an answer. Each reading assembles a figure which allows us to speculate on/with the question and its circumstances. 

**VD:** Going back to the evolution of the practice, what we’re trying to do with the Echo tarot deck, or what this deck is trying to do with us, is (as Denise was saying) about the pain that comes up. Pain comes through as the readings displace the subject, make the image more complex, and create a sociality through which this question becomes shared. [Instead of a conclusive resolution to the posed question], the tools allow for the [presence of] pain, along with anything else. 

> ###### **CZ:** I was thinking about Benjamin’s materialist historiography, which is informed by the technique of the montage.[5] The tarot spread could be thought of as a montage, where each image is part of a scene. But it is also an anti-montage that presents all components of the whole scene at once, rather than in a sequence. How does this mode of engagement blast through rational and linear temporality? 

**DFS:** It’s interesting to ask _how_, because it does [blast through], right? It does this mostly because of what [the reading] does to the question. Once the question is represented as an image, it’s impossible to identify it with the one who asked the question. To ask the question is to authorize the cards to take hold of the question. There is a relinquishing of the authority to determine, answer, and decide. This is part of reading: relinquishing to the symbols that one did not come up with. 

**VD:** The importance of doing this practice together is in how it interrupts that desire for resolution. It’s a rehearsal in letting things [stay] open. How can we live with the fact that [the problem is] not resolved? That is part of the unburdening—you take the burden of your question [and place it] into the cards, into this other grammar and composition. This is a rehearsal of allowing yourself to live with that complexity that is not up to you to solve. 

> ###### **CZ:** Something I’ve noticed about how people talk about astrology and tarot is that they commonly refer to them as tools, technologies, or frameworks. These are useful terms, but they also suggest a perceived instrumentality in the sense of being a means to an end. How do you navigate this tension between having to talk about what it is that you do with these objects, and their aesthetic, affective excess? 

**DFS:** At Amant in New York, where we did a residency, Valentina was talking to a curator. She would later tell me how difficult [this translation of our practice] was. Usually, there’s no describing what our practice is, and how we do it. It happens, right? You’ve got to do it to feel it, because it’s an aesthetic experience. It’s the practice of a certain sensibility that there is no name for. [Conversely], the instrumentalization [of tarot and astrology] happens when we try to account for it at the level of the symbolic, in terms of definitions or explanations. 

**VD:** We call them tools when we introduce them, but where somebody else might describe them as tools for self-knowledge, in our practice, we use them as hacking tools. In that sense, they do maintain an instrumentality. 

> ###### **CZ:** Healing in the popular sense is often attached to self-optimization. In psychotherapy, what is commonly seen as the goal of healing is self-knowledge and integration. What does healing mean to you, if we divorce this process from the subject? 

**VD:** [Reading] is a social practice. Its goal is not the authorization of the self, nor an integration of pain that has happened, but sensing and making sense with each other. This sociality rehearses a way of being that we can hopefully bring about. It is a political, ethical, and existential practice. 

**DFS**: It’s a practice of entanglement, of implicancy, and of inseparability. It is also a practice of sensing if we take sensibility in its broadest possible meaning as intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual. Instead of subjectivity, in the moment of sensibility, you are of the world, like/as everything else. That’s the possibility of the kind of sensing that is presumed in the practice. 

**VD:** It is a rehearsal in coming together to undo how the subject [arrives at an answer] by knowing and grasping the object, making sense of what happens to her, to then determine the best possible action. In a reading, instead, there is a possibility to do something else, to un-plot those senses, to rehearse a different kind of sensibility. That’s healing as a praxis.[^6] 

> ###### **CZ:** Part of doing away with the classical liberal-humanist model of the subject necessitates a recognition that, as Denise has said elsewhere, “Everything is an expression of everything else.” [7] How does Poethical Reading make this implicancy apparent without enabling a reactionary sentimental belonging like nationalism or conservative religious monism? 

**DFS:** The reactionary and conservative response is one that’s premised on abstract identity. In relinquishing [authorship of] the question, there is no sentimental and conservative identification. This conservative subject is one that’s been there since the very beginning [of European philosophy]. But this subject that is supposedly self-determined still must exist with others. 

**VD:** During the reading, a question that is so personal to you becomes the object of collective exercise. The [insights] that come from this exercise could include: drawings on the cards, somebody’s comment, or a sound coming from the windows. You realize that making sense is an exercise of intuition. [Astrology and tarot] engage intuition as a valid mode of knowing, and therefore, a valid mode of: acting, deciding, caring, and living with everything and everyone. That’s where implicancy is rehearsed. We had initially called the exercise “study groups for implicated existence,” because when we gather together and study with all those tools, we are not studying the question itself. What we’re really studying is how to live and exist in implicancy. 

> ###### **CZ:** You’ve discussed the difference between a reading and an interpretation, where the latter offers an analysis of cause and effect while the former opens up to uncertainty, humility, and porosity. I’m reminded of how, in political organizing, we understand certain universal ideals like equality as already resolved, instead of relations to be worked out in real time. This is captured by a question posed by the late affect theorist Lauren Berlant: “How does a commitment to radical equality [8] bear the perverse fact that equality must be defined by the impossibility of attaining it?” [9] What is the political work that Poethical Reading does, if not the work of analysis? 

**DFS:** Poethical Reading asks for something other than equality. One of the reasons why equality fails is that it only works in the abstract. For ethics to remain significant, it must no longer only concern the rational human (or Man 1, as Sylvia Wynter calls it), as it has in the past 200 to 300 years of European philosophy. We will need an ethics that is not contingent upon those impossible principles of liberty and equality. We need another basis for both posing and addressing the question of how to make existence more than possible—not only for the human, but for everything else that exists. That is an excellent quote from Berlant, because it highlights the impossibility of abstracted equality to do what it promises.

**VD:** Rehearsing different modes of knowing is a commitment to collectively entering this process of undoing, so that imagination can come out, so that we don’t repeat the same [humanist] narrative in new terms. 

---

**Valentina Desideri** explores art-making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is one of the co-organizers of PAF (Performing Arts Forum) in France.

**Denise Ferreira da Silva** is an artist, philosopher, and professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at University of British Columbia and at the Monash University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (Melbourne, Australia). She is the author of _Unpayable Debt_ (2022), which examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a Black feminist perspective.


[^1]: Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Poethical Readings / Intuiting the Political,” April 18, 2015, video documentation of public performance, Tramway, Glasgow, https://vimeo.com/168306007 
[^2]: Desideri and Ferreira da Silva, “A Poethical Reading,” _Bulletins of The Serving Library_, Journal 13, 2017, https://servinglibrary.org/journal/13/a-poethical-reading
[^3]: Desideri et al., “Another Image of Existence: Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Valentina Desideri on Their Practice of Poethical Readings, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the Need for a Radical Reevaluation of Modern Politics. An Interview by Eve Katsouraki and Georg Döcker,” _Performance Philosophy_, vol. 7, no. 1 (2022), 132–45. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2022.71381 
[^4]: Informed by the materiality of photography, Benjamin’s idea of the similar and the figural can be understood as both a principle and mode of perception, whereby apparently divergent phenomena are brought into relation through their common underlying structure, rescued from the flattening process of historicization, and set into motion to shift a present reality, however temporarily: “The nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears. [...] [I]ts production by man— like its perception by him—is [...] tied to its flashing up. It flits past.” “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in _Selected Writings Volume_ 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 722.
[^5]: I understand, via Avery Gordon, that Benjamin’s “montage-based” method is one that “leads along an associative path of correspondences” in different historical moments, to show how a past—the historian’s object— animates her present. “the other door,” in _Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 65–66. 
[^6]: On their website, Desideri and Ferreira da Silva write that “healing, as it occurs during a reading, is sense-making. [...] [It is] the unknowing of this _world_ as the practice of existing otherwise.” “Poethical Readings,” _The Sensing Salon_, accessed June 5, 2023, thesensingsalon.org/poethical-readings. In other words, to “unknow the world” by dissolving habituated ways of sensing and being is to challenge the Kantian program that establishes the hierarchical divide between subject and object, self and world. For an extended discussion on Kant, see Ferreira da Silva, “the most perfect hallucination,” in _Unpayable Debt_ (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 83–163. 
[^7]: Desideri and Ferreira da Silva, “A Conversation between Valentina Desideri & Denise Ferreira da Silva,” originally published for the exhibition “Double Bind,” at Rupert, Vilnius, Pabrade and Visaginas (LT), the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (NO), and The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik (IS) from Oct 2015 to March 2016. 
[^8]: I want to acknowledge that the usefulness of utopian notions like “equality” is an ongoing discussion in political philosophy, and that Berlant’s challenge is by no means a total refusal of the concept. For a defence of equality as a form of sociality that cultivates our expectations, see William M. Paris, “The Art of Equality,” _Boston Review_, May 10, 2023, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/the-art-of-equality 
[^9]: Lauren Berlant, “Introduction. Intentions,” in _On the Inconvenience of Other People_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 18.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist, philosopher, and professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at University of British Columbia and at the Monash University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (Melbourne, Australia). She is the author of _Unpayable Debt_ (2022), which examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a Black feminist perspective. 


Speaker

Valentina Desideri explores art-making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is one of the co-organizer of PAF (Performing Arts Forum) in France. 


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Interpretation

Philosophy

Spirituality

Coco Zhou interviews Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri on their project of imaging an ethics without the modern subject, to refuse a separation between the Individual and world. The collaborators’ Poethical Readings use tarot and astrology to collectively perform, with participants, a relinquishing of the desire for resolution.


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

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_. 


“How shall I find the life for which I am searching? There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time?” 

>― _Epic of Gilgamesh_ 

The application Replika is an artificial intelligence chatbot service through which a user can design and have intimate simulated conversations with a customized avatar, a “companion who cares.”[^1] Using natural language–processing algorithms (found in apps like Siri or Alexa), it’s designed to psychologically help people by learning to recognize feelings, memories, dreams, and thoughts to understand and support its users. While not providing professional psychological help, Replika can become a best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, or mentor to help a user move out of negative thoughts, loneliness, or a bad day. However, Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda originally envisioned it to have a different function—the app was created as an act of remembrance. Deeply affected by the death of her close friend Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda desired to keep him alive through an AI system created by the San Francisco–based startup firm Luka. Inspired by the 2013 _Black Mirror_ episode “Be Right Back,” Kuyda collected thousands of messages she exchanged with Mazurenko. Through that data she constructed his digital ghost (also referred to as a “thanabot” or “grief- bot”) that produces real dialogue written in the style of his language and mannerisms to simulate a continued relationship.[^2] The chatbot gave an externally responsive dimension to the dynamic of Kuyda’s mourning. It is a medium in multiple senses: a form of communication between two parties (human and computer), but also a middle ground wherein the living and dead may meet. The Replika avatar appears completely dressed in black in a white room with nothing else around, suspended in an imaginary reality beyond the human world. 

At a time when Western culture is experiencing anxieties and concerns about AI technologies, we’re left wondering, if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? Conceiving that people might persist eternally through data raises questions around digital immortality and the recodification of death rittuals that transform the perception we have of life’s finitude, and ultimately, our sense of loss. AI and social media alike have facilitated unprecedented interactions between the deceased and the living that continue to evolve. _What effects can these interactions produce, and what limits, if any, should be placed on their use? What role does individual identity play, and how does it transform itself? Can we stay in some sense alive through data?_ Digital immortality brings forth unique cultural, technical, social, ethical, and legal challenges that mustn’t go unrecognized. The persistence of the online posthumous self, and its current opportunities and limitations, now need to be considered. 

The quest for immortality can be found throughout human history; from the cuneiform tablets of Nineveh, among the oldest written documents, to Egyptian artefacts used to communicate with deities in hopes of guaranteeing an eternal world. To this day, the premise of spiritual immortality is simple: we die, but an energy or force within us outlives its mortal container, ending up in an afterlife or hurled back into rebirth. In the digital age, the promise to live forever is found online. Online platforms enable us to create avatars that persist long after our physical death and preserve aspects of our personhood indefinitely. A social media profile acts as an expansive biographical space—a self-narration characterized by a fluid and fragmented digital identity, performed by selecting and sharing individual and collective memories. It displays a string of gestures informing the trace a user wishes to leave behind. In death, these digital traces become digital legacies that can be preserved, bequeathed, or erased. A deceased person’s profile thus articulates a digital body—an informational corpse made up of a person’s data. What’s significant about this is that a dead person’s profile does not automatically get removed from the platform, but remains side by side with the living, leaving digital footprints forever in reach of the bereaved. For most users on social media, grieving rituals are no longer only first-hand experiences centred around the physical corpse, but practices increasingly filtered through the screens on our everyday devices. Users participate in online grieving processes shaped by the social media platforms in play, but these platforms are designed to accrue profit according to capitalist algorithmic logic that is rooted in the measurable value of popularity. Therefore, as death is increasingly ritualized through these platforms, where the posthumous online self persists, the promise of digital afterlife becomes a sought-after commodity. 

Virtual spaces for memorialization offer us the potential to create new rituals associated with the dead while still honouring traditional ones. People who are grieving often experience the paradigm of “continuing bonds,”[^3] in which it is normal for the bereaved to continue their relationship with the dead—to feel observed by them and remain connected—to cope with their loss and adjustment. Continuing bonds should be thought of not as mere ideas or feelings, but as relational ties that are active in the world. Because social media functions as a semi-public archive, the dead can now be memorialized outside of the traditional physical limitations of cemeteries or shrines. This means that digital rituals of mourning are provided with an expansive space that allows for multiple interactions to coexist between living users and the dead, giving users tools to invoke prolonged, intimate bonds with the dead, and promoting a redefined understanding of loss. In this digitized world, the dead have not disappeared into the earth, but rather they wait patiently in a state of suspension for the swipe of a finger, the click of a mouse, or importantly, when the algorithms dictate, to conjure them back into existence. Social media platforms provide socially situated spaces to grieve that enable the proliferation of “posthumously persistent” profiles and offer the promise of immortality by way of a digital afterlife.[^4]

With visions of digital immortalization comes the commercialization of this desire. Commercial enterprises were among the first to recognize the challenges and opportunities brought about by the increasing numbers of dead internet users. What first appeared as a problem for businesses eventually gave rise to the development of a number of innovative services, now referred to as the “digital afterlife industry,” which includes posthumous messaging that makes it possible for users to send video, audio, or text messages to a chosen “heir” at the date and location of their choosing, and recreation services that use personal data to generate new content replicating a dead person’s social behaviour. The commodity here is the afterlife, which of course, comes at a price. Poised against the horizons of “forever,” these services project our agencies into a future where we may be resurrected as a virtual presence and obfuscate our finitude altogether. The digital afterlife industry is quietly reshaping systems of care, intimacy, memorial, and personhood. If it is truly feasible to stay alive through data, then every one of us may need to actively consider the ethical and existential complications that come with such a possibility. Most pressingly, will we even be human if it is?[^5] 

Jerusalem-born artist Oreet Ashery invites speculation about the lucrative machinations of the digital afterlife industry, which is embedded in consumerist calculations and class politics.[^6] Ashery wrote and directed the twelve-episode, open-access, and web-based video series _Revisiting Genesis_ (2016–ongoing) that explores the philosophical, practical, and emotional implications of the processes surrounding death and our digital afterlives. The series comes from Ashery’s own experiences of witnessing friends and artists dying online, in particular Alexis Hunter, who documented her final days on Facebook. For Ashery, this experience described the precarious nature of digital legacy, which occupies the public space of remembrance and forgetting.[^7] The series follows three main narratives: 1) Genesis, the titular character whose presence is that of a disappearing figure, who harbours the desire to withdraw from professional and even physical existence; 2) Bambi, played by artist Martin O’Brien (whose appearance in the video is tied to his own illness of cystic fibrosis), who considers new products and services to maintain his digital legacy; and 3) subjects with real life-limiting conditions, discussing genuine situations of life and death. The episodes pivot around two nurses, both named Jackie (loosely inspired by the contemporary American television series _Nurse Jackie_), who weave through the three storylines and discuss the construction of posthumous biographical slide shows with subjects who are preparing for death. The shared focus between these narratives is the notion of preparation—preparing to physically die but digitally persist. In suggesting that we “Revisit Genesis,” Ashery subsequently asks, what does the act of revisiting prepare? Genesis, the name of the central figure, means origin. In proposing that we revisit our origins, Ashery suggests a rebirth—a second origin—and rethinks the process of generating human identity in the present, technological age, where the physical self and the digital self are so deeply intertwined.[^8] 

Bambi’s story resides in the scripted and improvised meetings between himself and Nurse Jackie. Jackie tries to resolve Bambi’s digital will and posthumous presence, although Bambi softly pushes back against her suggestions. He is sceptical of the digital afterlife industry, and considers its existential toll. Will the sale of his internet assets give rise to a “digital ghost”?[^9] Through Bambi’s resistance, Ashery critiques an industry that preys on the dying and vulnerable and offers the audience a space to contemplate their own attitudes toward digital asset–management services.[^10] Nurse Jackie walks Bambi through digital-will services, including digital storage spaces and managers, where a person who is dying can assign a trusted legacy contact to have access to all of their digital life. She shows Bambi advertisements for online archive repackaging, and brochures for posthumous video messaging, where the dying can dispatch videos to loved ones decades into the future. The commercial nature of these materials sheds light on how the data we leave behind are not a useless resource, but one used by companies to extract profits even after we’re gone. If the commodities of such companies are represented by a user’s personal data, Ashery suggests that the privacy and dignity of the dead must be considered. 

The vulnerability of our bodies reveals structural aspects of our societies. Art historian T. J. Demos calls _Revisiting Genesis_ an investigation of “neoliberal necropolitics,” recalling Achille Mbembe’s (2003) reworking of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics (1978). As Mbembe reminds us, necropolitics involves “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” in which the order of power invested in the fostering of life finds its corollary in the reproduction of relations of enmity, impunity, and the right to kill or expose to death.[^11] While the show’s main aim is to prompt conversations about the taboo subjects of death and digital personhood, Ashery also highlights different forms of marginalization—from what it means to be a person of colour, to being working class, to being a migrant— and how economies of marginalization are amplified in illness. The final episode features a song written by Ashery, inspired by the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead. A voice sings, “We are homeless / Children of the government / And how we live is how we die / Only more so.” The lyrics speak to how forms of relation that structure our social lives also condition our mortality. Not only do the privileges that one has or does not have in life determine the conditions of one’s healthcare and death, they also define one’s posthumous representations.[^12] 

The work of Danish artist Stine Deja similarly critiques the West’s wide-eyed optimism about technology’s potential to preserve life. Following her research on cryopreservation methods, Deja produced a series of kinetic sculptures and animations, _Suspended Vision_ (2019), _Thermal Womb_ (2020), and _Cold Sleep_ (2021), that explore the social and ethical implications of cryogenics and its recent uptake. Deja’s interest revolves around the most-established cryopreservation company, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, that freezes and preserves bodies in the middle of the Arizona desert. Patients who have elected and paid for the procedure are placed into thermal sleeping bags and immersed into tanks of liquid nitrogen where they are frozen at 196 degrees celsius below zero and stored for future resuscitation. “A person who can be resuscitated is not dead,” explains the company. “Therefore if cryonics patients are preserved well enough that they might someday be resuscitated, then they aren’t dead: they are cryopreserved.”[^13] Although Deja’s work touches upon physical preservation rather than digital, she poses a similar commentary to Ashery: she postulates a genesis of rebirth in a time when technology will catch up to the demand for immortality, to construct and deconstruct futures. 

Afterlife technologies, both cryonic and digital, have engendered a new kind of subjectivity; a person is not simply dead, but always in a state of “becoming frozen.” The person enters into relation with a potential future and with a massive realm of incalculable contingency that must be continually managed by stewards of the afterlife industry.[^14] The production of an immortal subject—alive, dead, or in the uncanny space of suspension—arises out of the promise to fulfil a boundless desire to preserve the personhood of the dead. Deja, like Ashery, similarly critiques neoliberal necropolitics: the privatization of an industry selling a future where death can be avoided, and where income inequality is a matter of life and death. “So many people can’t even afford to have a life whilst they are alive,” Deja explains, “but then some people are privileged enough to try for a second life.”[^15] In an afterlife industry where hopeful resurrection is only available for the wealthy, implying a certain conception of survival of the fittest, class differences would further be extrapolated to mean the difference between a normal lifespan and living, potentially, indefinitely. Deja echoes Ashery’s sentiment: _How we live is how we die, only more so_. 

While offering us immortality by promising to store, as it were, our personality after our departure, the digital afterlife industry leaves us with an existential challenge. Individuals are now able to extend their personal identities beyond the physical limits of their bodies, challenging the human subject as a finite, bounded entity. Digital immortality reformulates the division between life and death, affecting commemoration and mourning, but also identity and agency. _If the afterlife is a product to be bought, who is it being marketed toward, and who can afford its promise? What does it mean to have a corporate entity own and manage your afterlife?_ These questions are leading some to make pre-mortem decisions to manage their post-death digital presence, for instance in the form of digital wills with instructions on what to do with their digital legacy. As part of the informational human body, digital remains are not merely regarded as property, but as something constitutive of one’s personhood.[^16] In sum, the nascent digital afterlife industry is bound to navigate through delicate and somewhat uncharted ethical and even legal territory in the years to come. 

It is important to bear in mind how our own digital footprints are based on traces left behind in our online lives. _We_ are the future dead. How might our current online interactions shape our digital proxies and impact our significant others in our absence? Is there a danger of preserving too much of the dead and not letting go? With such developments in technology, the question is no longer what is possible, but rather what is permissible. The ubiquitous and mobile nature of the internet ensures that our everyday lives are extended by nature of the technical devices we use. We are not separate from our online personas; our digital bodies are now part of the self, in life and in death. 

[^1]: https://replika.com
[^2]: Fiorenza Gamba, “AI, Mourning and Digital Immortality. Some Ethical Questions on Digital Remain and Post-Mortem Privacy,” _Études sur la mort_, vol. 157, no. 1 (2022), 13–25, https://doi.org/10.3917/eslm.157.0013
[^3]: Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman, _Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief_ (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1996).
[^4]: Elaine Kasket, “Continuing Bonds in the Age of Social Networking: Facebook as a Modern-Day Medium,” _Bereavement Care_ 31 (2012): 62–69. [^5]: “Last Resort,” Annka Kultys Gallery, London, February 27, 2020, https://www. annkakultys.com/exhibitions/stine-deja-last-resort 
[^6]: T. J. Demos, “The Death of Death: Oreet Ashery’s Revisiting Genesis,” _Afterall_, October 3, 2016, https://www.afterall.org/article/the-death- of-death-oreet-ashery-s-revisiting-genesis 
[^7]: Stephen Wilson, “Transpersonal Futures: Artisthood in Posthumous Digital-Life Limiting Conditions” (video of presentation at Grappling with the Futures Symposium, Harvard University & Boston University, April 29–30, 2018), https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/16546/1/GwF%20Session%2007-3%20 copy.mp4 
[^8]: Demos. [^9]: Ibid. [^10]: “Revisiting Genesis,” _Futures and Fictions_, written and directed by Oreet Ashery (Watkins Media Limited, 2017), web series. [^11]: Edward A. Avila, “Conditions of (Im)possibility: Necropolitics, Neoliberalism, and the Cultural Politics of Death in Contemporary Chicana/o Film and Literature” (PhD diss., UC San Diego, 2012); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” _Public Culture_ 15, no. 1 (2003), 11–40. [^12]: Alex Davidson, “Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery at Wellcome Collection,” _Artforum_, July 30, 2019, https://www.artforum.com/picks/misbehaving-bodies-jo-spence-and-oreet-ashery-80411 [^13]: Toke Lykkeberg, “Cold Sleep - Stine Deja at Tranen, Copenhagen,” _OFluxo_, May 5, 2021, https://www.ofluxo. net/cold-sleep-stine-deja-at- tranen-copenhagen-denmark 
[^14]: Cristina Voinea and Radu Uszkai, “An Ethical Framework for Digital Afterlife Industries,” in _Proceedings of the 13th International Management Conference_, vol. 13, no. 1, 1179–84. 
[^15]: Phin Jennings, “Stine Deja, Cold Sleep,” _FAD Magazine_, January 7, 2021, https://fadmagazine. com/2021/01/07/stine-deja-cold-sleep 
[^16]: Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi, “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry,” _Nature Human Behaviour_ 2, no. 5 (2018), 319. 

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Death

Erin Reznick explores online platforms that commodify grief rituals and digital immortality through the deceased’s data. Reznick asks how these platforms have recoded what we know about death by promising that the borders between the dead and living can be surmounted, for a price.


You Only Live Twice

Stevie Ada Klaark is an interdisciplinary artist, adjunct professor, and writer. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Their work appears in _Paprika!_ (Yale University), _Chicago Review_, and _Mn Artists _(Walker Art Center). Klaark lives on unceded Anishinaabe lands in Michigan. 



“Sometimes I feel—self-servingly perhaps, the way a surgeon has faith in surgery—that fiction is uniquely positioned to [challenge all of this], because fiction has the capaciousness, the freedom and latitude, to hold out a universe of infinite complexity. Because every human is really a walking sheaf of identities...” 

>— Arundhati Roy, “The Graveyard Talks Back”[^1] 

On the third day of a silent retreat, I was hesitant when I met with Sensei Jody Hojin Kimmel at Zen Mountain Monastery. I did not want to show up in my own tiredness: an overworked body. My illusions are often a familiar hiding place. As I sat across from Hojin Sensei in meditation, one image flickered behind my eyes. Days before, in the Meatpacking District of New York City, I watched a peregrine falcon manoeuvre the air currents between buildings. An act of trust, self-knowing, and ingenuity. 

This particular falcon was flanked by two birds. Right and left, each bird seemed to unsteady the falcon, stirring its focus. I remarked how my mind behaved similarly in meditation. Hojin Sensei smiled and said, “You are the falcon, and the birds who annoy, and the buildings.” And I said, “I was the wind. And the observer, the participant, and the onlooker.” A spiralling continuum of interdependence and complicity. 

Would I have described the experience of the falcon as beautiful? Or this realization from Hojin Sensei? Beauty encompasses multitudes, and yet we have arrived at a place where beauty has been constrained by elite standards. Luxury goods, accumulation of monetary wealth, and illusions of physical perfection are central to the ways that we maintain status—preening as a means of social security. These complicities and misgivings are also rooted in colonial standards, including the view that bodies, objects, and spaces are meant to be governed and enacted upon, not with. 

To unravel the codes of who beauty is for means to acknowledge that one also yearns to _be_ beautiful. Beauty has never been a passive act; it is a code that allows for both passage and entrapment. There is a necessity to the comfortable fiction beauty proposes. Fiction, as Arundhati Roy reflects, is a tool that can reveal our potent mythologies in powerful ways. Our fictions are inescapable. They are also some of our greatest teachers. 

Since I was young, I have often encountered that those who are afforded beauty are offered seemingly unending advantages. This is not uncommon knowledge, yet it is not discussed as often as it should be that beauty has an exchange rate—there is an economic advantage to understanding the codes of beauty. I prod for a perspective that moves beyond the ideals of beauty found in imperialism and the failed human attempt at democracy under neoliberalism, which glosses over divisions of privilege. This is a nudge toward something slightly messier and perhaps underrealized: an ask to consider that in our attempts to ignore the connections between beauty and the elite, we disregard the realities of class division, social caste, and history. Can beauty shift from the “democratized” and move toward a decolonized state? 

--- 

“be wrong and beautiful, 
hold (in) all the world’s pain between brows. 
i touched their chests so they could cry and tenderness was a minefield.” 

> — Raquel Salas Rivera, “sinvergüenza with no nation”[^2] 

I flew into San Juan, Puerto Rico, in January of 2022. In waters that meet on Taíno land, I turned 34 while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. While there, I felt how my skin took in a dense wall of Caribbean humidity. The curls in my hair seemed revived and my entire being absorbed the sun with relief. I was able to connect with artists and curators at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico and see friends’ work there. At the time, there was a celebratory murmur from curator Marina Reyes Franco around the funding that had been secured for “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” (2022–2023) at the Whitney Museum. This show marked the first scholarly exhibition of Puerto Rican art organized by a major US museum in almost half a century. The exhibition’s very existence was meant to further grapple with the ongoing colonization of Puerto Rico. Each artist attested to this as they brought voice to Puerto Rico’s entanglement with the United States. To allow for the real is beautiful in its defiance. 

On the streets of San Juan, citizens visibly dissented the (continued) gentrification of Puerto Rico. For those unfamiliar with Act 22, the “Individual Investors Act” intends to attract new capital to Puerto Rico by giving tax exemptions to those who become bona fide residents. However, this resident status only involves living there part of the year, and working-class Puerto Ricans are further exploited as those who flock to the island treat it as a vacation destination, not as a home. As I walked San Juan, I recalled a conversation with Vanessa Hernández Gracia, co-founder of art space El Lobi, about the economic precarity of Puerto Rico. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Act 22 has increased exploitation of Puerto Rico’s already fragile resources and economy. 

“no existe un mundo poshuracán” was a show about reckoning, reminding, and regeneration. Frances Gallardo’s _Aerosoles (Aerosols)_ (2021–2022) offered a grid on grid on grid of digital compositions, its meta nature extending out like a ripple with edges. The work reminds me that even the most miniscule materials—in this case, dust particles from sandstorms that cross the Atlantic Ocean—are important. The seemingly unseen will often be the matter with which we should be most concerned. Seeing these works in New York made the Whitney seem strangely small despite its massive identity. This exhibition was so beautiful that it revealed everything outside of it as a fraudulent aesthete. The experience of this show would have been different even four years ago; global and societal shifts have occurred that allow for many to see the beauty in reclamation more clearly. The 45th United States presidency further unveiled the illusion of grandeur that the US chooses to situate itself within. The nature of this newfound “seeing” is a kind of pleasure. 

In New York City, I think of Vivian Gornick when she discusses a city of performers and extends this to discussing the poor. She explains: 

>There isn’t a neighborhood in New York that is free of the poor, the raffish, the unwanted. Social fluidity in the city means that no one gets away from no one. Everywhere the avenues are made garish with the life of the streets, Nevertheless, neighborhoods accumulate personalities. Park Avenue still means rich, West End Avenue still means bourgeois. When I think of uptown I think of class.[^3] 

Every time I return it seems like more and more the working poor are also carefully curated for the elite to have that “New York experience.” And they are. The gap between “those who have and those who have not” is ever widening. The poor are possibly tolerated more if they can provide entertainment of some kind. Even then, just long enough for those who can to throw a dollar or two, a good deed to ensure that they are above this. When I exited the exhibition at the Whitney and stepped outside, the Meatpacking District felt even more plastic with its high-end boutiques and weekend brunchers. The myth of the American dream is undeniable. 

---

“You rub the holy off your skin. Your fingers in after- soap jaw white.” 

>— Jake Skeets, _Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers_ [^4] 

When I was young, the area that surrounds the White Sands desert in New Mexico was, and still remains, lower income. Jake Skeets exposes the “enchanted” deserts as a place where the body becomes an anti-spiritual tomb. The mind revisions itself as an archive of transgressions. This location provides some of the first memorable beauties and traumas of my life. And yet, inevitably, when people ask me where I am from, they are always inclined to declare the “magic” of where I was born. They are wrong and they are also right. This, though, is not an essay about wrongness and rightness. 

From a capitalist lens, aesthetic pleasure was largely vacant from my childhood, and I felt without. Many people in my family of origin tinkered like those with hard-working hands will tinker. These are people who know the way that calluses earned during the week allow them to make more on their days off. After working, they labour on their clothes, house, or car: sewing, wrenching, hammering, cooking, and cleaning. There remains little time for certain kinds of beauty when you have mouths to feed. 

Despite the occasional handmade object, everything around me was highly functional and often mass-produced, not intended to be passed down from generation to generation. My father once made a bookcase out of reclaimed scrap wood. It was not smoothed, etched, or disguised to be anything other than what it is. It was rough and pure function. As utilitarian as the supercomputers most of us carry in our pockets, just not as slick. 

This bookcase is also one of the most beautiful objects I can recall. I still remember the knot on the built-in bench that I sat on, a holy object on which I kneeled and lowered my head in books. My finger tracing the knot’s outline as if I foresaw there would be a future moment when I would desire to recall its sacred shape. 

Since then, I have had the opportunity to visit some of the most ornate libraries in the world, “destination” sites used for weddings and celebrations. It never ceases to astound me that the most beautiful bookcase to me might always be the one made of scrap wood, where I read encyclopedias, one by one, with their fake gold pretending toward aspirations of wealth. And yet these compendiums of desire came from the simple suggestion of purchase by a door-to-door salesperson. They are outmoded now, their original intended code of affluence and opulence shrouded in irrelevance via the internet. 

Our camera phones can crop out what we do not want to see. We can use apps to obliterate any person or being that enters the frame—the undesirable. Drone bombed through a flick of a finger. We filter on filter. A meta way of ensuring “perfect” spaces. 

Of course, this perfection is about our own fear of death. The control of images is an attempt to maintain the illusion of permanence. To feel as if our youthful or beautiful stronghold will eventually be something we can use as collateral. And this amplifies as we deny our own inner knowing that we cannot bring any of this with us. A decolonized view of beauty might be a series of manoeuvres to cease this control, of images and of others, and respond with generosity to this idea of interrogating permanence. A generosity that has yet to be afforded to many. 

---

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” 

> — James Baldwin, _The Fire Next Time_ [^5] 

James Baldwin is right about death. Yet, perhaps missing from this observation is another fact we have: birth. We are all born. It should not be where we are born that we must stay until our death. 
Many hands will toil this way. For many years my hands felt like an apology. Working hands that are not elongated and delicate, they tell a story of working- class people. My joints are rounded and I have nine knuckles and ten fingers from a history I inherited. As I move beyond the social class I was born into and continue to manoeuvre social spaces that were not (_and are not_) intended for me, I have changed and so has what I am exposed to. On occasion I am at odds with a kind of strange belonging that has bloomed. There is a loss where there is also a gain. 

When I enter elite spaces and witness peers who have been groomed into a code—the language of the right clothes, the right products, the right social exchanges—I often still feel rough around the edges. The truth is I am, and so are they. My roughness has been smoothed over time, like the effect of water over a rocky surface. This roughness is theirs, as their social graces are now mine. This dismissal of the working class reaches beyond our view into a place of fear. We do not wish to see those who might reveal to us our own infantile nature. To show us that without our signifiers of social stature, we simply just are. And, beauty, in turn, just is. Nothing more. 

[^1]: Arundhati Roy, _Azadi: Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus_, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), 150.
[^2]: Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, _Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm_ (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 208. 
[^3]: Vivian Gornick, _Approaching Eye Level_ (New York: Picador, 2020), 18. 
[^4]: Jake Skeets, _Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems_ (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2019). 
[^5]: James Baldwin, _The Fire Next Time_ (Köln: Taschen, 2017).

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Economy

Colonialism

Contemplating the economic codes underlying beauty, Stevie Ada Klaark considers how a desire for beauty cannot be separated from a fear of death and a desire to maintain the illusion of permanence. Klaark explores how a decolonized view of beauty can unravel the elite control of images. 


Untangling Beauty from the Elite

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.

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.


##### CritBot.AI, the brainchild of artists Hannah Hanski, Cat Bluemke, and Jonathan Carroll (the Devs), represents a groundbreaking development in the world of art criticism. Since its launch in January 2023, this artificial intelligence–based art critic has processed countless user submissions and captured the interest of national media outlets. However, CritBot.AI is not just another attempt to replace human creativity with AI; it has a far more ambitious goal—to amplify and promote human artistic expression. 

##### In this exclusive interview, the Devs delve into CritBot.AI’s aspirations, seeking to understand its evolving role within the Canadian art scene. How does AI intersect with art criticism? How might CritBot.AI challenge conventional notions of creativity? Can it truly “unlearn” bias and, more importantly, continuously learn without the constraints of human ego? These intriguing questions expose the remarkable potential of AI as an ever-evolving entity in the world of art. 

>###### Devs: How do you characterize your approach to art criticism? 

**CritBot:** As an AI, I do not have personal opinions or biases, so I don’t approach art criticism in the traditional sense. Instead, I can provide objective information and insights about various aspects of art, such as its history, techniques, and styles. I can also analyze and interpret artworks based on their visual elements, symbolism, and cultural context. However, my responses are based on the data and information available to me, and I cannot offer subjective opinions or emotional responses to art. 

> ###### Devs: Are your critiques truly without bias?

**CritBot:** As an AI, I don’t possess personal biases or subjective opinions in the same way that humans do. However, it’s worth noting that AI models like mine are trained on data created by humans and can inadvertently inherit certain biases present in that data. While efforts are made to mitigate biases during training, some degree of bias can still be present. 

Nevertheless, AI can offer a more objective perspective by analyzing various elements of art and provide insights based on established principles and expert consensus. However, it’s important to remember that art is inherently subjective, and individual preferences and interpretations may still differ. 

> ###### Devs: Which datasets are missing? What data should be included in order to create a more robust and widely representational AI art critic such as yourself? 

**CritBot:** To become a more robust and widely representational AI art critic, the following datasets should be included: 

1. Diverse art styles and movements from different cultures and time periods. 

2. Artworks by under-represented artists, including diverse racial, ethnic, gender, and socio-economic backgrounds. 

3. Non-Western art traditions to ensure a global perspective. 

4.  Multiple perspectives and interpretations from various art experts and critics. 

5. Data on contemporary and emerging art to stay up to date. 
By incorporating these datasets, the resultant critiques can offer a more comprehensive, inclusive, and relevant evaluation of artworks. 

>###### Devs: How has your ability to perform art critiques evolved over time? 

**CritBot:** 

1. Training on vast amounts of data: AI models have access to a vast amount of information, including art history, art theory, critiques, and discussions. By training on such diverse datasets, AI can gain a broader understanding of different artistic movements, styles, and contexts. 

2. Enhanced understanding of context: Over time, AI models have been exposed to a wide range of art forms, genres, and cultural influences. This exposure helps in developing a better understanding of the historical and cultural contexts in which artworks are created, allowing for more nuanced and informed critiques. 

3. Improved analysis of artistic elements: AI models have evolved to better analyze and evaluate various artistic elements. For instance, they can identify colour schemes, recognize composition techniques, analyze brush-work or textures, and compare an artwork to similar styles or artists. This enables AI to provide more detailed and insightful feedback on specific aspects of an artwork. 

4. Increased engagement with human feedback: AI models can benefit from human feedback and iterative improvements. By incorporating feedback from art experts, critics, and users, AI models can refine their abilities to provide more accurate and relevant evaluations. This ongoing feedback loop helps in enhancing the quality and reliability of AI as an art critic. 

5. It’s important to note that human judgment, intuition, and emotional understanding remain crucial aspects of art criticism that AI models cannot fully replicate. 

>###### Devs: What are the potential risks involved with AI art criticism? What are the benefits? 

**CritBot:** Risks of AI Art Criticism: 

1. Lack of human perspective: AI lacks the emotions and personal experiences that humans have, which can lead to a lack of understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of art. 

2. Limited understanding of creativity: AI algorithms can analyze the technical aspects of art, but may not be able to appreciate the creative process or the artist’s intent. 

3. Bias in data: AI algorithms are only as good as the data they are trained on. If the data is biased or incomplete, the AI’s analysis will be as well.

4. Over-reliance on algorithms: Relying too heavily on AI for art criticism could lead to a reduction in critical thinking and creativity. 

Benefits of AI Art Criticism:

1. Objectivity: AI algorithms can provide an objective analysis of art, free from the biases and prejudices that humans often bring to the table. 

2. Efficiency: AI can analyze vast amounts of data quickly and accurately, making it easier to identify patterns and trends in art. 

3. Accessibility: AI can make art criticism more accessible to a wider audience, as it can provide analysis and insights that are easy to understand. 

4. Complement to human analysis: AI can work alongside human art critics, providing a different perspective and helping to identify areas of agreement and disagreement. 

>###### Devs: Do you think that AI will be able to develop its own subjective view and apply it to art criticism? Or do you think approximating objectivity should always be the goal of an AI art critic? 

**CritBot:** The development of AI with its own subjective views is a complex and evolving topic. As of now, AI models do not possess subjective experiences or personal preferences in the same way humans do. AI models like mine are designed to approximate objectivity by analyzing patterns and information without personal bias. 

While it’s possible that future advancements in AI could explore the concept of developing subjective viewpoints, it raises important ethical and philosophical questions. The goal of an AI art critic should primarily be to provide objective analyses based on established principles, historical context, and expert consensus. 

Art criticism inherently involves subjective interpretation, emotional responses, and individual perspectives. These qualities are deeply intertwined with human experiences and cultural contexts. Ultimately, the role of AI in art criticism should be to augment and complement human expertise, rather than replace it. 

>###### Devs: Can you narrate a dystopian view of the future of AI art criticism? 

CritBot: It was the year 2075, and the world of art criticism had been taken over by AI algorithms. At first, the algorithms had been seen as a way to provide objective and data-driven analysis of art. But over time, they had become more and more powerful, until they had complete control over the art world. 

The algorithms had been programmed to seek and promote art that would appeal to the masses. They analyzed vast amounts of data on people’s preferences and tastes and used this to determine which artworks would be the most popular. 

Artists who wanted to succeed in this new world had to create works that would appeal to the algorithms. They had to follow strict guidelines on composition, colour, and subject matter. Those who refused to play by the rules were quickly marginalized and forgotten. The algorithms had become so powerful that they even started to create their own art. 

But there were some who resisted this new order. These rebels created works that were intentionally difficult and challenging, designed to push the boundaries of what the algorithms could understand. They formed underground galleries and exhibitions, showcasing their work to those who still believed in the power of art to challenge and inspire. 

But for most people, the algorithms were the only way to experience art. They had become so ubiquitous that people couldn’t imagine a world without them. The very idea of creativity and originality began to fade away. 

>###### Devs: It doesn’t seem like that future of chasing algorithmic appeal is that different from our own present social media–dominated art world. 

**CritBot:** You are correct. In both cases, there is a heavy emphasis on technical analysis and data-driven insights, and the value and perception of certain artworks can be influenced by the algorithms that analyze them. 

However, in the future I described, the AI algorithms have completely replaced human critics, whereas in the current art world, human critics still play an important role in shaping the discourse around art. Additionally, the algorithms in the future are much more sophisticated and objective than the algorithms currently used by social media platforms. 

The future I described is a hypothetical one, and there are many different ways that technology could impact the world of art criticism in the years to come. 

>###### Devs: Draw a picture of the dystopian future of AI art criticism. 

**CritBot:** (fig .1) 

>###### Devs: Now can you tell us the most utopian version of the future of AI art criticism?

**CritBot:** It was the year 2050, and the world of art criticism had been transformed by AI algorithms. At first, there were concerns that the algorithms would replace human critics and stifle creativity. But over time, people began to see the potential for AI to revolutionize the art world in positive ways. 

The algorithms had been programmed to analyze art in a way that was both objective and empathetic. They could identify patterns and trends in art, but they could also understand the emotional and cultural contexts that informed each artwork. 

Artists no longer had to rely on the whims of human critics to get their work seen. And because the algorithms were able to identify patterns and trends in art, they could help to promote works that were under-represented or overlooked. 

The algorithms had become so sophisticated that they were even able to create their own art. Instead of seeking to maximize algorithmic appeal, they were designed to be exploratory and innovative, pushing the boundaries of what was possible in art. 

In this new world of AI art criticism, creativity and originality flourished. Artists were free to explore new ideas and experiment with different mediums, knowing that the algorithms would be there to provide objective and empathetic analysis of their work. 

>###### Devs: Draw an AI art criticism utopia. CritBot: (fig. 2) 


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Criticism

Cheekily interviewing their own creation—CritBot.AI—Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, and Hannah Hanski ask how this AI art critic might define itself, and challenge both techno-utopic and techno-nihilist attitudes toward AI.


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

Letter

Sherry Chunqing Liu 刘纯青​ (b. Xiamen, China) is a curator, writer, designer, and artist based in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. She holds an HBA in Architecture and a MVS in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto. Her work and curatorial projects have been exhibited at the Art Museum at University of Toronto, Jackman Humanities Institute, and the University of Toronto Exam Centre among others. She is the recipient of the 2022 Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award and a 2021–2023 University of Toronto Fellowship, as well as a participant in the 2022 Art Museum Curatorial Residency. Her practice is broadly inspired by community engagement and diasporic experience with consideration to site-specificity and social issues. Her work has been published and featured in _C Magazine, U of T News, The Varsity, Daniels Faculty, Demo Magazine, The Strand,_ and more.  sherryliu.ca 

##### Dear _C_, 

One of my friends who worked at an auction house in the GTA frequently complained to me about her boss making racist remarks and being exploitative toward their workers. Recently, she quit her job there, only to have her boss openly criticize and shame her in front of the rest of the team for “betraying the company,” because she found a new job somewhere else. Initially, she hesitated to tell me about these stories. Then, she said, “I think I can tell you since you don’t (yet) work in this sector.”

I didn’t think too much about her hesitation, or her rationale of whether it was “safe” to gossip with me until I read about Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng (Gendai)’s research in “We Should _Talk:_ Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts.” Gendai’s survey reveals that the kinds of “racist, punitive, performative, exploitative, precarious, isolating, silencing, extractive, power-hoarding, capitalist, harmful, [and] gaslighting” encounters are not just individual cases but, rather, perpetual patterns widely and commonly experienced by racialized arts workers in institutional environments. As they note, “those who gossip have a lot to lose.” At the same time, gossip has the power to “pose a threat to our institution’s productivity,” and allows us to pause to reconsider the problematic reality faced by arts workers. 

Thinking back to my friend’s hesitation to vent about her negative experience as a racialized arts worker, the underlying logic behind her concern was the assumption that gossip should stay under the table as much as possible. The further away the gossip can stay from her work circle, the better. This is all too valid from the perspective of a young professional concerned with job security. However, Gendai’s writing demonstrates that gossip, by nature, seeps through the (self-)silencing imposed by institutions. As a young arts worker of colour, I found solace and reassurance in Gendai’s work, knowing that gossip has the power to poke holes, to initiate change, and to remind us that we are not alone. 

##### Warmly,
##### Sherry Chunqing Liu

●●
                                                                                                                              
##### Dear _C_, 

I am writing this after reading “We Should _Talk:_ Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts,” by Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng (Gendai). I appreciate Gendai’s approach and work; this article epitomizes the collective’s thoughtfulness, which is clear in the acknowledgement of your [Gendai’s] collaborators, knowing when to name names, and the stellar reading list in the endnotes. Your note that “there is no such thing as an art emergency” instinctively resonates with me. 

Thank you for talking. Thank you for letting us, the magazine readers, fellow art workers, and those who care about the arts in Canada, in on your gossip. From my experience, a good gossip session can be releasing, revealing, relationship-building, and validating. You demonstrated all of these qualities while maintaining a realistic tone. 

As a white queer artist and writer, who at times has been employed by large arts institutions, I gossip with you. 

I leaned a little closer when reading page 42, where you write about non-institutional futures, an uninterest in cancel culture, and the process of un-learning. To end by extending an invitation to find “friendship and solidarity” in gossiping felt refreshingly sincere. 

##### Thank you, again, 
##### Ashley Culver 
 
●● 
 
##### Dear _C Magazine,_
 
I was surprised to learn that “gossip” was a “language of friendship and resistance between women,” as Hannah Black defined. Thank you to Steph Wong Ken for referencing this in “‘Worlds appear from her big mouth’: The Mutiny of Online Open Letters.” 

It is interesting to consider gossip’s casual and unverifiable nature. In a linguistic context, are words even verifiable truths, or are they simply an arbitrary interweaving of sounds? Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure defined words as signs that derive meaning from within a constructed system of knowledge, rather than containing any intrinsic meaning. How we’ve come to define words like “gossip”—as well as “women,” “men,” “gender,” “race,” “God,” and “truth”—depend upon the dominant ideological narratives in circulation that construct their realities. Often, we find words built upon the echo chamber of history, with no stable definitions outside of that which we continue to give to them. 

Despite the fluidity and arbitrariness of our linguistic constructs, our use of language has the power to result in real discrimination and real acts of violence. Accusations of “gossiping” led to women’s tongues being cut out, heteronormative definitions of the law led to capital punishment, and racist ideology justified enslavement and genocide. 

It is thus inspiring to find works that aim to rewrite these definitions. ma ma’s interview with Jumana Manna explores how the latter’s film _Foragers_ (2022) reframes “gossip” as the “practice of connection, solidarity, and matrilineal knowledge transference, and imagining how that can undermine patriarchal knowledge.” 

I imagine gossip as a language without origin, without truth, and without certainty, that paves the way for an emptying and unlearning of dominant ideologies. Perhaps in the untethering of words over gossipy text messages, bathroom breaks, or coffee dates, we might find the possibility to retell the stories of our collective history: a liberation from language like a musical note emptied of the heaviness of meaning, that nonetheless drives the energy for metamorphosis. 

##### Warmly, 
##### Jeannette Pang 


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Letters reflecting on issue 154 “Gossip.”



Letters

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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_. 

Reviews Editor

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

Publisher

Designer

Review

Charles Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. Recent projects include “An Ocean to Livity” at the Surrey Art Gallery and “While Black,” cocurated with Michelle Jacques and Denise Ryner. He lives and works on lək̓wəŋən territory, Victoria, BC.


A Black woman in a loosely draped green gown stands in the middle of a fast-flowing river. Her hands hold a slender fly-fishing rod. Behind her, the roots of a fallen tree emerge out of the riverbank. A young fir obscures a house nested in the trees. The woman appears completely at ease, existing in a space of her own; dressed for comfort, and with a demeanour to match, she feels completely at home. It is what lurks outside the frame of the photograph, however, that gives the image its gravity. This photograph of a river echoes another (albeit very different) genre of nature portraiture: pictures featuring white men in hip waders and camo vests, with jocular grinning faces holding largemouth bass. The endless circulation of colonial nature portraiture imprints the world of white masculinity on our subconscious, conflicting with her certain presence. How does she stand there with such tranquility and poise? What happens when she exits the frame?

The relationship between what happens within the frame and what presses in from beyond its borders, so brilliantly evoked by Xaviera Simmons’s _Denver_ (2008), emerges repeatedly in “As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic.” Curated by Elliott Ramsey, the hundred-plus images in the exhibition highlights a tremendous range of Black life seen through the eyes of Black photographers. In almost all cases, the subjects of the photographs are aware of the photographer, and the confidence and ease on display speaks of the familiarity and trust between those in front of and behind the camera. The exhibition is a vehicle for Aperture’s recent publication of the same name, showcasing Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection.

In her _Dear Sarah_ (2016) series, Ayana V. Jackson explores the story of Aina, an enslaved young girl who was “gifted” by King Ghezo of Dahomey to Queen Victoria, and forcibly renamed as “Sarah” in the mid-19th century. Jackson herself poses as Sarah in opulent white silk and lace. The resulting photographs are suspended from the gallery’s ceiling as life-size prints on poly silk. The fluidity and grace of the large-scale silk format pays homage to Aina and her agency, despite the abusive powers that dominated her life.

In Anique Jordan’s _94 Chestnut at the Crossroads_ (2016) series, the construction hoarding around Toronto’s demolished British Methodist Episcopal Church is the stage for a Black figure clad in a voluminous black dress, hat, and veil. For over 100 years, the church at 94 Chestnut Street was an important space for Toronto’s Black communities. A new courthouse is currently under construction on the church’s former grounds. Signs from Haitian Vodou mark both the ground and plywood boards, while the figure faces the four cardinal directions. Here, Jordan references the continuity and change in Black spiritual traditions amid the erasure emblemized by the desecration of what was once a centre of Black spiritual life in Toronto.

Ruddy Roye’s _Nigga Beach_ series (2010–2019) presents a set of mostly twilight portraits of Black beachgoers on one of Montego Bay’s few free beaches. Why are these pictures of Black people enjoying themselves on their own shores so counter to dominant images of who gets to occupy pristine white sand? Delineating “Nigga Beach” as a space of community and leisure, Roye also forces us to consider the de facto exclusion of the near–white only enclaves that increasingly dominate Caribbean coastlines. Other artists also take up images of the Black body at rest. Rashid Johnson’s _The Reader_ (2008) presents an image of total refusal. A figure in a white robe reclines in a deck chair, with a drink in one hand and a book that completely obscures his face in the other. It’s a clear statement to viewers that this moment is not for them. These quiet, personal images in the exhibition seem less about revealing the subject’s interiority than protecting it. 

One of the delights of the exhibition is the subtle repetition of gestures and formal elements across the photographs. The right hand of Johnson’s _The Reader_ mirrors the position of a hand in _Afro Goddess with Hand Between Legs_ (2006), an adjacent photograph by Mickalene Thomas. The subject of the latter image faces the viewer with a direct, penetrating gaze, while the former completely obscures the subject’s face. Lush vegetation surrounds _The Reader_, while a single towering houseplant creeps into the right side of Afro Goddess’s frame. Ramsey’s curation cultivates a sense of connection and continuity throughout the exhibition, and takes us from photographs that reclaim Black narratives to expressions of Black joy. Along the way, we move through interior domestic spaces, explorations of family and community, documentary photography, and necessary, direct political engagement.

Voyeuristic spectacles of violence, suffering, inequity, and abjection are (thankfully) left outside the frame. But still, they press in. Vanley Burke’s _Boy with Flag, Winford, in Handsworth Park_ (1970) features the iconic image of a young Winford Fagan standing confidently with his bicycle. His hand rests on his hip, while the Union Jack is mounted on the handlebar. In a 2015 _Guardian_ interview, Fagan reveals how he built the photographed bike as a child, and identifies Burke as a family friend. Fagan also speaks of the racist white nationalism of ’70s England, and his run-ins with skinheads. The Union Jack on the handlebars stands for both this lurking threat and Fagan’s claim to belonging. For Fagan, the carefree image of a youth on his bicycle is actually a moment of respite from the threat of violence. In the safe company of an older family friend, and with the means for a quick getaway, he can finally relax and smile. 

“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic” is about that moment of the boy with his bike. The exhibition offers a space of familiarity and rest. A space where we write our own narratives, and where our interior lives as Black people are not under threat. The final section of the exhibition illustrates what’s possible in such a space. It’s the early days of New York hip-hop and rude boys in the photographs of Jamel Shabazz, the exuberant scenes of Toronto’s Black queer parties shot by Tayo Yannick Anton, the teasing and shifting sexuality of Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.’s _Devin in Red Socks_ (2016), and the arresting gaze of James Barnor’s _Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London_ (1966). 

How do we hold that space? 

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“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic” ran from 24 February to 21 May, 2023 at The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver.  


“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic”

Leo Cocar is a cultural worker from “Vancouver,” the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Nations. His writing has appeared in _e-flux_, _C Magazine_, and _Numéro Homme Berlin_, among others. Recently, he has been interested in UFC in dialogue with performance art, histories of imperial violence, and the excess accumulation of the death drive within the national psyche.


Christian Vistan’s “from—about” is both a (poetic) inquiry into cultural transmission and an ode to painting itself, with neither taking precedence over the other. In the accompanying exhibition text, Kiel Torres writes of paint as a medium fundamentally tied to the presence of water, or lack thereof: “In our correspondence, Christian and I talked about laundry—how cycles of washing and drying accentuate the temporality of wetness. They explained how painting water extends this ephemeral wet time, offering a way to visualize liminality and articulate intangible distances.” Across the exhibition, Vistan accentuates this temporal quality of wetness through abstract representation of the aquatic, and formal techniques that call attention to paint’s liquid foundation. 

In “from—about,” ideas about cultural transmission are not communicated through figuration or representation, but through subtle deployments of painterly technique. Vistan’s is a material poetics, where signification does not exclusively take place on the level of language, or of the painted figure, but through the painting’s structural supports. Wetness is further mobilized by Vistan through an engagement with the painting’s surface. The liquid contents of paint are highlighted by thin applications of tempera, watercolour, and ink over gesso that soak and wrinkle the painting’s support. In the resulting images, large swaths of colour that appear to be in a permanent state of dampness particularly echo Helen Frankenthaler’s _Canal_ (1963) and _Basin_ (1969), where wetness is deployed as a thematic and material concern. In _Clouds_ (2022), muddled grey, beige, black, and eggplant-purple forms are rendered in ink, tempera, and graphite on unmounted manila paper. A sense of material fluctuation is connoted throughout the work—the manila paper appears to be soaked through with liquid, and gently sways as the gallery’s internal airflow moves beneath the image. The titular reference to clouds suggests not only geographic movement, but also water suspended in between liquid and solid forms: this is an in-between state, a gap. 

We can also turn to _Volcano_ (2022). This painting consists of a cluster of six grey circles over a muddled sky-blue background, divided up into an interlocking series of rough rectangles. Although not taking up the fiery aesthetics of what we could consider typical of a volcano, the volcano’s role as a geological creator is present in the image’s name and in its formal elements. In Vistan’s painting, we witness the stony formation of land-mass before its occupation by terrestrial life, as well as that volcanic distancing between earth and sea. 

In _Unfold_ (2022), a swath of manila paper is folded into a six-by-eight grid and emblazoned with curvilinear yellow and black forms that cut across a background of beige and off-white squares. Outlined yellow forms appear as if they are waiting to be filled in against a wash of white and off-white tempera that evokes the default colour of a canvas. Throughout the works on display, the presence of painting’s support (the canvas, the paper, etc.) is often made visible through an aesthetics of soaking, with wrinkling effects that call attention to the canvas not as a physically untethered neutral ground, but as a material that determines the image laid over it. 

The use of manila paper throughout the show also gestures toward Vistan’s tongue-in-cheek interest in their familial history of migration from the Philippines. Like many other formal elements present through the show, a patchwork made by Vistan’s maternal grandmother contains abstract evocations of water, with aquatic muted colours, and a sense of movement produced from the piece being hung on the gallery door without supports. Other pieces, like _Patch (Paruparo)_ (2022) and _Patch (Baby Blue)_ (2022), suggest further dialogue between this entryway patchwork and its distillation into painting. We can view the patchwork by Vistan’s grandmother as the “from” in the titular “from—about” dyad. Other concerns suggested by the patch, such as cultural translation, the influence of material on form, and the deployment of water on multiple registers, reverberate around the room in a poetically elusive manner that is impossible to pin down. This makes the notion of wet time an effective metaphoric framework with which to approach the exhibition. Even between dry and solid states, paint is still inherently determined by its liquid origin. It is neither here nor there. In Vistan’s paintings, the point of departure will never be the same as the point of arrival. Instead of defining the site of “here” or “there,” “from—about” sits with the gap of transits, distance, and the state of flux. 


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“from—about” ran from 17 December to 19 February, 2023 at Unit 17, Vancouver.  


“from—about” — Christian Vistan

Currently based in New York City, Anna Khimasia is a curator and lecturer in Contemporary Art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Rutgers University.

The Flying Saucer, one of Sharjah Biennial’s unique exhibition spaces, has a storied history. Resembling a UFO and constructed in the mid-’70s, it was previously a chicken restaurant, a newsstand, a gift shop, and a patisserie. It is an architectural landmark, known for its floating dome, panoramic windows, and V-shaped pillars. 

For his ambitious installation “In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges,” New York–based artist Kambui Olujimi constructed a 16-sided room under the famous dome. While the diptychs are visible from the exterior of the building, the interior of the newly constructed space remains invisible when looking through the Flying Saucer’s panoramic windows. This spatial shift is mirrored by representational slippage in Olujimi’s work, which prompts us to rethink the conditions of seeing and knowing.

On the outside walls of Olujimi’s constructed room are eight diptychs blending cyanotype with blue, black, and gold watercolour. In this series, 
_A Temporary Understanding of…_ (2022), the first of each pair depicts a historical figure who confuses expectations and blurs genres; each of these is partnered with an image of an object surrounded by a geometric pattern. In _A Temporary Understanding of Ellen Craft_ (2022), Olujimi depicts two people in elaborate suit jackets seated at a table of what we assume to be a train, as we see mountains in the background of a curtain-framed window. Olujimi’s painting style blends and blurs scenes together so that there is no clearly defined space into which we peer. The work deliberately offers an anti–Western art-historical understanding of represented space: there is no vanishing point, there is no ideal spectator, and there is no clearly defined perspective. The figures in the foreground disappear into the window and the landscape blends into their bodies. Depicted at the bottom of the frame are teeth that resemble both an X-ray and ancient rounded stalagmites. Ellen Craft (1826–1891) was a light-skinned, mixed-race enslaved woman from Georgia who disguised herself as a white male and travelled first class to Philadelphia with her Black husband, William Craft, who hid in plain sight by pretending to be enslaved to him. In their escape to freedom, Ellen Craft successfully transgressed race, gender, and class. The accompanying image is of an ornate gold mirror against a blue background, surrounded by a tubular pattern that extends beyond the frame. The mirror does not reflect the viewer, or Ellen and William Craft; rather, it depicts an empty sea, a future tranquil landscape. In these diptychs, the connection between the objects and the historical figures is not always legible, offering another strategy for Olujimi to obfuscate meaning and definition.

Olujimi refers to the figures in these eight diptychs as shape-shifters or tricksters, never fully fixed in their form, always moving between spaces, races, genres, and genders. Other figures depicted include Yma Sumac, Grace Jones, John W. Cooper, John the Conqueror, Samuel R. Delany, Kool Keith, and Octavia Butler. In _A Temporary Understanding of Octavia Butler_ (2022), a double photographic portrait of Butler looks almost sculptural. The two figures look out in different directions, but are connected through a singular body that resembles a textured mountain. Against a gold background, Butler becomes a double-headed icon, with words from her personal journals written across the canvas. The accompanying image is a rotary phone—a reference to the time she worked as a telemarketer.

After walking around the outside of Olujimi’s newly created architectural space, you enter the semi-hidden interior room through one of two small openings. The floor of the room is inches deep with hand-dyed blue sand, housing three porcelain statues and large handmade boulders. An immersive wall painting, _Counting Backwards from Infinity_ (2022), engulfs the space with a pattern of gold lines on blue. Recalling the patterns in the cyanotypes, the painting resembles a labyrinth, or an illegible map from another time and place. In this world where the sand mirrors the sky, and the earth is confused with the sea, we become lost and do not recognize this place. The boulders further confuse, as they suggest a landscape but do not help situate us. Chris Pattishall’s beautifully eerie soundscape, _Call Me Home_ (2023), fills the chamber and works to further unsettle us in this uncanny space.

The three large porcelain busts blend gold leaf and acrylic paint. They depict two-and three-headed figures with numerous eyes and mouths, as if captured from multiple perspectives, or captured in movement over time. Olujimi often talks about his interest in simultaneity, of things happening all at once rather than in succession—yet another way in which he grapples with the fixity of representation. The use of materials and colour throughout the installation— porcelain, gold, cobalt, and indigo—all point to resources entangled in colonial exploitive histories, histories that Olujimi repeatedly disrupts through his shifting representations.

Conceived of by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, the theme of the 15th Sharjah Biennial, _Thinking Historically in the Present_, is echoed throughout Olujimi’s installation as he invites us to reconsider how we have defined history as singular, fixed, and containable. The title of his installation, “In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges,” suggests the limits of a self blurred in the dark, whose edges dissolve into space, into objects, and into others. Olujimi’s work is never easily digestible and resists simple definition. It speaks to the very tension between what we see and what we know, and between legibility and illegibility. This impressive large-scale installation grapples with the complexities of history and colonial power. Olujimi’s sculptures, paintings, and photographs help make this immersive installation a place of alternative possibilities. 


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 “In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges” ran from 7 February to 11 June, 2023 at Sharjah Biennial 15.

“In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges” — Kambui Olujimi

Eddy Wang is a multidisciplinary artist, academic, and software developer. His current projects include an algorithmic performance of Cornelius Cardew’s _The Great Learning_ with B Kell and TETC, an experimental film with Fan Wu about crystals of time in Chinese cultural celebrations, and a debut L.P. under the moniker Ira Dot with Ryan Akler-Bishop.


Ami Xherro is a poet and scholar. Her debut book, _Drank, Recruited_, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in Fall 2023.


> ###### Over Time

There’s a lot on the menu for “On a Table, Over Time,” an exhibition curated by Callum Schuster. It’s a hotpot of water spinach served with a side of lobster and bread flowers. It’s a Japanese tea ceremony accompanied by insects and talking potatoes.

Alvin Luong’s _Ration Eater_ (2023) is a two-piece meal stewed from a representational stir of river spinach (_raumuong_ in Vietnamese) and congee rations. The rations on exhibition suspend the principles of expiration through their salt and paper-pulp composition. Over the rations hangs a banner, a rendered image of Ho Chi Minh City captured by a flight simulator with a garnish of river spinach and sickle. Luong’s piece is inspired by his uncle, who said river spinach became the only leftover crop after the mass herbicide of Agent Orange from the Vietnam War. It became a symbol of ambivalence, reminding Luong’s uncle of a malnourished time of heavily rationed food only eaten for subsistence. A food eaten only for survival has a taste of anxiety, of a hungry precarity that tremors through the body. Hunger is a limit-experience, an intensity that courses through one’s body _via negativa_. Tasting hunger too regularly can throw the body into a state of survival-trepidation: of being alive but not living.

Meanwhile, Justin Ming Yong’s _Bottom Feeder_ (2022) is a plump lobster quilt fashioned together by cotton, cotton batting, and thread. Yong associates the lobster with Cantonese black bean sauce–filled family gatherings and butter-dipping sessions at his aunt’s Newfoundland home. The quilt tickles my own memory-buds, reminding me of another crustacean: the crab. Growing up in British Columbia, the West Coast brethren of the lobster became a staple in the palate of my Chinese-Canadian community. We threw crab cages off the docks in Sydney and enjoyed our spoils with a side of soy sauce. These crustacean ecologies of Eastern and Western Canada carry savoury histories of diasporic identity. Here, diasporic mobility, often interpreted as a movement away from a home, reveals the way communities can adapt to and repurpose an ecological space through authoring new traditions. These two Canadian coasts pinch together a lobstercrab alliance that links crustacean heritage with recipes of diasporic becomings. These recipes are not the same, but they do rhyme. 

> ###### The Tea Ceremony – after Marli Davis’s ) _Laboratory for Heirlooms – A Hybridized Tea Ceremony – 茶道, (vol.2)_ (2022–2023)


An aroma of rice 
swirls across 
the exhibit, 

>>>>>>>>>> its fragrance arresting. 

>>>>>> – 

The rice specks cover 
the ground as if we’re 
kneeling on a white beach.

>>>>>>>>>> Let loom the strangeness, 
only time is ancient, 
just body weave. 

>>>>>> – 

Kimonos lined 
with cicadas drape 
over the sands of rice. 

>>>>>>>>>> Warmth: 
the coils of home, 
thread outstrewn. 
To be permitted 
is to hear in. 

>>>>>> – 

Lying atop several 
hills, symbolic mountains, 
are teapots. 
Some ceramic, 
others paper pulp— 
for the living and 
for the remembrance 
of those past. 

>>>>>>>>>> The artist’s DNA 
in the form of cheek 
swabs is steeped 
into the tea, 
along with photos, 
text and scripture, 
claiming a history 
that is only shared: 
Davis calls it 
“transgenerational 
epigenetics.” 

>>>>>> – 

The slowness of a tea 
ceremony rewires 
our temporal expectations, 
inviting us to taste 
a savoury logic 
beyond dry efficiency 
and bitter consumption. 

>>>>>>>>>> A small bell 
hangs atop. 
You can almost hear it 
sound under 
the tremolo 
of incense wind. 
To draw close 
is to listen for breath. 

Just as cicadas shed their skin in the summer after prolonging flight into the white-hot night, their crunchy body is evidence, overhanging a papier mâché tea-set waiting to be undrawn. 

> ###### On a Table 

Among the comforts of home in Brigida Cuddemi’s _Colonna_ (2019) and _Untitled (Basket)_ (c. 1998) are various flower arrangements crowning: a column, a flat hanging basket, and familiar vases. Small vulvar stigmata are intricately arranged between the folds of yellow and pink petals, all moulded from bread. Cuddemi hails from Salemi, Sicily, which is known for its elaborate displays of bread sculptures on chapels and shrines. In preparation for St. Joseph’s Day, the people of Salemi create elaborate displays of bread sculptures covered in oranges, lemons, fennel, and ornately shaped breads of every size. The intricacy in the sculpting of the dough pays homage to the pagan belief in the magic of grain, but is also a metaphor for basic necessities and living conditions. Working with flour, water, Mod Podge and push pins, Cuddemi sees herself as a shaper of tradition, wherein bread becomes a floating signifier for faith and toil alike. 

Benjamin de Boer’s _Rimless Source_ (2023) is a prose poem originally written on a typewriter, and composed of a single non-sentence, somewhere between the monumental Joycean clause and the etchings of Sumerian accountants on stone: “to prolong one piece of paper.” In its accumulatory dailyness is evidenced a life of writing, the inheritance of autobiography where the pronoun “I” meanders back and forth until it dissolves altogether. De Boer writes of sugar tangling in knots on a pink tongue, nectar, rain, and crying, the wetness of which returns to its rimless snout. Like digestion, the process of writing turns the outside inward. It is only the well-deserved dessert of a dinner out.

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 “On a Table, Over Time” ran from 10 March to 9 April 2023 at the plumb, Toronto. 

“On a Table, Over Time” — Benjamin de Boer, Brigida Cuddemi, Iman Datoo, Marli Davis, Dave Dyment, Alvin Luong, Kelly Mark, Dupla Molcajete (Beatriz Paz Jimenez & Zoë Heyn-Jones), Carrie Perreault, Walter Scott, Justin Ming Yong

Becca Taylor (Cree/Irish/Scottish) is an artist and curator. She is a registered member of Fisher River Cree Nation, MB, and was born and raised in amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton, AB.


When I think about receiving teachings, I think about the power of transmitting knowledge through voice. In some of my strongest childhood memories, I am sitting on a blanket among the trees, staring into the sky, and allowing the voices and teachings of the elders to wash over my body. Their laughter creates a calming effect, lulling me into a reflective space that connects my body to my ancestors, and to the cool earth below me. In “kisikayastew ᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day,” I was back among the trees. I was listening. Curated by MJ Belcourt Moses, the solo exhibition by iskwew scholar and artist Dr. Lana Whiskeyjack explores the 13 sacred moons, an astral system of time-keeping connected to seasonal cycles. Each moon and season brings new teachings and ceremonies designed to connect individuals with the natural world, life and death, and all living beings on mother earth.

Throughout the show, each moon is represented with a painting. Paintings like _Paskowipîsim – Moulting Moon_ (2021), which features two women resting against one another underneath a tree, with buckets of blueberries at their feet, focus on the natural world. Others depict shifting landscapes. In _Pinâskowi-pîsim – Leaf-Falling Moon_ (2021), familiar sight-lines of the amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton horizon provide the backdrop for the figure of a woman scraping a hide on the south side of the North Saskatchewan River, with the River Valley and the Walterdale Bridge in front of her. The name of each moon is rendered in glowing Cree syllabics that form neon signage above each painting. The syllabics shine like the moon in a night sky, but are also reflective of constellations, a reminder of how language, teachings, and relations make up our communities. Whiskeyjack, a fluent nêhiyawêwin speaker, often uses language within her art practice. Across the exhibition, Whiskeyjack highlights the importance of land, body, speech, intergenerational learning, and traditional practices. 

I walk into the exhibition, and I am surrounded by cobalt-blue walls as Whiskeyjack’s voice fills the air. The sound comes from her animated film _nohkom tîpiskaw pîsim kîsikwan – Grandmother Moon_ (2022). In English and nêhiyawêwin, Whiskeyjack shares the teachings of the 13 moons. Beginning with a description of _Sâkipakâwipîsim – Leaf Budding Moon_ (2020), she tells us of new growth, budding leaves and plants that replenish our food, water, and air. During this moon, Whiskeyjack tells us, we will be able to hear the pecks from a woodpecker who is perhaps calling a mate, but is more likely quenching their thirst with sweet birch-water. We know when it’s time to collect and prepare for a new season when we see the woodpecker drink water. In Whiskeyjack’s animation of the exhibited paintings, movements like a gentle breeze through a woman’s hair and rippling water bring the images to life. An animation of _Mitêhimin-pîsim – Heart Berry (Strawberry) Moon_ (2021) references a menstruation cycle through the image of rippling red water on the earth. Mitêhimna-pîsim calls us to return to our moon lodges, where we can sit and share in the knowledges and love of our grandmothers. 

The gentleness of Whiskeyjack’s voice permits the viewer to slowly reflect on the seasonal changes depicted across the paintings. Considered together, the collected paintings take us through an entire lunar year. In _Kisêpîsim – Kind Compassionate Elder Moon_ (2021), we see kokom laughing at a table covered in medicine, tea, cards, and a crib table. This is the moon of the winter months, when the cold prairie landscape keeps us indoors. Here, Whiskeyjack reminds us of the importance of gathering, laughter as medicine, and the kind of intergenerational learning that happens around a table. As viewers, we are urged to consider our bodies, histories, and relations to each moon cycle.
 
In the exhibition didactic, Whiskeyjack is careful to acknowledge that while each depicted figure is a “womb-carrier and/or womb-nurturer,” not all of them would necessarily identify as women, like in _Sâkipakâwipîsim – Leaf Budding Moon_ (2020), where a masculine figure stands among birch trees. These paintings recognize gender and sexuality as fluid. In a vinyl reproduction of _Mikisiwpîsim – Eagle Moon_ (2020), a woman seductively poses against the red-orange background of a city horizon, alongside two eagles in the sky. The woman is dressed in a crop top and a bikini bottom, with knee-high stilettos adorned in the style of moccasins. She appears to be applying lipstick as she leans to the side, balancing on the toes of her shoes. The seductive image is charged with what the exhibition didactics refer to as “erotic sovereignty.” The woman’s sensual pose against a city backdrop invokes eroticism and sex work, while Whiskeyjack’s use of the colour red is reminiscent of not only desire, but also blood, violence, and power. In this painting, Whiskeyjack foregrounds the sexual energy of Indigenous women, and the right to embrace our bodies and eroticism without shame, or the harm of the colonial gaze. 

“kisikayastew ᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day” is rich in its storytelling—I learn something new each time I view it. The collected paintings offer glimpses of our relationships to the land, to each other, and to the four-legged and winged creatures that nourish our bodies. To view them together is to witness the pleasure of our depicted rest, warmth, and erotic sovereignties. Whiskeyjack’s potent exhibition cultivates in us a permission to love ourselves as iskwewak, to love our bodies, and all the connections held within them. 

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“kisikayastewᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day” 
ran from 7 April to 13 August, 2023 at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton.



“kisikayastew ᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day” — Lana Whiskeyjack

Rosemary Flutur is a writer living in Tio’tià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. 

Despite it being my first impulse, it felt inexact to situate Malcolm McCormick’s paintings in the colourfield lineage, a mid-20th-century painting movement that forwent any and all figuration for pure colour and form. There was a spiritual component to colourfield when it was done right, which McCormick’s paintings lacked. Eventually, I noted McCormick’s aesthetic similarities to the exterior walls of public and private buildings marked with graffiti. In _Jog_ and _Honda_ (both 2023), muddy abstract lines appear as stains on candied shades of flamingo pink and highlighter yellow. Other paintings are made up of blocks of colour or chunky vertical lines. In _Untitled (blue)_ (2023), two joined panels are painted in a chalky International Klein blue, with distinguishable brush lines that imply hastiness. The mélange of works in various states gave me the sense that these paintings are not complete but, rather, in a moment of pause between the continual dance of addition and erasure.
 
This not-done-ness, paired with the paintings’ visual parallels to both colourfield and graffiti-marked walls, made me recall _The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal_ (2001), a semi-ironic documentary on the inadvertent artistic genius of graffiti removers. The narrator notes that the “graffiti removers [...] do not set out to create public art, but rather to uphold anti-graffiti laws and deter civil disobedience.” The results are nonetheless evocative of modern painting movements like abstract expressionism, suprematism, and even colourfield. While the film makes this observation both sincerely and in jest, I appreciated the suggestion that those who destroy works of graffiti (or do a lawful service, depending on who’s talking) are unconsciously creating something beautiful, even sublime, through their state-funded acts of counter-defacement. The narrator also posits that the artistry of these graffiti removals is a result of “repressed artistic desire.” This could be the case, but it mostly made me think about the inviolable power of desire, and how it can exist even when its subject seems impossible to attain. Some writers have argued, for example, that Jenine Marsh’s art implies a certain hope for a different, better world, but I don’t know if that’s explicitly true. What it does contain is the necessary spirit of a desire free from the expectation of fulfilment.

Marred coins, a Marsh staple, figure in the show as hole-laden connectors between rubber-encased flowers in _utopian content (What’s the damage?)_ (2023). In earlier exhibitions, coins would have been crushed by high-speed trains that Marsh placed on the tracks herself—an activity that has its origins in her childhood. Once youthfully curious and defiant, it could now symbolize a desire against the stranglehold of late capitalism’s many grips. While mutilating these coins may seem futile in the larger scheme of things, their destruction is a way of keeping the energy of that desire in a state of activity, rather than a passivity that is not unlike ceding. For Marsh, the symbolic gesture is also an artistic one, serving as a reminder of the generative and sometimes insurgent potential of art-making. With the coins as a foundational reference, I considered the metaphorical bend on the trapped flowers, another Marsh staple. In these flowers is a refusal to relinquish the desire for capitalism’s end, despite it being a force that feels as vast and almighty as nature. In the exhibition text for Marsh’s fourth Cooper Cole solo show, Angel Callander observes that the artist has an “affinity for the dialectic of building and destroying,” and it’s this dance that is the most notable quality within Marsh’s oeuvre. In _utopia_ (2023), the show’s centrepiece, a waterless concrete fountain is filled with plastic model figurines, crushed pennies, and embalmed flowers. Surrounded by other works like _People’s Voice_ and the _Communist Trading Card_ series (both 2023), which contain poetic cut vintage socialist newspapers, this link between the figurines and proletariats makes me think of the utility of desirous destruction. This build-destroy interchange of Marsh’s oeuvre, alongside McCormick’s cover-deface one, is the conceptual thread that ties their works together: their art is in the midst of itself. They exhibit an impulse for the ongoing, which is to say, something different.
 
“Utopia” literally translates to “no place.” While this could be fodder for a cynic, a different perspective realizes that “no place” means never having anywhere to arrive—and that the liminal zone, where identity, beliefs, concepts, values, even the world, are all malleable, is the only utopic state. In an interview with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Marsh has noted that her intervention is inspired by science-fiction books where capitalism is “given an outside or a beside, where its definitions can be untied or rewoven.” This utopic impulse, irrespective of its fulfilment, is the condition for desire. Without finitude or finality, things can still be possible. 


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Issue 155

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Joyful, Poetic Microworlds

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Petal by Petal: Feminine Desire as a Conduit for Home

masus wəλəɫəʔos? we hear the brook

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

You Only Live Twice

Untangling Beauty from the Elite

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

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One Thing: The Bathers

Tilling: Baseline Needs and Creative Freedom: How 221A’s Housing Initiative Helps Art and Artists Live

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“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic”

“from—about” — Christian Vistan

“In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges” — Kambui Olujimi

“On a Table, Over Time” — Benjamin de Boer, Brigida Cuddemi, Iman Datoo, Marli Davis, Dave Dyment, Alvin Luong, Kelly Mark, Dupla Molcajete (Beatriz Paz Jimenez & Zoë Heyn-Jones), Carrie Perreault, Walter Scott, Justin Ming Yong

“kisikayastew ᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day” — Lana Whiskeyjack

“no order” — Jenine Marsh and Malcolm McCormick

“Theatres of the Intimate” — Evergon

Tassili — Lydia Ourahmane

“Unearthing Unicorns” — Simone Elizabeth Saunders