Web Poem Reply Poems

Five short language-only poems written in response to Dina Kelberman’s coded Web Poems (2017).

Dina Kelberman, Two Poem, Web Poems, 2017.

WET PANT

L is a tongue

unfurling at a pink right angle

tense curl as it licks in

 

WET PANT

WET PAINT

half-glossy and drying

lifelines flooding the plain

up, up to the first knuckle

 

I don’t know what nice is and I’m pretty sure I don’t want it

 

I know what you mean about the square in the corner

This one time

my friend gave me a dimmer switch a foot from the ground

for beauty, also

 

TWO, TWO

Earth does not have two moons

Tatooine has two suns

Earth has two not-moons

 

2016 HO3 has not been named

(maybe they have a secret name they call themselves)

Caught in a little dance with Earth too long-distance to count

 

Cruithne has a name

(this is probably why it is called our second moon)

((‘our’ here feels like the ‘us’ of a sports team))

we chase each other through space

1:1 orbital resonance, you know

crossing paths once or twice

 

round of moon

curve of bathysphere

 

the prospect of escape

instead of bearing witness

 

ZZZZZT

I had heard that lightning never strikes the same place twice

But no: it is attracted

whatever’s easy: height, metal

 

water

 

In a pool

you can’t feel your hair raise

or skin tingle

can’t place your hands over your ears

or tip toe touching heels together

 

In one foot out the other

No place like home

 

 

I DON’T KNOW HER

Can’t rely on a shadow

to be there when you need it

 

Probably leaves for something better soon

 

Reach out for a hand

Grasp at its trace

 

 

SUGGESTION

Yarn is not a worm but it looks like

(as though injured)

Drying in the sun

 

Worm is not a line but it looks like

Invasive earthworms of North America

(reality tv show I would watch)

 

Lines are not music but they look like

Levels stretching and flexing

But making no sound

Static

This follows a series of short artist talks and Q+As  by Vector Festival artists Judith Doyle, Chris Kerich, Amanda Low, and Tobias Williams at InterAccess (950 Dupont St.). This writing draws lines of rot and rhizomes between Low and Doyle’s works. Kerich’s work on death in video games is relevant here, future writing could further consider those connections. 


Amanda Low, www.http://eternallymoving.com/, 2017

if you are uncertain, you may be wondering

what does it look like?

 if the site is drooping and your links are turning purple for unknown reasons, you will want to check

 

carefully click on all of them

unhealthy ones lead to a 404.

 

whether the problem is prolonged neglect or a singular changing context

does not matter

YOU MUST ACT QUICKLY!

treating rot as soon as you can will give your site the best chance to survive and be relevant

remove or replace affected links BUT! do not change its appearance as this may cause stress

hopefully now the site can recover

and you will get your beautiful website back

Amanda Low’s http://www.eternallymoving.com/ (2017) is a non-linear poem engaging the concept of ‘link rot.’ When the site a link is pointing to is removed or expires, the link is dead and the server generates a “404 Not Found” page, indicating it could not find the requested page. This is the half-life of the internet: its rotting synapses. Speaking of her work, Low noted the particular prevalence of this issue in the legal community—In 2014, a Harvard Law School study found that 50% of the URLS in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to their intended references.[1] Low’s poem builds on the already evocative term from the coy (“where am i? i have moved”) to something more fleshy and infected (“i am plagued by something insidious / my ends are rotting”). By giving the internet and perhaps also the illusive links themselves an identity in the form of the first-person, Low articulates a being, one dying a hypertextual death. Though perhaps it is not dying, only shifting: “internally i am always stirring and stirring.”

(A small tangent about rotting ends: there are many metaphors we use to try and understand the internet. The carefree sun-bleached hang ten of net-surfing in the nineties, a series of tubes implies blockages in the pipe, misinterpreting the way things like server capacity function. The information superhighway is another infrastructural metaphor: in some ways very much a utility, to be publicly or privately policed and regulated as such. The metaphor of a cloud leads us to imagine our information, intangible to us on a solid storage device, being held aloft to be pulled from the air. In actuality our cloud information is stored in data banks, in vast warehouses, in the Californian desert: cooled by enormous amounts of ever-scarcer water.[2] In these re-conceptualized internets, I see that a metaphor is not just a poetic turn or a curious connection. It guides perceptions of what something can do and how we interact with it, even future policy actions we take on it. How does the rotting plant-like self that Low suggests in http://www.eternallymoving.com/ guide our perception of the internet? I feel more carefully, more tenderly.)

Willoughby Sharp and Robin Winters, Whistle Voiceprint, archive of Judith Doyle, c. 1970s

Judith Doyle spoke after Low yesterday, about the collective fax-transmitted work she and her colleagues created in the 70s with Facsimile and WORLDPOOL, responding about rot in relation to artist archives, which haven’t rotted yet. These collectives creatively engaged the first telephonic transmissions as art practice. Creative writing students, they transposed the avatar-like identities and networked exchanges of print publications into fax exchanges. With free faxes enabled by a government code leaked by the Canada Council for the Arts (an excellent example of what agencies and institutions can leverage with the power and access granted to them), the young artists set up connections with artists in other parts of Canada, New York, or Japan. These would be regular party to party networks, with snacks and drinks and company filling the sometimes hours of download time. Like Low, Doyle facsimiles a bodily connection to telecommunications. She talked about the erotic charge of anonymity in sharing publicly, relating conversations about the affordances for porn, between them, as them. Despite the long delay: an electric touch across distance. One of the archival faxes she shows is a voiceprint of artists Willoughby Sharp and Robin Winters whistling into their modem in New York. It looks like static: the trace of utterance. Though Winters is still alive, Sharp died in 2008, some 30 years after the recording. And yet: his breath remains in Toronto in this paper archive. Doyle insists that the rhizomatic network exists in the basements and boxes of artists archives: things rot in order to grow.

Thinking about art spaces and media archaeology, Thomas Elsaesser wonders: “In the face of an electronic present that exceeds us at every turn and eludes our grasp, media archaeology in art spaces becomes symptomatic of the material fetishes we require, in order to reassure ourselves of our material existence or rather: in the mirror of these media machines’ sculptural objecthood we can mourn and celebrate our own ephemerality and obsolescence.”[3] Neither internet nor fax archive is treated as a sculptural object. Low and Doyle might counter Elsaesser from two different angles: Low seeing rot and eternal movement, and Doyle reading not obsolescence in the archive but rather teeming life. Connections rotting and shifting, or lingering even after death.

pppffffffffffffffffsssssssssfffffffffffffffssssssssshsssssssssssssssssssssweeesweeeesweesssssssssssfffffffffffffffsssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhssssssshshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpssssssspsssssssspssssssssspssssssspssssssspsssssssvrroooooooooommmmmmwwwssppppsssssssssssffffffffffffffffxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxliplipliplipssssssssssssssssfffffffffffffffffffffffffffrrffffffffffffffffgffffffffffffffffffffffffdsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssneuwneuwneuwsssssssssssssssssfffffffffffffffffffksssssssshhhhhhhhsssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxssssssssxxxxxxxxxxxbiannnnbiannsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssppssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhssssssssxxxxxxxxxxxxfffffffffffffffffffxxxxxxxxxxxxyxxxxxxxixxsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssxxxxxxxxxfffffffffffffffffffvfffffffffffffffffffffffffffwwweeoooooooooooooooowweeeoooooooooooooooowwwwweowwwwwwwssssssssssssssssssssssssssxxxxfffffffffffffxxxxxxxfffffffffffffffffsssfsssfsfsfsssssfsfsfsffsfsfsfsfsfsfssssxsxxsxsfsfsxfsfsxsxsffssxfsfsfxsfsxsxsxsxsssssssshhhhhhhhhsssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhsssssssssshhhhhhhhhs

[1] Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert, and Lawrence Lessig, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations,” in Legal Information Management 14, no. 2 (2014): 88–99. doi:10.1017/S1472669614000255.

[2] Mél Hogan, “Data Flows and Water Woes,” in Big Data and Society July-December (2015): 1-2. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951715592429.

[3] Thomas Elsaesser, “Media archaeology as symptom,” in New Review of Film and Television Studies, 14 no. 2 (2016): 206. doi: 10.1080/17400309.2016.1146858

Speak

These are some thoughts arising after Words Before All Else: Oral Histories in the Digital Age, with works by Zacharias Kunuk, Mary Kunuk, Zack Khalil and Adam Shingwak Khalil, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Elizabeth LaPensée, Skawennati, and Doug Smarch Jr., curated by Jenny Western and Clint Enns at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall.


“Words before all else: we bring our minds together as one, as we give thanks for the people, now our minds are one.”

The screening begins with Skawennati’s machinima Words Before All Else Part 1 (2017), which sees her avatar xox recite the above words, the first verse of the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen –  Haudenosaunee “Thanksgiving Address,” in English, French, and Kanein’kéha, traditionally spoken at the opening and closing of all Haudenosaunee gatherings. The piece is a more recent version along similar lines of her 2002 collaboration with Jason Lewis, Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Technological World. Where the traditional address extends greetings and thanks to the natural world—earth, water, thunder, and the many plant and animal beings—Skawennati and Lewis thank the creator for more technological gifts. They extend greetings and thanks to computers, TCP/IP, internet, C++ and Java, and more, bringing our minds together as one.

To bring our minds together: a reminder. Joining each other through spoken words, thanking the natural world as a way of remembering to live intentionally and carefully with it. Through the ceremony of opening and closing, drawn together into a mindset.

Mary Kunuk’s Unikausiq (Stories) engages the oral transmission of knowledge as an act of remembering. “These stories and songs remind me of my childhood and the stories that my mother used to tell me,” she says. “Recording them on video is my way of keeping them alive.” The stories, carefully rendered through hand-drawn computer animation are unexpected and wonderful. In one of them, a snow bunting teases an Inuk arriving on a small island, asking after snow buntings, “you come from nowhere, I won’t tell you where I am. A bird must have shit between your teeth.” The electronic continuation of storytelling into video is something Kunuk’s brother Zacharias Kunuk has spoken about, that “filming traditional knowledge is a way of collecting these old stories and retaining them for the future.”[1] Knowledge is passed from elders by way of the video apparatus. It can be played, replayed, shared widely (through things like IsumaTV’s mediaplayer network and Digital Indigenous Democracy projects).

To pass on, to keep alive. The care of rendering:  hand on mouse sketches, clicks, fills in. Traces tears on grandmother’s cheeks, and the ptarmigan she turns into out of grief for her lost granddaughter. What of the relational intimacy of telling?

Zack Khalil and Adam Shingwak Khalil’s The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets speaks to the valuation of oral history within conflicting knowledge systems. Through archival footage, red-on-white and white-on-red text, and elegant cuts of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, they tell a story about the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick. Contrasting the persistent oral histories of the people indigenous to the Columbia River region where he was found that this “Ancient One” was their ancestor, scientists appealed the right to study the skeleton until DNA confirmation eventually confirmed the oral histories. The film also investigates archaeologist’s early interpretation of the skull as having Caucasian traits, and the overwhelming hungry vehemence of white supremacists to use this “science” to “prove” long-standing European presence in the area. “We are not evil, conquering Europeans,” a racist speaker orates, “We will not be swept from this place.” This grasping at shaky soon-disproven hypotheses in lieu of a long lineage of oral history, one of many insidious settler narratives or moves-to-innocence that are further explored in Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”[2] Shown through media archives, it also holds those of us who are settlers accountable to our acts, our words.

We open and close with more or less intention. To repeat and keep repeating? I keep telling myself. I am still holding on to a story that helped me make sense is no longer true and maybe never was. In the middle of a long conversation I have to take a break and they hold their thought by repeating it to themselves in one long whisper thisthingthisthingthisthingthisthing until I rush back and they can say it to me: this thing. My oma described to me the place she was born. Green layers of mountains and a valley below winding roads and grain-ripe. The sudden rush thunder as she tickled salmon in the stream. She is gone, we go there. I have seen it though not with my eyes before now. None of this is an oral history. We haven’t spoken like that for far too long.

It is impossible to think about words before all else without thinking of the art community’s own recitations: the territorial acknowledgements we give now. What does it mean to do this kind of opening, for the art world? How do we say it? Chelsea Vowel’s excellent article “Beyond territorial acknowledgements” is a reminder that in order to be sites of potential disruption, they must discomfit those who speak them and those who speak and hear them.[3] We need to learn how to pronounce the names—Anishinaabe or Haudenosaunee—of those who made the first treaties in this area, the thinkers who conceptualized the Dish With One Spoon which we all eat from and have a responsibility to renew.

Words can only follow meaningful intention. Settlers have a long history of using words as an apparatus for violence and control. Historically this has manifested in the legal documents of misleading treaties and cultural genocide through language. In the present, words replace action as a form of superficial healing or appeasement. Beyond land acknowledgements, we are tearfully very sorry, we insist that the government’s nation-to-nation relationship is the most important. We’re sorry, we said we’re sorry, we said it. Without clear and articulated intention or action, how can settlers hope to take on the provocation of words?

At a symposium this March at McMaster University on policy and Indigenous Governance, Anishnaabe doctoral scholar Josh Manitowabi spoke about including oral histories and stories in teaching. In thinking about bringing Indigenous knowledge into the education system, he spoke about the difference between sacred stories and teaching stories. Sacred stories need to be told the same way; teaching stories can be changed a bit at the end in order to be specific to a certain lesson or context. What Manitowabi and the program seek to teach, then, is that words matter. They carry meaning: words gain power in material contexts, the places where they’re spoken and heard. How did the context—the physical container of the venue, and the psychological container of the opening and closing—make space for the meaning of these teachings, for their power?

We open and close in context.

Thinking about oral histories and the uttering of words, I think of Maggie Nelson’s reading of Roland Barthes—that the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during the voyage without changing its name.” In this vein, Nelson says, “whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use.”[4]  Our openings and closings and the words we speak should similarly be renewed by each use. Not as rote: rather, imbued with intention.

We can implicate ourselves and our actions and our organizations in them, pushing to disrupt those that speak and hear, accepting responsibility and renewing meaning.

Not tray tables securely stowed not life vests under a seat not silencing cell phones not shuffling papers not final murmur to your companion not a word from our sponsor.

No:

A voice making intentional space.

[1] Kerstin Knopf, Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North America (New York: Rodopi, 2008), 340.

[2] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.

[3] Chelsea Vowel, “Beyond Territorial Acknowledgements,” âpihtawkosisân 23 September 2016, http://apihtawikosisan.com/2016/09/beyond-territorial-acknowledgments/.

[4] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Greywolf, 2015), 5.

Threshold

Some notes from micha cárdenas’ Becoming Dragon Redux as part of the second evening of Vector Fest 2018: Born Digital, Inner Workings (918 Bathurst) with performances by cárdenas as well as Adam Basanta and Afaq Ahmed Karadia + Adam Tindale. I understand the premise: to explore the inner workings of bodies human and mechanical, a turning inward. Basanta’s piece made Sigur Rós-type music out of tuned microhone feedback. Karadia and Tindale’s Wii Kinect and other sensor-based work left me thinking about the differences between machine-inspired dance and conducting an orchestra of handmade instruments. Still, a close reading of bodies is a very large and ungainly umbrella under which to put these two more medium-specific dudely electronic audio works with cárdenas’ introspective poetic transmissions from her changing body on Estradiol as a dragon in Second Life. It is hard to find deep connective tissue, the through-line skims the technological surface.


micha cárdenas, Becoming Dragon Redux, Second Life performance, 2018.

Her orange eye smoulders

There’s fire in it

A signal, a portal

Inside and leaking out

Liminal is a threshold, a door. It is a transition between: on or to either side of a boundary. A heterotopia is a liminal space, a place that is absolutely real and unreal at the same time.

On a darkening hilltop the dragon Azdel Slade’s wings are beating, casting dark shapes on the ground. (Is it possible to write about a dragon without writing bad fantasy?) The noise phases in and out of sounding like a heartbeat, a drum without a kickback: thump thump thump. The virtual form of the art gallery and production studio InterAccess hovers with arms outstretched in the dragon’s shadow. I think this might be how all people in Second Life move, a modified Superman. In this sunsetting, the pose seems exaggeratedly holy. InterAccess wears a green bomber jacket and jeans. She is white, her hair is long and brown. She toggles, in and out of body experience. She is also our cameraperson, our viewpoint on the performance. The shuddering roll between first and third person. This is a 10-year-later restaging of cárdenas’ project Becoming Dragon, a 365-hour durational performance where she questioned the year-long “real-life experience” required to receive gender confirmation surgery. She chose to experiment with a hypothetical requirement for ‘species reassignment’ – time spent in a digital body, selecting to become a dragon: an identity beyond binary gender categories.

The cyborg hybrid: a real/unreal body in a place that is absolutely real and unreal at the same time. Though cárdenas is a virtual dragon, in between roars of flame she speaks of the very real physical transition of her own body. Through Adzel Slade, cárdenas performs two poems written during her own hormone replacement therapy. She speaks of the immediate difference in the first few days, her heightened awareness of her changing self, the liminal space between names and genders. About the virtual reality of being on drugs. She notes the dozens of tiny microtransitions that all of us make in the trajectories of our lives. Are any of us solid states?

Even her words come in waves.

Potentially through the glitchy internet connection of 918 Bathurst or possibly even the cameraperson InterAccess’ proximity to cárdenas-as-Adzel, her voice fades and raises and in moments cuts out altogether. This project is an interesting study in what it means to re-stage a digital project ten years later. (You can tell Second Life launched in 2003, reminding us of the time-context even of liminal digital spaces. It has a reputation now for mostly being populated by researchers and artists. When she flies off around the corner of a mountain at the end of the performance, it is with the staggered square flight of digital beings of a different era.) Still, this tenuous connection (however unintentional) brings us into the in-between with her. We catch stray phrases, making liquid sense from uncertain fragments. Occasionally, the camera dips under the surface of the water and the world refracts and grows abstract.

What does it mean to sit with uncertainty, with transition, with partial understanding? As part of her 2014 project at SBC, A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, Curator cheyanne turions provisionally defined sovereignty as “an oscillation between different ways of knowing; the recognition of other understandings as they rub up against one’s own; the act of holding a space for not-knowing.”[1] Maybe it is this space that cárdenas is speaking from. Early in the performance, she talks about the first days on Estradiol, not being confident about anything, and the converse and simultaneous scariness of being a trans person admitting any doubt. In medium and content, she holds this space for us as well. We join her in the in-between.

To be liminal is to be suspended in the strength of the in-between. So often, a pressure for resolution, to be either one thing or another. This explores the richness of not-knowing instead, held within the threshold.

[1] cheyanne turions, “A Problem So Big It Needs Other People.” (Montreal: SBC, 2014).

I.D.

These are some thoughts arising after the opening reception for Vector Fest 2018: Born Digital, for the eponymous exhibition at InterAccess (950 Dupont St. Unit 1) featuring works by Adam Basanta, A.M. Darke, Joseph DeLappe, Judith Doyle, Ann Hirsch, Chris Kerich, and Lu Yang. This blog won’t engage with all of the works in the show, but is a short piece of experimental writing responding and in parallel to some of the ideas in the exhibition. 


“I look at my bare feet on the tiles in front of me and think: Those are her feet. I stand up and look in the mirror and think: There she is. She’s looking at you. Then I understand and say to myself: You have to say she if it’s outside you. If your foot is over there, it’s there away from you, it’s her foot. In the mirror, you see something like your face. It’s her face.”

Lydia Davis, “Examples of Confusion,” in Almost No Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997).

You shouldn’t tell anyone your social insurance number, you shouldn’t. As for me I didn’t have to do anything to get one, just rolled out quietly. For others it’s an almost-insurmountable mess of precarity and travel and administration and money. A SIN is an unfinished waltz:

dun dun dun, dun dun dun, dun dun dun (“SIR!” my dad finishes, a leftover from his days in the reserves).

… … …

Three morse esses, hissing like the sticky guttering pennant of a forked pink tongue.

Image of Lu Yang, Lu Yang Delusional Mandala (2015)

Along a human face on a pale blue screen, a bright green line scans, searing. The caption below reminds us that a 3D scanner is a device that collects data on an appearance, making a 3-D model. Rendering falls into place in lines up its legs, building a body, a model which can be stretched and manipulated. Steadfastly moving up the body, we see into cross-section: bones and muscle and tendon and sinew. Does a rendering need bones? It has bones because we have bones. It has bones because we want it to look like us. Throughout Lu Yang’s Lu Yang Delusional Mandala, the newborn 3-D model morphs fluidly across genders and bodies. They lumber and stagger, three copies dance in unison. Their skin and bones fall away until they are only a head, until they are only rhythmically moving lungs, until they are a bumping heart, a twitching intestine. Near the end they are a neon cart carrying a coffin, they are blinking lights, they are blowing billowing curtains of hair off their nose. It’s hard not to identify with a 3-D model of ourselves. Still, it is outside of you. As Lydia Davis insists, you have to use the third person. Those are their teeth. A digital child: that is their intestines.

Anyone who has created an avatar knows the push-pull of this identification. Creating a virtual body with which to emerge from cryogenic stasis, fight off irradiated beings, and find my missing son, I feel a mix of competing desires. Is she an ultimate self, or a new persona, or something different altogether? Am I? In her exhibition Tomorrow People at Oboro last year, Skawennati’s piece Generations of Play spoke about a doll-like identification with an avatar through an industry-made Barbie, a 3-D print of her Second Life avatar, and a handmade cornhusk doll. She draws a connection between her early analog “gaming” and her avatar as a “a virtual representation of herself, envisioned for the future.”[1] Instead, I want distance.  My avatar is not only stronger than me and more able to pick a lock than I am, but her hair is long and a different colour. I give her a scar, and freckles. I do not give her my name. Yet I can still see myself in the largeness of her body, in the colour of her eyes. I take credit for her improving navigation skills and mourn her multiple deaths.

Image of Adam Basanta, A Truly Magical Moment. Interactive kinetic sculpture, 2016 1m x 1m x 1m. 2 x iPhone 4s, selfie sticks, aluminum, electronics, bluetooth chips.

In Adam Basanta’s A Truly Magical Moment, two iPhones on selfie sticks face one another. Pairs of viewers, soon to be dance partners, connect to the phones through FaceTime, one to each. We share a magical moment for around a minute. Our partner’s face remains in focus while the room spins around us at top speed, aided by the whirling cameras until it slows and stops. I feel as though I should be laughing, stumbling at the end into the other’s arms. I am not laughing, I am not in anyone’s arms. The digital counter nearby ticks up one point and dance 00002591 is complete. The piece evades a one-note critique of the current digital distance, though. I do feel a tenderness, a closeness. There is a certain vertigo of seeing the room spin around behind my partner. It is no replacement for real dizziness. (Though I wonder: are those moments in life always truly magical? Something about them feels contrived, still.) That is her face, not mine, on the screen. I am a third wheel, involved only by proxy. Grasping at some of the trace centrifugal chemistry spinning off a giddy dance between two phones.

Image of A.M. Darke, ar+ show, 2017.

To identify is to make the same. It is an active process, a drawing of lines. They look so much like their parent, we coo with amazement. Does this attribute affinity, belonging, possession? He tells me:

“When I hit 35 or so I started clearing my throat exactly like my dad

I hate it

A sound that annoyed me for my whole childhood”

Projecting and identifying, forward and back. But what of our digital children, who we have more of a direct hand in creating? What of their chubby glitching fingers (count to 10, five on each hand), their digital births? Within them, the unspoken biases of their makers and their own technological errors surface. What happens when they look back and identify you? A.M. Darke’s ar+ show speaks to these malfunctions. Instead of locating her face, Snapchat’s detection algorithm reads her breast instead (wearing a cat, lifting weights, adorned in a burning flower crown). In conversation with the classical nude, Darke makes fun with this loophole, in control. She wryly plays with the software’s blunders.

same/different

I/O

[1] Jolene Rickard, “Tomorrow People: Skawennati,” ed. Hannah Claus (Montreal: Oboro, 2017): 1.