Gathering Dust
Fox MaxyGathering Dust creates connections between water, intergenerational care, and encroaching urban development. Like the film’s layered visuals, numerous sources converge to create the film’s soundscape. The film contemplates lessons exchanged between elders and youth, and the differences between generations, friction vs. flow, and the layers underneath Los Angeles.
Commissioned by The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in 2023, this film screened in the exhibition Shifting Perspectives: Vertical Cinema, initiated by Jessica Niebeland and organized by a curatorial collective.
bio (space/opal)
Cassie Packhambio (space/opal) is a machinima self-portrait narrated by a shapeshifting digital artist living on the Second Life grid. Through dance, world-building, and her own music, space/opal relates her origin story, moving between dream, memory, and networked becoming to explore what it means to emerge from one’s own future.
FoUBARthes: Death of an Author
Dayna McLeodMedia performance artist Dayna McLeod asked ChatGPT to write an increasingly snarky and heated dialogue between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault about “The Death of the Author,” inspired by Barthes' famous essay. This script is performed by AI actors of the theorists, with Dayna’s AI doppelgänger, DaynAI, acting as host to their debate.
A Weak & Panicked Animal
Jake StarrCivilization endeavors to minimize the uncertainties of human survival.. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing all serve as boundaries, a tacit agreement between the human and non-human, stipulating that neither shall cross these thresholds without consequence. A Weak & Panicked Animal examines how deeply human civilisation depends on denial, contingency, interdependence, and the fact that no matter how fortified our cities become, we are still enmeshed in a chaotic, planetary ecosystem.
How to excel at everything
Marion BalacIn How to excel at everything, two Pokémon-like friends follow online tutorials to master every skill. Loosely adapted from Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, the film examines algorithm-driven self-learning, YouTube rabbit holes, and DIY culture, where gamified self-help replaces institutional pedagogy in an endless, disoriented learning odyssey of contemporary digital life.
Response 00.003
MikikiDo Not Resuscitate
Acquired Brain Injury
AIDS jokes
Cognitive Processing Therapy
SLOMW
Community Reinforcement Approach
Intrusive Thoughts
Resuscitate
The Compulsion to Repeat
Epic fails, or, ordinary failure just wasn’t enough
The works in this program call on my inner internet child, left behind on early-2000s platforms like MySpace. Here, the digital plane becomes haunted by a familiar past. Ancient avatars, unruly subjects, and gaudy profile layouts, shaped by the internet’s early mess and excess, resist contemporary pursuits of mastery and efficiency, surfacing early selves left behind for their failure to be productive. These works subvert the language of mastery by using pixelated .gifs, 3D-modelled landscapes, and found footage to raise questions about the origins of our early selves and what remains of them in the hyper-optimized present. This self has been shaped by broken HTML code and self-built worlds that extractive data practices have since paved over. Still, the traces of our early internet selves persist.
Across the program, these unfinished selves share a refusal of optimization. Through perseverance, they have survived decades of software updates, compression, and neglect, forming a swirling archive of early online exchange, chaotic and ungoverned by efficiency. What happened to our unusable contributions to the internet? Have they been drifting around as fragmented pixels, waiting to be regurgitated by future users?
These digital leftovers linger as material that dominant systems cannot absorb or render profitable. Instead, they spill into myths, trends, and ghosts within the algorithms of the next generation. Given a second life through contemporary appropriations of early Y2K aesthetics, fragments of our past selves, first born online in the early 2000s, are returned to us, altered in the process. The next generation reworks and returns parts of ourselves that could liberate, while exorcising the outdated toxins that shaped their origins. Moving through popular culture and online subcultures, this program proposes an alternative lineage of the internet, one that can nurture and heal our inner internet child by reclaiming the mess and excess of our past and refusing the optimization of future.
Please join us after the program for a conversation with Dayna McLeod, Kiera Boult and Mikiki.
2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
Sidewalk-level entrance, elevator and ramp available, door width 32 inches, no automatic doors. No accessible parking on-site. Four wheelchair accessible seats in the cinema. 15 step-free seats in row 9. Accessible gender-neutral washroom located on the 2nd and 3rd floor.
For a map to Innis Town Hall, click here
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