VOIDXWITCH, Beast of the Black Hill, Self-released (Bandcamp)

In the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Robert Patrick’s character, the T-1000, represents the world’s most advanced iteration of Artificial Intelligence, a machine constructed of liquid metal that’s capable of assuming any blunt form.

Although it is a machine, the T-1000’s prime directives are undoubtedly libidinal in nature. Yet this creature’s implicit human sexual drive is sublimated into dominating, penetrating, and murdering any obstacle in its path.

Nonetheless, nothing seems to satisfy it — and nothing subdues it. No matter how many people it kills, or how many bullets it takes, the T-1000, like its urges, just won’t be terminated. Not only is the T-1000 not human; it cannot be compelled to die.

What is terrifying about Artificial Intelligence is specifically this undead quality.

A.I. is a representation of human libidinal unconsciousness which, just as the voice can’t hear itself speak, cannot conceive of its own mortality.

Les Corps Complexes, Delphine Huguet, Galerie Robertson Arès, 3 October – 2 November 2024

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain:
For the former things are passed away.
And he that sat upon the throne said,
Behold, I make all things new.
And he said unto me,
Write: for these words are true and faithful.

—Revelation 21:4-5

The obvious impetus for establishing some post-human cyborg utopia is that it generally really sucks having a body. They’re bulky, achy, breaky, leaky, hairy, smelly, and seldom sightly sacks of mostly water that we drag around with us, getting heavier and more cumbersome with time. Who among us wouldn’t trade in our sagging bits for mechanical perfection?

The problem is that variance is typically what constitutes beauty. And variance is a fundamentally organic trait. Machines by virtue are uniform, identical, interchangeable. Diversity is distinctly corporeal.

Which raises the question: what is perfection?

If perfection is machinic, then we as non-machines must stop striving for some unattainable ideal. But if perfection is biological, then it stands to reason that everything alive is always-already perfect. How can it not be?

Every cell, every atom, every molecule, is, was, and will be precisely as it should.

Un beau spectacle, VICTIME, En conversation avec (Mothland)

“I’m an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And I’m tired of all these soldiers here
No one speaks English, and everything’s broken
And my stacks are soaking wet.”

—Tom Waits, “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)”

Launch of Still Kelly Collection 01, SSENSE, 24 October 2024

When it comes to clothes, there are two types of wearers: those who are fashionable, and those who are stylish.

Fashionable people tend toward following the latest trends. Stylish people ignore what’s trendy in favour of personal taste.

Fashion is often hot, awkward, uncomfortable, which gives credence to the maxim, “fashion over function.” Style, rather, is relaxed and cool, the art of feeling comfortable not just in clothes but in one’s own skin.

The difference between fashion and style is that fashion always goes out of style, whereas being stylish is never not in fashion.

Échos X NicheMTL Year 000 Launch, Ateliers Belleville, 19 October 2024

Cities are simultaneous repositories of cultural history and collective initiatives for historical obliteration. Tensions persistently occur in the post-modern metropolis between slowness and speed, stillness and circulation.

Movement in Montreal, as in any major city, is regulated by rhythmic impulses that stimulate a feeling of novelty within a milieu of tradition. Disparate factors such as necessity and capital dictate the rate and flux of municipal change.

The refurbishing of architectural spaces — or even the transformation of entire neighbourhoods — gestures towards the urban condition of constant conflict between what once was and what will be. Gentrification manifests in condo complexes and third-wave cafés that used to be in derelict districts. Any city dweller who has spent a significant amount of time in one place is apt to feel a longing for the past, however recent or distant.

The urban scholar Will Straw writes in his essay entitled “Spectacles of Waste” that “the tension between these ways of grasping urban life and experience — one insisting on the city’s endless mutability, the other stressing its tendencies toward statis and inertia — runs through various sorts of urban cultural analysis.”

Straw proceeds to illustrate this dichotomy with competing cultural forms — such as architecture and cinema. Edifices represent accumulation and endurance, whereas motion pictures indicate “the destabilizing impulses within city life.”

Cinema’s arrival in the early 20^th century was an inherently urban phenomenon which reshaped cities around screens. However, the silver screen was still architectural, requiring enormous structural real estate in the form of theatres, malls, megaplexes; drive-ins, pedways, parking lots.

Television, beginning in the mid-20^th century, transformed the social aspect of urban cinema, and thus shrunk the moving image’s geographical footprint. Television meant the collapse of metropolitan temporality, too, wherein one didn’t need to see a movie immediately because you could always catch it later on TV.

Straw wrote his article in 2010, on the cusp of a radical evolution in moving image media — the advent of video-sharing social networks like Instagram and TikTok. Location in time used to be a key to a stabilizing sense of urban experience — being somewhere for something meant that spatiotemporal coordinates were fixed and absolute.

More recently, though, social media have destroyed the event-ness of events. Everything is missable nowadays because it will come back at us almost immediately in our social media timelines. The opposite of fear-of-missing-out is the anxiety of participation.

Visual social networks make it unnecessary to be in any given place at any certain time. Furthermore, the instantaneity of contemporary image circulation accelerates the capacity for urban melancholia, the nostalgia for the never experienced city, like phantom limb syndrome for an imaginary appendage.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Verdun Beach, 20 October 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.}