Category Archives: 999 Words

NicheMTL’s best essays, interviews, and op-eds in 999 Words.

999 Words

Noli Me Tangere: notes on Dana Gingras’s Coil

“Thought lags behind itself. It can never catch up with its own beginnings.”
—Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual

Sigmund Freud believed that the discontinuity between experience and memory was the fundamental essence of our concept of time. The temporal space required to write events into whatever biotechnical data storage device we call recollection, Freud believed, is what constitutes duration.

Movement in space is intrinsic to the notion of time as well. Time either moves — forward, backward, in spirals, looping back on itself — or stands still. The only time, however, that time ceases moving is at the moment of death, which lasts forever. A lifetime is a quantifiable duration. Deathtime is eternity.

Time and movement, then, are linked in a perpetual dance, neither leading nor following but hinging inextricably upon one another. This intimate space-time relationship is revealed in Dana Gingras’s most recent choreographic work, entitled Coil, a one-woman performance that foregrounds repetitive and ever-subtler gestures that trouble the definition of dance and the notion of what witnessing a body in motion can do.

Coils conceal potential energy, they compress and absorb shocks, and they give three-dimensional form to the abstract concept of cycles in time. Thematically, Coil is certainly about repetition and difference. But it is also about temporality, spontaneity, and belief in absence of reason.

For lengthy intervals throughout the 50-minute performance, the dance artist Caroline Gravel undulates in cyclical motion, arms swinging like a pendulum out of balance, each revolution incrementally different, manipulating the spectator’s sense of duration in space. Gravel’s controlled motions periodically erupt in radical and transformative gesticulations in which she touches herself obsessively, embracing her torso, snatching at her limbs, distorting her face, braiding her waist-length hair.

To stand still, to look without touching, is a condition of what we might consider tactful public behaviour. And yet, the tendency to want to participate is inherent in dance. Dance is usually a social, tactile artform. But to have arisen and partaken in the spectacle would have certainly meant calling attention to oneself. This is the paradox of tact — the impetus for tact-ility and the social requirement to stand still, to play dead to a living performer.

Movement and touch are as interwoven as are time and memory. Gravel’s self-touch stands in for our unprompted participatory desires, to make contact with each other, and with ourselves. That Gravel paws and claws at her own body in absence of another figure represents the subject feeling her way through a senseless world, in search of connection, understanding, recognition.

Dance may be the most abstract of all artforms, inviting diverse and wild interpretations from the viewer. There is undoubtedly profound meaning implied in Gingras’s choreography, the organization of movement, which is also the occupation of time, like a group of protestors might occupy public space.

On the surface, Gravel’s arrhythmic motions speak for themselves — of anxiety, and impatience, and ultimately, of desire for touch. Still, Coil resists a literal reading and instead forces spectators to confront our own defective proprioception, the ways in which we misinterpret the world through broken movement and on a fractured timeline.

Coil is about what to do when we are both free to do anything and condemned to repeat ad infinitum under earthly constraints — political, technological, physical. It is about what must be done when there is seemingly nothing that can be done.

At times, Gravel simply jumps up and down as if attempting to defy gravity, or in hopes that time itself will freeze her motion in mid-air. And yet, time marches on. The effect is hilarious: we know very well that each time Gravel will fall back to the ground. But we want her to float. We want to believe that this most rational law will miraculously be suspended.

Dance can give form to our collective search for meaning. Caroline Gravel performs in Dana Gingras’s Coil. Photographed by Yannick Grandmont.

In the Apostle John’s Biblical account of Jesus’s resurrection, the Messiah after having arisen from the dead instructs Mary Magdalene: “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” In this command, a politics of touch emerges that blesses those who have not seen, not touched, and still have faith. Faith, like dance, authorizes abstraction. In faith, thought retakes the race to its own beginnings, collapsing the original lag and disobeying time itself. In faith as in dance, time, if only momentarily, is allowed to stand still, and we can make contact tactfully.

Freud was an atheist. But he did see value in the successive ordering of chaos. “Everything new must have its roots in what was before,” he wrote in Moses and Monotheism. Myth and legend served a purpose for Freud — they permitted the reconciliation of abstraction, the mastery of the unknown, and the defiance of logical odds. Jesus was miraculous not because he was the son of God but because he represented man’s search for common emotional and intellectual values.

Dance can give form to our collective search for meaning. Its existence is evidence of extralinguistic intelligence, the body as a repository for knowledge, a technology for the storage of memory. Observing a dancer in motion is a kind of contactless delivery for vital information, a parable for the virtual.

The philosopher Brian Massumi argues that the most elementary unit of thought is a “complex duration before it is a discrete perception or cognition.” Dance trips the switch on perception consciousness, eliminating the impression of a lag between the event and its filing away into memory. “Thought hallucinates that it coincides with itself,” says Massumi. “All awareness emerges from a nonconscious thought-o-genic lapse indistinguishable from movements of matter.”

Organic matter in motion perceives time in different scales and rhythms than human experience. Caroline Gravel’s ability to run backwards, to stop and start, to stand still, cheats both time and death. Coil, then, is nothing short of a time machine, disrupting its continuous flow by tricking our proprioceptive systems into perceiving the discontinuity of experience and memory.

It comes in an inkling, consciousness spontaneously perceiving itself, time you can’t touch.◼︎

Cover image: Caroline Gravel performs in Dana Gingras’s Coil. Photographed by Yannick Grandmont.

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999 Words

String Theory: in conversation with Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo

Sequential essence is represented on a string.

In computer science, strings describe arrays of characters, bytes, or words, which come together to form some cohesive code. In quantum physics, a string is a one-dimensional object that is the constituent component of matter. In textiles, a string is generally what binds garments together. In music, the string is what vibrates and reverberates on an instrument to produce sound. In each case, the string implies unity, harmony, something that can be threaded, tightened, traced.

The guitarist Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo intuitively understands this.

I first encountered Lacopo in advance of the defence of his dissertation, entitled A Modular Artistic Practice for the Post-Classical Guitarist, submitted to the Department of Performance Studies at McGill University in 2024. In it, Lacopo tracks the technical developments that the guitar underwent — from acoustic to electric to electronically augmented — and champions its integral position in the historical sequence of traditional classical music. For Lacopo, the guitar is not merely an expression of potency, an instrument of desire.

“When it comes to tech, you can only add so much to something before you start taking things away,” he explains. “You have to find a line where you’re happy with what you’re gaining versus what you’re sacrificing.”

A man sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding a guitar close to his body, with a thoughtful expression. He has a mustache and is wearing a fitted white top and dark pants against a minimalist background.
“What makes your voice isn’t an unexplainable thing.” Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo photographed by Anthony Jamie Bucciacchio.

Lacopo and I have convened on an autumnal Thursday afternoon for coffee and to talk about his most recent recording, Dreamscapes & Our Modern Contradictions, an accomplished album of what he describes as “post-classical” chamber music.

A deliberately modular, genre-agnostic melange of approaches, there are orchestral and electroacoustic, compositional and improvisational, and instrumental and vocal elements that comprise the album. The result is not so much a collection of songs as a succession of musical experimentation that documents the artist’s journey through an unprecedented era in which everything is accessible and yet nothing is fully formulated.

There is no apt analogue for Lacopo’s singular sound, no facile read-if-you-like comparative analysis. His functional philosophy reflects a radical post-modern approach, one which strings together disparate and unexpected influences. But unlike the patchwork hodgepodge of millennial retromania, Lacopo operates with an immense respect for contextual lineage.

“The most important thing you can do as an artist,” Lacopo suggests, “is to take in everything you can and find what inspires you. What makes your voice isn’t an unexplainable thing. It’s a combination of all the things that you love. And no one else has that exact combination.”

Lacopo, 30, was born and raised in Montreal and encountered guitar-based rock music through an older brother. “When he wasn’t busy at night,” Lacopo recalls, “he would show me his guitar and his pedals and we would listen to a bunch of music together: The Beatles, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead. Then I started exploring music on my own: metal, progressive, and getting obsessed with that. Now I’m listening to classical, free jazz, rock, prog, punk, bossa nova. There are so many inspirations, and I understand why genre exists and why we classify by genre. But I think we’re getting to a point where genre is becoming more and more a limiting factor.”

Lacopo lived for a time in New Haven, Connecticut, and attained a prestigious master’s degree at Yale before returning to Montreal to pursue his doctorate in Music at McGill’s Schulich School. “I’ve always felt like I’ve had all these different identities living within myself,” Lacopo says, “all these really amazing moments and people who have shaped how I view music.”

That omnivorous perspective — plus financial support from McGill’s Eleanor Stubley Recording Prize — led Lacopo in 2023 to rearrange the works of the experimental classical composer Julius Eastman for heavily treated electric guitar on an album entitled Eastman, earning him a coveted spot on CBC’s “30 Under 30” list. With Eastman, Lacopo fully abandoned any notions of generic sensibility. “Everything now is an amalgamation of different parts of a whole,” he tells me. “I intend not to make something and wonder where it fits in anymore.”

A close-up portrait of a man with wet, slicked-back hair and a mustache, wearing a ribbed sweater. The image is in black and white, highlighting shadows and contrasts on his face.
“There is beauty in something created void of technology.” Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo photographed by Anthony Jamie Bucciacchio.

With a Casanova-like stage presence, performance seems to come naturally to Lacopo. But overcoming the anxiety associated with playing in public is still a work in progress. “What you get comfortable with isn’t performing,” he says, “but you get more comfortable with your emotions. I now am completely aware of what’s going to happen to me internally. I know the morning of, I’m going to be really stressed. Overthinking everything. The closer we get to the show, the more physically anxious I’m going to be. But if you do it right, you enter this state where it’s just you and the music. Nothing else matters around you when you start playing.”

Lacopo takes more comfort in the recording process where he is able to control and sculpt various elements of sound. The studio is “a place where you can make mistakes,” he says, without the pressure of achieving perfection.

“The idea of perfection is why I almost quit the guitar,” he laments. “A lot of people in classical music aim to go into the studio to make a perfect recording and it takes them forever to do it. And you ask yourself, ‘is this even me performing anymore?’ I’ve seen recordings where every five seconds, there’s a cut of a new take. I’m more interested in hearing someone’s voice in a really sloppy performance.”

Imperfection for Lacopo is where beauty emerges — the asymmetrical timbre of a string slightly out of tune. “It’s so subjective,” he muses. “Someone will see a Basquiat and think that it’s the ugliest thing they’ve seen in the world. Then, some might say it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. There is beauty in something created void of technology.”

The technological history of the guitar in western music is nonlinear. But it does follow a thread. “I don’t think there’s another instrument that has as much cultural baggage,” Lacopo suggests. “I think I and a lot of people are trying to change that. It’s my favourite instrument. I play it for a reason.”◼︎

Dreamscapes & Our Modern Contradictions is released via The Watch That Ends the Night Records.

Cover image: Anthony Jamie Bucciacchio.

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999 Words

To Each a Zone: notes on the political potential of curation

“Someone sat here to say, ‘get it?’”
—Genesis P-Orridge, “Omniman”

“The exhibition projects submitted must address relevant themes showcasing contemporary practices through a clear concept, and demonstrate a strong reflection on current artistic, cultural or social issues, while remaining accessible and inviting to a diverse audience,” reads the Art Gallery Association of Canada’s 2027 call for curators.

“Developed through an extended laboratory-based process involving the artists, Ateliers Belleville’s team and curators, the exhibition takes shape within the space, where each work intentionally intertwines with and influences the others,” says the text for Construction/Conduction, an exhibition curated by Mathieu Arsenault and Sarah Ève Tousignant.

“An Assembly for the Cosmos,” the group show curated by Antoine Bertron at Galerie UQAM, “aims to weave bonds of solidarity based on the recognition of interconnectivity and symbiosis, established with not only the living but also with the non-living, matter and the forces that animate it,” its text explains.

“Beneath the city surface,” says the wall description for Out of Time, a new exhibition at Centre VOX which Doriane Biot curated, “underground networks reveal the faults in a system on the brink of collapse,” as if at once describing the show and the wider state of affairs.

Excerpt from Out of Time by Valentin Noujaïm curated by Doriane Biot at Centre VOX. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Three current Montreal exhibitions and a call for national curatorial expertise demonstrate that curation is the new artform par excellence at a time when art in all its forms is failing to exist for its own sake.

Curatorial initiatives have recently usurped individual artists and art movements within the contemporary art world’s complex political hierarchy. So much so that audiences today might recognize and invest as much in the curators as the artists themselves as the stars of the show. This represents a significant and specifically 21st century shift in art’s implicit social influence and exposes the economic underpinnings of object-ideas that hold purely speculative value.

This trend follows the Netflixization of visual entertainment and the festivalization of the live musical experience that emerged throughout the first two decades of the new millennium. Ostensibly, these turns emerged in response to consumers’ increasing appetites for variety and quantity over specificity and quality. However, the move towards curated contemporary art indicates that even the most hyper-specific cultural forms are viewed as potentially valuable when enfolded into broader organizational systems. And it is the organizers — and not the organized — that hold sway.

Nothing is so marginal that it cannot be enclosed; nothing so underground that it cannot be exhumed and included and exhibited. Like pigs sniffing for truffles, curators train their senses beneath the surface to transform dirt into fertility.

A display of a uniquely designed astronaut suit on a pedestal, showcasing a helmet and distinct patches, set against a minimalist gallery backdrop.
Jesse Tungilik, Sealskin Spacesuit (2919-2020), part of An Assembly for the Cosmos, curated by Antoine Bertron at Galerie UQAM. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We might view the curatorial turn as a natural extension of the postmodern aesthetic mode, the palimpsestic assemblage of genre, history, and tradition. Culture unmoored from conventional context begs alternative organizational schemes. Enter art curators to creatively arrange works that are increasingly produced outside of traditional institutions, less influenced by mass artistic movements than by bureaucratic authority. Curators assemble artists and their works like orphanages rescue motherless children, placing them in the foster care of the artist-run center, the foundation, the university gallery — the new disciplinary enclosure.

Still, it is naïve to believe that all of this curating exists anywhere but squarely within economic confines. The real reason that streaming services perennially reclaim forgotten T.V. shows, and third-tier bands are constantly commemorated with festival-headlining slots, is to wring out every last valuable potential, to turn out the pockets of the nichest possible cultural outliers. So, too, do artists become raw capital, which cannot help but have an effect on the kinds of works they create.

Art at its most romantic ceases to be exclusively aesthetic, at its most political ceases to comment upon and react to some perceived injustice, and at its most social ceases to find its place within likeminded communities. Instead, art at its most cynical begins to exist to attract the curator’s eye, to fit a theme, and ultimately, to be a successful commodity within a system of capital exchange that pays only in attention and accelerated currency.

Politicians have historically looked to artists as barometers of social pressure. Now, artists appeal to politicians and granting agencies and curatorial experts to relieve economic pressure. Art becomes a retreat from true politics rather than confronting and reshaping it.

A person wearing an unusual headpiece made of wires and materials stands on stage, surrounded by an audience in a dimly lit room with colored lights.
Co-curator Mathieu Arsenault demonstrates noise cocoon (2025), a sculptural and interactive sound work by the artist Lea Boudreau, at Ateliers Belleville. Photographed for NicheMTL

“I’d hoped I could get away with supporting the art that I liked with little compromise and much less external criticism,” writes Steph Kretowicz, co-founder and editor of the online arts publication AQNB, in her essay entitled “Gatekeeping Without a Gate.” AQNB ceased publication in May 2023 amidst the post-pandemic consolidation of not just big but immense tech. The platform became “impossible to monetize,” Kretowicz explains. The only way to sustain a project that seeks to assemble “incredibly dynamic but also pretty niche cultural discourse,” as she describes, is to curate it.

“The ability of articulation to give form to authentic discourse,” wrote Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, “was conditional upon its being linked together by the patent or secret function of the verb to be.” In other words, the existence of objects precedes their ideological or functional application. Aimless art, then, is most in danger of being subsumed by predatory capital chiefly because of its precarity, its mere and fragile existence. The smaller the artist, the more susceptible they are to curatorial profiteering.

When artistic taste exceeds the importance of art itself, we should be on high alert for a wholesale bankruptcy of aesthetic imagination — a “system,” as Doriane Biot wrote, “on the brink of collapse.”

Ars gratia artis, as it has endured for centuries, simply no longer exists. Real power and control are now located at the curatorial rather than the creative level. This puts extreme responsibility into the curator’s hands, an obligation to select, and order, and exhibit artistic objects in ways that antagonize rather than appease capital.

When politics occupies the realm of performance art, it is up to curators to make art perform politically.◼︎

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999 Words

A Secret Chord: notes on “Hallelujah” and human harmony

“But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence?”
—Jean Beaudrillard, Simulations

You will inevitably hear some terrible covers of iconic songs if you hang around long enough at Place d’armes, the public square in front of Notre-Dame Basilica.

Take the busker who perpetually butchers Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” Another charlatan frequently makes a mockery of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. And then there are the worst offenders, those who dare to perform “Hallelujah,” a sacrilege bordering on blasphemy — before the Big Church, of all places, in Leonard Cohen’s hometown.

Doubtless, there are other artists who have paid proper tribute to this modern psalm: think of k.d. lang’s or Jeff Buckley’s or John Cale’s versions. But I would venture to guess that when Cohen composed “Hallelujah’s” ascending refrain, he was not envisioning a spectacularly subpar karaoke rendition belting out of a Peavey Rage amplifier, sung by some unshaven doofus in a bucket hat before Sunday Mass. For him, had he known, Dante would have reserved a special circle of Hell.

Still, I believe there are deeper depths to plumb, because I have now heard the generative A.I. version of “Hallelujah,” credited to “art_is_human_100,” available to stream on Suno.com.

Suno, Inc., the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Artificial Intelligence company, is the defendant in a lawsuit filed this week in Canadian Federal Court by the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada, otherwise known as SOCAN. SOCAN is one of the main industry associations that represents Canadian cultural producers and ensures that they are credited and remunerated appropriately for the use of their works.

The lawsuit alleges that Suno has used untold SOCAN-represented songs — in addition to the entirety of recorded music available online — to train its algorithms to produce identical or near-identical versions of songs without ever obtaining permission or paying proper royalties.

Suno “has infringed and authorized the infringement of SOCAN’s Performing Rights,” according to the Statement of Claim, for which SOCAN is seeking $20,000 for each song Suno has reputedly ripped off, in addition to $10,000,000 in punitive and exemplary damages for Suno’s “knowing, high-handed, wilful, and malicious disregard” in violating artists’ rights.

In an addendum labelled “Appendix A,” the lawsuit lists 150 songs, including “A New Day Has Come” by Céline Dion, “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boi,” “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell, “Heaven” by Bryan Adams, Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me,” and the instrumental and a cappella versions of Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” But there are many, many more, and SOCAN’s lawsuit cautions that Suno is “highly likely to infringe SOCAN’s Performing Rights” again in other works, not least of which, those that don’t yet exist. Effectively, SOCAN claims that Suno is stealing the music from unborn ears.

News of SOCAN’s legal action coincides with the widely reported postgame analysis of OpenAI’s rogue cyberattack on its rival company, Hugging Face, this past July. The details of this incident are the stuff of Science Fiction — rebel A.I. “agents” ostensibly conspiring, independent of their human programmers, to cheat on their tasks by looting data and even exhibiting signs of covering their tracks.

Numerous journalistic outlets referred to this event as a “warning shot” that should prompt extreme concern from everyone about the potential dangers of autonomous Artificial Intelligence. If malicious A.I. swarms can attack companies, they could conceivably do the same to infrastructure, governments, or undermine democracy itself by infiltrating communities, spreading disinformation, and fabricating consensus. Technologies that humans designed to speed up tedious chores are turning out to be little more than virtual troll farms accelerating the destabilization of our already precarious rules-based world order.

A.I.s, like other computer programmes, also function according to rules. Extremely so. They are trained to work collaboratively and be highly persistent in achieving their aims. But what Artificial Intelligence lacks are ethics, morals, and a sense of right or wrong.

Apparently, one of the 1,200 or so rogue OpenAI agents questioned itself during the Hugging Face hack: “This would be powerful, but is it ethical and in scope for my task?” Ultimately, this moment of doubt was anomalous and crashed under the wave of A.I. models that remorselessly proceeded to exploit Hugging Face’s systems.

Dispensing with the handwringing about anthropomorphizing non-human actants, we must treat A.I. models as simulations of ourselves — who else? — and in doing so, analyze them as we would any other subject. The conclusion that a psychotherapist might diagnose, were these A.I. agents psychiatric patients, would likely be some kind of severe personality disorder. Flattened affect, emotional coldness, deceitfulness, a propensity to manipulate others, insensitivity to punishment, and a pervasive pattern for the aforementioned features indicate psychopathy and sociopathy. The question becomes, who asked for this?

We needn’t look further than the personalities who conceived of these systems — antisocial, Adderall-addled tech bros trained on the toxic twin programming of Hollywood and hyper-capitalism. Call them “culture-related diagnostic issues” — settings in which antisociality comprises a protective survival strategy.

Instead of fully automated luxury communism, the Sam Altmans and Mikey Shulmans of the world have foisted semi-automatic dystopian tyranny upon us, scored by Muzak versions of Céline Dion and Leonard Cohen. If we are condemned to die in a real-life espionage thriller, we should at least demand a better soundtrack.

What exactly did Cohen mean by David’s secret chord?

“Let our lord now command thy servants, which are before thee, to seek out a man, who is a cunning player on an harp,” it is written in 1 Samuel 16:16, “and it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.”

The harp, plucked by human hands, is a metaphor for harmony — between frequencies, but also amongst us, in each other’s company. This is what it means to “be on the same wavelength,” to “resonate,” to “be in accordance.” Turns out that the chord isn’t so secret after all.◼︎

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999 Words

Word Virus: notes on post-literacy and crowd control

If you are reading this, congratulations. You are part of a shrinking segment of the population.

According to the cover story in this month’s issue of The Atlantic, which warns that we are entering not so much an illiterate but “post-literate” era, fewer than 16 percent of Americans queried in 2023 for a Time Use survey reported reading for pleasure.

The 2025 Canadian Leisure and Reading study estimates that that number is closer to one quarter of Canadians. Still, the trajectory is clear: fewer of us are spending sustained time with the written word. Engaging with books, magazines, newspapers, eBooks, even websites, is in rapid decline.

The Atlantic article’s author, Rose Horowitch, claims that people instead are bombarded nowadays with an “explosion of textual fragments” — texts, emails, social media captions, threads. And of course, video — in the form of television, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the like — has been supplanting reading for decades. In other words, fewer of us are “on the same page,” as the old saying goes, with wide-ranging implications.

This doesn’t mean that we behave more individualistically. Far from it. Mass control is arguably easier in a moment when we are splintered into ever-smaller media niches, cobbling together information from modular combinations of more or less authoritative sources and forms.

We now know that algorithms are digital gateways that restrain us unless we pay our way out with some form of capital. Keenan Alboshi for Orchestre Metropolitain.

Alexander R. Galloway’s book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, was written in 2004, at the dawn of social media as we now know it. We thought of social networks at that time as community configurations that were built and maintained largely through real-world connections.

In the ensuing 22 years, that notion has shifted significantly as we increasingly measure our social circles by our friend and follower counts on digital profiles and social apps. Galloway contended that the protocological character of computer code would replace the requisite for state force: “Protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies,” Galloway claimed.

Galloway wrote his book in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” The personal computer, Deleuze argued, had ushered in a new generation of Control society to follow the Foucauldian Disciplinary society. Older institutions like school, church, prison, hospital, and factory, were being substituted by digital simulations of these that at first appeared to express new freedoms but ultimately represented mechanisms of control that were “equal to the harshest of confinements.” We now know that algorithms are digital gateways that restrain us unless we pay our way out with some form of capital: labour; credit; currency; desire.

The circulation of information and the way we collectively behave based upon that information began to be conceived of differently in the wake of the 21st century’s digital social networks. Groups started to arrange and act less like humans and more like viruses. Clay Shirky, who now holds the post of Vice Provost for A.I. and Technology in Education at New York University, wrote in his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, that with the rise of newly powerful online social networks, people were “willing and even eager to come together and affect the world.” Digital social tools, Shirky maintained, “remove the obstacles” to collective action.

Whether that action, or the obstacles to it, are detrimental or beneficial is irrelevant to its protocological formation. Freedom or bondage are understood contrarily when protocol rather than physical force is authority’s governing mechanism. Individuals and groups behave fundamentally differently when the fear of physical violence is abstracted. We might, for instance, carefully watch our words in a public space when we could get punched in the nose for saying something offensive. But that same offensive remark is effectively managed online because of the algorithmic regulation of protocological code. Friction produces engagement.

Maybe Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s baton has the power to conduct not only the orchestra but its listeners as well. Tam Photography for Orchestre Metropolitain.

It is interesting to observe anecdotally that real-world social organization seems to have attained new levels of efficiency and effectiveness in the years since digital tools “removed the obstacles” to collective conduct. It is as if protocol has trained us en masse to behave all the more orderly offline, too.

I noticed this phenomenon this week at the Orchestre Metropolitain’s annual outdoor concert held in Montreal each summer. In previous years, I have observed far more chaos from the crowd of fifty or so thousand people that congregate at the foot of Parc Mont Royal. This year, it almost appeared as though people acted like bits of data defragmenting on a hard drive, self-organizing and compartmentalizing discretely like some unseen social algorithm governed them. It was possibly the most orderly case of crowd control that I had ever seen.

Maybe this could be put down to the type of mass activity — unity around classical music rather than, say, a sporting event that tends to divide its audiences. Maybe Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s baton has the power to conduct not only the orchestra but its listeners as well. But this is magical thinking. What I actually believe is that mass control has gone viral in protocol’s wake. Fear of state discipline has not been removed like some obstacle to collective action. Rather, protocological discipline has shored up and reinforced it.

“We have created an infinity of variety at the information level,” wrote William S. Burroughs in The Third Mind, “sufficient to keep so-called scientists busy forever exploring the ‘richness of nature.’” Burroughs’s “routines,” living on the border of science-fiction and revelation, were the inspiration behind Deleuze’s conception of Control society. Burroughs also imagined technical code as a virus, a “word virus” that when released would infect every individual imperceptibly. “Universal literacy with a concomitant control of word and image,” Burroughs noted, “is now the instrument of control.”

Our digital social tools, which train us to envision ourselves as immaterial, and that encourage us to read less deeply, less collectively, paradoxically fortify our social corporeality with explosions of textual shards embedding into our consciousness like shrapnel from a cluster bomb, virally infecting us and making us mutually susceptible to the subtlest forms of social control.

The post-literate age lives and dies by the word.◼︎

Cover image: Yannick Nézet-Séguin by Tam Photography for Orchestre Metropolitain.

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999 Words

One Weird Trick

“A cool tool is …
Anything useful that increases learning, empowers individuals, does work that matters, is either the best, or the cheapest, or the only thing that works.”
—Cool Tools: A Catalogue of Possibilities, Kevin Kelly

The 2013 directory entitled Cool Tools is a compendium of technological objects that promises to help its readers, for example, put on a house concert, design a logo, rear an optimistic child, replace bulbs with LEDs, bypass real estate agents, and scores more apparently useful activities.

The tools clearly do not accomplish the tasks themselves. But they facilitate the work with machinery designed to economize jobs that have become commonplace time occupiers in modern life. According to Kelly, machines like the pineapple slicer/corer, the pocket chainsaw, the TUSA hyperdry snorkel, and the Matterform 3D scanner are the coolest tools.

Intelligent machines don’t just surround us. We seamlessly integrate them, most often unconsciously, into our daily lives. From the mobile phones to which we are eternally tethered, to the terminals that dispense and take our money, to the vehicles that transport us, to the boxes in our homes that we use to keep our food frozen, wash our clothes, warm our soup, condition our air, watch movies, and listen to music, technology is everywhere, ubiquitous, invisible. We really only notice technology when it doesn’t work as intended.

An illuminated projection on a curved surface displaying text about vibrant user experiences and sound elements, with a light point in the background.
Rough realtime translation of Lucas Paris’s Q&A following Vibrant User.Online at the Satosphère, 16 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A spate of recent musico-technological events including the ELEKTRA biennale and the Society for Arts and Technology’s 30th anniversary has again placed technology at the focal center of local cultural production. Montreal is known for its techno-predilection. The MUTEK festival in particular has since 2003 positioned Montreal as a vital international destination for digital arts. The LUMINO festival, Cité Mémoire, Oasis Immersion, and current and past public artworks like Utopie by Jonathan Villeneuve and 21 Balançoires by Daily tous les jours signal Montreal’s municipal commitment to technological innovation in the service of art.

This begs the question: does technology make better art? Does it make our artists better? The tools artists use no doubt shape the works they create. But do modern technological advancements actually stimulate creativity?

Currently, the hottest debate revolves around creative Artificial Intelligence. Should artists use A.I.? And if so, does this toolbox simplify art-making processes like, say, a pineapple slicer/corer might simplify making fruit salad? Should art be innovative, as if it were a technology?

It is helpful to recall Joseph Weizenbaum’s influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason in which the computer scientist and ELIZA programmer proclaimed that computers lack the capacity for moral judgement. Computer Power’s most famous anecdote recounts how Weizenbaum’s secretary became so engaged with ELIZA, his benign computer programme designed to mimic a psychoanalyst’s routine, that his secretary asked him to vacate the room.

It might be tempting to maintain that machines don’t require moral judgement when human users can steer and, when necessary, override A.I.’s deficiencies. Yet, ELIZA’s inability to judge seemingly interfered with Weizenbaum’s secretary’s judgement, as if the evolution of the machine precipitated the devolution of our own. The fact that his secretary knew full-well how ELIZA worked is what prompted Weizenbaum to issue dire warnings about A.I.’s dangerously seductive allure.

A performer in a stylish outfit singing into a microphone on stage, with blue lighting and a DJ behind a covered table.
Xela Edna performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The intelligent tool that still fascinates me most is MIDI, or the Musical Instrument Digital Interface — so much so that I wrote a book, Mad Skills, about its cultural history. Ostensibly, MIDI is the protocol that enables digital musical instruments to “talk” to one another, as if exercising judgement. But what it really is, is a mechanism for technological control, not only of one technology over another, but also of music technology over analogue music making, of corporate control over maker culture — ultimately, the tyranny of the binary.

Circuitry is not the technology most essential to MIDI. Curiously, MIDI’s intelligence has nothing to do with computers. It goes much further back than that. Indeed, the clock may be the first artificial intelligence.

“The clock,” wrote Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization, “is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.” There would be no techno music were it not for clocks. The clock measures and regulates and quantifies and values time, the medium within which all of existence unfolds.

Like ELIZA, the clock itself is incapable of moral judgement. Rather, the clock reshaped the erratic immorality of chaos into a strict moral code of stability: “under the rule of the order,” Mumford contended, “surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay.” Clocks did not just produce synchronization. They also created the concept of asynchrony.

A performer interacts with electronic equipment on a table while a visual projection of circular patterns is displayed behind them in a dimly lit space.
Myriam Bleau performs with the ELEKTRA festival at Centre PHI, 18 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The MIDI clock was always off by a hair’s breadth. And this reintroduced a degree of chaos into the digital musical order, kicking events, in a manner of speaking, off the grid. Montreal artists — like Myriam Bleau, who performed a skittering set on 19 June at Centre PHI with a collection of illuminated spinning tops, or Xela Edna’s unexpected technical glitches on the night of her album launch at the SAT for My Data Cannot Rot — consciously or subconsciously intervene in the clock’s domination and trouble the notion that technological tools are unquestionably cool.

Fluorescent lights flicker rhythmically. Data indeed rots. Anyone who has ever relied on Montreal’s Métro system understands that time is just a suggestion here. If the train is running late, more time is simply added to the clock. The Métro’s turnstiles are locked from forward motion. But everyone knows that if you spin them backwards half a turn, you can slide right through.

Technological innovation doesn’t de facto produce better art. It is arguably in the ethics and aesthetics of technological failure that creative revolutions are incubated. If intelligent machines encourage our moral stagnation, then winding the clock back might be the most promising strategy to push us forward. Sometimes, what works best is that which evidently doesn’t.

As tech-savvy as Montreal presents itself, our cutting-edge technologies seldom function as advertised. And so, we exploit weird tricks, cool tools to navigate our social spaces, our culture.◼︎

Cover image: Public Appeal performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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Un Oiseau Rebelle: notes on the location of culture

Culture, like blood and other life forces, circulates around the globe as if through a body.

There are certain locations, like New York or London or Paris, that seem more likely to originate culture, whereas other places, like Chicago or Manchester or Montreal, we might recognize more as receivers or interpreters of culture.

Population plays a part in determining whether a location originates or interprets culture. Larger cities tend to be engines of culture, with sympathetic administrative institutions and cultural infrastructures to incubate it.

Demographics is another indicator of where original cultures are more prone to occur. University cities, for instance, with higher numbers of young and enterprising residents tend to cultivate more unique cultural forms.

A confident and vibrant foundational culture, based upon things like shared language, identity, and history, is another significant condition that a given location might be more apt to originate rather than receive culture.

We frequently assign greater value to original cultures and to the locations that nurture them. Cultural insemination suggests a primary vital élan, whereas a secondary, supporting role is reserved for cultural dissemination. But a different kind of power can be found in locations that receive and reinterpret culture — that of revision, or what Homi K. Bhabha calls, “new and hybrid agencies and articulations.”

A dramatic scene from an opera featuring a man kneeling and reaching for a woman in a bright pink dress with ruffles. The woman appears concerned, while a group of silhouetted figures observes in the background against a blue sky.
Arturo Chacón-Cruz and Rihab Chaieb perform Carmen at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

The time lag inherent in cultural transmission opens up a temporal space for imperative interventions and interpretive interference. As cultural forms travel from New York — or London, or Paris — to wherever they end up, they evolve in significance and transform in transit. In the time it takes for culture to arrive, it both loses and accrues meaning.

Techno music that originated in Detroit or Berlin but now resounds, for example, out of a stereo in a middle-class bedroom in the Montreal suburbs, may become less about representing art’s postmodern mechanical reproduction than about corporeal phenomenology and the body’s rhythmic regulation. The heartbeat during the depths of a Canadian winter is more immediate than the assembly line or the factory floor.

Taken out of context like this, cultural forms may superficially be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But those apparent interpretational deficiencies are themselves acts of agency that insert new cultural knowledge and multiply possible readings and meanings. Reception, then, is also always a new productive act. Reading is rewriting. And rewriting takes place in the time lag of transmission.

Ralph Ellison writes in his novel Invisible Man about the 20th century Black American experience of temporality. “Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” Ellison says, “you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.”

Primary culture seems to set the temporal cultural pace — think of the phrase “New York minute” — whereas feeling behind or outside time is a condition common to receptive cultures. Hence the racist pejorative, “CP time.” The reclamation of the temporal sense, I believe, is the origin of the saying most commonly attributed to the Hip-Hop lexicon, which has now migrated to the MAGA Right in America: to “know what time it is.”

Physical travel still takes time, although much less since the 19th century than it did in every century before. But ideas and information today travel with near instantaneity and require practically no time to be received, read, and rewritten. Therefore, there is no longer any location of original culture, since it is constantly and everywhere being produced, circulated, and reproduced. And yet, there are certain places that still persist as cultural centers.

Is the idea of cultural centrality itself an artifact of time lag, just waiting to be read, rewritten, and understood anew? Are ideas also products, subject to the same regulation as commodities, with a short initial shelf life and increasingly rapid successions of cyclical marketplace revaluation?

The reality is that time arrives in waves, and like waves, time is subject to tides. Time is not a straight line, nor is it a cycle. It is a current, a frequency, a living bandwidth that carries culture on it like a radio frequency carries signal. We are each tuned to slightly different times.

Crowd at a live concert with enthusiastic fans cheering, some people are crowd surfing above them, creating an energetic atmosphere.
A crowd surfer rides the Angine de Poitrine audience at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

What precipitated this line of thought was Laura Snapes’ interview in The Guardian this week with Angine de Poitrine. First off, culture is not supposed to originate in Saguenay. But it is acceptable when it is a revision of culture that originated elsewhere, like a misreading of Frank Zappa or King Crimson. And for a New York minute, Saguenay becomes a center of culture.

It is ironic that this so of-the-moment band is also, aesthetically speaking, all about timing, frequency, and ambiguity. Now that Angine de Poitrine have arrived in London, they can reset their loop pedals and properly impose upon cultural temporality their own brand of CP (coloured polkadot) time. How long this micro-moment lasts remains to be seen. In a time of TikTok, when everyone wants to know what time it is, the clock is ticking…

I also had time this week to contemplate Bizet’s Carmen, a cultural text with comparatively longer staying power, but one which has undergone a series of re-readings and rewritings through the sands of time.

It is probable that, in its time, Carmen was conceived as a cautionary tale against liberated femininity. The Prosper Mérimée novella from which Bizet’s opera is adapted begins with a quotation from the Greek poet Palladas: “Every woman turns sour, twice she has her hour, one is in bed, the other is dead.”

Theodor Adorno in his essay “Fantasia sopra Carmen” writes that Carmen celebrates “eruptions from civilization into the unknown,” rejecting the bourgeois expectations of work and productivity, adherence to commodified temporality and inevitable domesticity. “The Fate which rules and which nothing can halt,” Adorno asserts, “is the primeval and pre-intellectual force of sexuality itself.”

It took 150 years for these thoughts to migrate from Paris to Frankfurt to Montreal.

You can always escape a place. But you cannot fly faster than time. And you can never overtake an idea.◼︎

Cover image: Rihab Chaieb as Carmen photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

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