Coded Dreams, 9 October 2024 – 12 January 2025, Centre PHI

“First the sun and then the moon, one of them will be ‘round soon.” —The Rolling Stones, “Slipping Away”

The impetus for technological innovation was once upon a time to extend humankind’s functional capacities. We invented shovels so we wouldn’t have to dig with our fingers. We devised washing machines so we wouldn’t have to scrub our fabrics by hand. Books prolonged our natural memories; recordings preserved ephemeral sounds that would have otherwise been lost in time.

Media then became all about compression, packing more and more into less and less. Books and motion pictures and audio recordings were progressively condensed onto celluloid reels, shellac disks, vinyl records, magnetic tape, then digitized into formats that advertised their increasing miniaturization. The Compact Disc. The iPod Nano. The MacBook Air. Everything into nothing.

Artificial Intelligence presents the veneer of infinite information beneath a shiny, tiny interface. But below the surface, it’s as hollow as an abandoned snail shell — pretty but vacant.

“Images and information,” writes the media theorist Laura Marks in her 2010 book Enfoldment and Infinity, “come into the world and roll back into the infinite in a ceaseless flow of unfolding and enfolding.”

It is not, however, the process of unfolding-enfolding that is ceaseless; it’s the flow.

Communauté Slo / Nancy Tobin, Superheart L’Opera, 9 October 2024, La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporaines

“The future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory.” —W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

The camera eye is a consumer-grade drone flown across the New Mexico desert by a twelve-year-old boy named Emmanuel. We cruise smoothly over scrub and brush, whizzing above rocks and low bushes, surrounded by nothing but reddish-brown sand and cerulean, blue sky. In the far distance, mountains; in the other direction, what looks like a state-of-the-art military base.

A hare scurries among the spikey cacti and thistle weed, approaching the observation tower and barbed wire fences surrounding the secured compound. As it tracks the hare, Emmanuel’s drone suddenly explodes mid-air, apparently shot by an automated ballistic weapon.

The boy runs to the perimeter fence, tears streaming down his face. He retrieves the wreckage as an obese, moustached guard wearing a bulletproof vest and aviator sunglasses approaches the fence from the other side.

“Shouldn’t be flying that damn thing around here, kid,” warns the guard — too late for Emmanuel.

“This base has the highest-level security of any in these United States,” he mutters to no one in particular as he wheels back on his leather boots and returns like a fat robot to his post.

A Place to Noise, Léa Boudreau, 11 October 2024, Cyber Love Hotel

“Nothing here now but the recordings.” —William S. Burroughs, “Soul Killer”

Autumn is undoubtedly the season for nostalgia, for reflecting on the year’s events and making plans for whatever time is left. The falling leaves signify time’s passage and the inevitability of death. Montreal’s autumnal magnificence is surely a testament to the truth that there is beauty in decay, that youth is illusory, time is cyclical.

Sometimes, you already know when something is happening that you will become nostalgic for that time later in life. It’s an uncanny feeling, projecting yourself into an inherently sadder future in which you will miss the moment you’re inhabiting right now. The now that will be.

When you have that future nostalgic sense, hold onto it for as long as possible, and then let it go as soon as you feel its departure.

Cleave it and leave it.

Wadada Leo Smith and Sylvie Courvoisier with Rehab Hazgui, 7 October 2024, La Sala Rossa

“In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.” —Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life

Human memory has always been selective. We tend to recall our favourite moments with crystal clarity. Trauma, too, marks our commemorative impulses deeply. But hard drives and digital memory store the good and the bad with ruthless indifference. They can call up any memory at any given time — even simultaneously — with the happiest and most distressing events sitting right next to each other, sharing virtual space on a plane with seemingly an infinite amount of it.

Machines don’t discern between one or another emotion. Plenty of sweat and tears have been shed trying to teach them to behave more human-like. The question is, should machines become more like us, or should we strive to be more like them, abandoning our warm and soft physicality for something colder and more calculating?

FYEAR with Erika Angell, 16 October 2024, Centre PHI

“What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.” —Johnny Cash, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”

I received an email from a friend recently telling me that he was finding it increasingly difficult to do anything “for fun.”

The news of war in Lebanon — and Gaza, and Ukraine, and Sudan — was apparently robbing him of the inner capacity for enjoyment just for the sake of enjoyment. Of course, we focus on death toll and count victims in numbers. But enlightenment is immeasurable, and the true casualty of war.

This, I believe, is what Mark Fisher meant by “consciousness deflation.” In order to raise the awareness of our collective situation and surroundings, we require an elevated sense of perspective. We have to become lighter to attain the moral high ground. Our opponents seek to lower us, to weigh us down with a constant barrage of base-level emotions — fear, anger, hatred — that enshroud us in a thick and heavy darkness.

In Krakow’s ghetto district, where thousands of Europe’s Jews were rounded up during World War II before being shipped off to die in concentration camps, I was surprised when I travelled there for the first time in 2018 to see a graffito on a tenement wall depicting Gene Kelly from the 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain with a caption reading, “I’m happy again.” A dark joke, I thought.

I couldn’t help but laugh, though, given the context — both historical and geographical.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Still from Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser’s The Golden Key. Photographed for NicheMTL.}