Lèche-vitrine, Art Dressé, Espace Transmission, 8-18 April 2026

The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him, but the desire of the righteous shall be granted.
—Proverbs 10:24

The British slang “window-licker” is a derogatory term for a person with diminished mental capacities. It is akin in meaning to the “R” word and considerably more offensive. It indicates the propensity of mentally handicapped people to do foolish things, like, for instance, lick windows.

Since the release of the 1999 Aphex Twin single “Windowlicker,” however, the expression has taken on another connotation: unconsummated desire. The song’s video, which has not aged well, especially presents overt themes of longing which suggest a covert toxicity that accompanies objects of desire. There is an implication as well that desire itself is mindless, that wanting is a form of weakness, ripe for control.

“Window licking” in the 21^st century has come to signify still another type of desire — the desire for the representation of an object. “Windows,” after the Microsoft operating system, are what we commonly refer to in the act of looking-through onscreen. Window shopping and window dressing are no longer practices reserved for meatspace. And what appears within the digital window can be infinitely adjusted, altered, augmented, or may in reality not even exist.

The digital world, among other dubious consequences, has exponentially multiplied and convoluted “window licking,” not only in meaning. Nonetheless, the variation of sense in the circuits and wires and distributed networks of interconnected machines always has real-world consequences.

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, Mount Royal Center, 10 April 2026

“I don’t need anything. I want.”
—Mr. C., Twin Peaks: The Return

At a recent conference on A.I., Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Daniel Béland identified two categories of power: power over and power to.

Power over, Béland loosely defined in the negative as the power of one person or group or nation to subjugate and control another. Power to, he described in the positive as the power to assist or overcome or empower another subject.

Judging by the standing-room only crowd, the potentials and perils of A.I. are of immediate interest and acute concern to a broad swath of luminaries across the disciplinary spectrum. I was seated between a retired McGill Engineering professor and the head of a public relations team from a Montreal-based startup, and each of these individuals listened with discernable alarm, as if there were some secret code to be cracked in the participants’ responses.

Artificial Intelligence, like any technology, has the potential to demonstrate, and the capacity to exert, both types of power. In the hands of some users, A.I. could be a force for capital ‘C’ Control in the Burroughsian or Deleuzian sense — protocological, algorithmic, inhuman domination that subjugates us through a series of automated if-then propositions. In other hands, A.I. possesses the power to ease the burden of impossibly tedious or time-consuming labour, to liberate us from work that has always posed an obstacle to progress and growth.

The problem is that human beings designed and implemented A.I. in our own image, so to speak, and as such it aims to satiate our wants more than our needs. A.I. has its own essential desire. It desires to satisfy our desires — if you like this, then you’ll love that — and inoculate us in doing so against the virus of dissatisfaction.

The Intense Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026

Over the counter, with a shotgun,
Pretty soon, everybody’s got one.
—U2, “Desire”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government made headlines this week by being the first in Canadian history to secure a majority outside of a general election. Through a series of floor-crossings and byelections, the Liberals now occupy 174 out of a possible 343 seats and can operate until October 2029 without facing the threat of a no confidence vote.

Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre described the Liberal mandate as undemocratic, accusing the party of coordinating “dirty backroom deals.” According to Poilievre, Carney orchestrated his majority by force, using vaguely anti-revolutionary coded rhetoric: “Mark Carney is saying to Canadians: ‘Your vote does not count,’” Poilievre declared on 9 April in Richmond, B.C.

The Liberals’ byelection sweep recalls the famous anecdote about the conversation between Lenin and Trotsky on the eve of the October Revolution in November 1917. According to legend, Lenin, in a fit of uncertainty, asked Trotsky, “What will happen to us if we fail?” To which Trotsky was said to reply, “What will happen to us if we succeed?”

“An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions,” writes Slavoj Žižek in Living in the End Times, “it retroactively creates its conditions.” Carney is in the process of performing a similar soft socialist revolution in Canada and, given the populist surges underway in Alberta and Quebec, I for one reluctantly have to admit that I don’t hate it.

Quatuor Molinari : Musique à voir, Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026

“The Buddhist will tell you: ‘All life is pain.’ Pain comes from always wanting things.”
—‘Sally’ Moltisanti, The Many Saints of Newark

We are under the impression, mistaken in my opinion, that if we were only to consume the correct media, desire the proper commodities, collect the right art, listen to the authority-approved music, watch the acceptable films, belong to the prestigious clubs, trust the most reliable experts, keep the most important company, and engage in the most sophisticated sexual escapades, our wanting would be absolved and our suffering effaced. Because if we only want the righteous things, we shall receive them.

Still, it’s not the things that we desire that make us righteous or not; it’s the wanting.

Plural : Foire d’art contemporain à Montréal, Grand Quai du Port de Montréal, 10-12 April 2026

“Happy are those who have what they need and no more.”
—Saul Ha-Levi Morteira

The old “wheelbarrow” joke, which I have told many times, hits different in the age of ICE and bears repeating.

A man crosses the border every day carrying a wheelbarrow full of sand. And every day, the crossing guard at his checkpoint dutifully sifts through every grain of that sand and finds nothing.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the same man transports his wheelbarrow full of sand over the border, in the face of the same increasingly confounded crossing guard, sifting to no avail, evermore certain that he is being deceived by some ingenious smuggling scheme.

Finally, the crossing guard reaches his last day on the job and implores the man with the wheelbarrow: “Please, I’m retiring tomorrow. You must tell me what it is that you have been smuggling through my checkpoint!”

To which the man replies, “I thought it was obvious. I’ve been smuggling wheelbarrows.”◼︎

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_{Cover image: Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Portrait d’une chambre orientale, 2022, Édition 2/3 + 1AP, inkjet printing on archival paper, 24 x 36,” Galerie Eli Kerr, acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.}