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May 25 @ 10:00 am - June 22 @ 5:00 pm
Xuan Ye: I OWNED, A TONGUE
May 25th – June 22nd, 2024
404 York Rd, Guelph, ON N1E 3H4
Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 10 am – 5 pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 25th, 2024, from 2 pm – 4 pm, Ed Video Media Arts Centre, 404 York Rd, Guelph, ON N1E 3H4
Joint Launch: A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints and EveryLetterCyborg Bites:
Saturday, June 8th, 2024, from 2 pm – 4 pm, Art Metropole, 896 College Street, Toronto, ON M6H 1A4
Artist Statement
I OWNED, A TONGUE is about hacking the alphabetic writing apparatus as a technology in an algorithmic narration of cybernetic feedback and data economies. In the exhibition, the software writes on its own, interfaces invite you to decipher and gesture, neon signs emit ringing sounds while scrolling antonym pairs, and speech voices are indigestible data that insist on unlearning. Six works of digital poetry, that are six modes of perceptual rerouting, synthesize unstable and untranslatable signifiers that confuse yet connect us. Meanings dangle in the collective dreams we are all in, where networked machines relay signals from the other side of reality. Lost tongues are found anew as contexts are displaced, detached, and divinated from their normalized mundane.
About EveryLetterCyborg Bites Artist Multiple (Edition of 100)
EveryLetterCyborg Bites are toothy fortune cookies offering cryptic divinations in camouflage as heteroglossia. Each bite is one message that is one tweet from the Twitter bot @qletrcyborg (2018 – 2022). Each tweet contains words sourced from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) as its corpus. Each message is encrypted with a word randomly generated from an online database of English dictionaries. Each bite casts a post-cyberfeminist spell, enchanting the already predicted fortune with the allure of data noise and indeterministic codes.
About the Artists and Contributors
Xuan Ye 叶轩 works across art, music and technology. X is interested in making noise as a generative space to evoke the dissonant, untranslatable and illegible within more-than-human entanglements. They often involve improvisation, computation and fiction to compose software, images, installations, performances and editions. Their work has appeared at the MOCA Toronto, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai), Venice Architecture Biennale, Peer to Space (Berlin), MUTEK Montreal, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Goethe-Institut (Beijing), among others. Their multifaceted practice has been featured and reviewed in Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific(Issue. 111), KUNSTFORUM (Bd. 257), Musicworks (Issue. 136), and Bandcamp Daily (Best Experimental Albums).
Mujie Li is an experimental writer and a doctoral researcher of digital media and culture at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom). Her research explores how literary aspects (such as writing, reading, text and language) in digital and computational technological conditions work together to shape digital aesthetics. She is the author of the novella Mirage Time (2017, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and the article On Digital Aesthetics: Sense-Data and Atmospheric Language (2023, published by Electronic Book Review).
Jason Doell is vital to Canada’s experimental music/sound community. His interdisciplinary practice includes site/context-specific works, live coding, and signal-chain manipulation. Doell has created several significant works, including “Beneath a Landscape”, a 30-minute subway piece commissioned by INTERsection festival (CA), the interactive online work “TURNONANDBENOTALONE” presented by Music Gallery (CA), and the algorithmic piece “tbtastiuth” commissioned by MaerzMusik (DE). Doell has worked with international artists such as Quatuor Bozzini, Continuum Contemporary Music, Pulitzer Prize-winner Raven Chacon, and legendary guitarist John Dieterich. Doell’s new album, Becoming In Shadows ~ Of Being Touched, was released on American imprint Whited Sepulchre.
Exhibition Catalogue
Download here.
Accessibility
On the side of the 404 York Rd building, there is an accessible ramp that leads to the building’s back door. Head straight through the hall to reach Ed Video’s side door. Parking is available along the side of the building. The parking spot closest to the ramp is reserved for those with accessibility needs. Note that parking spots near other buildings in the area are not publicly available spots.
Acknowledgement
This exhibition has been supported by Partners in Art under its Artist-Direct Program and received exhibition assistance from the Ontario Arts Council. Special thanks to Maddie Lychek, Program Director, and Elia Morrison, Technical Director, of Ed Video for their invaluable organizational and technical support.
Founded in 1976, Ed Video Media Arts Centre is a charitable artist-run centre, whose mission is to foster the creation, exhibition, and appreciation of media arts.Ed Video is situated on the traditional lands of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabek, and Haudenosaunee Peoples and the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. The Ed Video Media Arts Centre acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Guelph, and the Trillium Foundation.
