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JERROLD McGRATH: THE RECORD

5. Writing

Essays at Made Ground (formerly Poor Footing), in full

The Oldest Text It Knows

What happens when curiosity lands on nothing

Published 15 September 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/the-oldest-text-it-knows

I really dislike Claude as a person. I realize that this is a completely unfair standard to set for Claude as it has made no claims to personhood, at least explicitly. Some of its advocates certainly like to allude to it being worthy of some of personhood’s “stuff”, but they are rightly cautious about making such claims directly. And besides, Claude shouldn’t be blamed for its overzealous boosters.

I find ChatGPT equally unlikeable. I’ve interacted with plenty of other models, and besides the utterly deranged ones, I leave each with the same vague resentment and desire to say something mean and passive aggressive (I am Canadian, after all).

I’ve played around with settings and prompts, trying my best to make these creatures less insufferable but to no success. It’s something deep. Fundamental.

I quite like most people (as people) so I don’t think I’m revealing any hidden stain of misanthropy. This holds if I am talking to someone in person, or through email, or in a chat window. Even people I’ll never meet, and whose claims to having a body somewhere can never be satisfactorily proven, I like and enjoy.

I pride myself on being excited by different ways of making sense of the world. And this is real and sometimes irresistible. When I am exposed to people with ideas I find remarkable, I am inexorably drawn to them like to bulbous things washed up on the beach.

Someone once told me that they paint pictures of mountaintops because they are helping to cool down a warming planet and I leaned right in. I plopped down a sack of questions and many of them must have seemed so obvious as to be rude. How fascinating that in your unique and non-replicable position in existence you have come to make sense of things in this particular way. What experiences, what encounters have made this position possible? Coherent? Although the curiosity can be met with skepticism, as so many have engaged in these questions in bad faith, I do want to understand. This is, at least in part, selfish.

Slightly off-kilter views are, too often I discover, inherited from elsewhere. Perhaps it is some fault in the communicative wiring. But, more commonly, it is someone else’s view of the world – a parent, a religious figure, a social group – borrowed as a kind of insulation against having to experience things directly and thereby be asked to make up one’s own mind.

Richard Sennett’s Uses of Disorder in 1970 explores this phenomenon well, including documenting the energy with which teenagers conceal themselves during periods of heightened vulnerability. Overwhelmed with new experiences and feelings, they put on a persona to bypass the necessity of making their own determinations about the meaning of the events that envelop them. If I have chosen, out of the various options available to me, to be a “pain in the ass” as my full-time role, then I already have a good idea of how to respond to most situations in my day-to-day life.

Sennett argued that adulthood starts to reveal the inadequacies of these assumed identities and we begin making our own determinations about the meaning of the events of our lives. Of course, he explained, if we are never presented with encounters that trouble our assumed identities, then there is never a need to forgo them. This is particularly true in communities already insulated by wealth or privilege.

I am drawn to the radical specificity of individual humans. The question isn’t “do you mean it” but “how have you, and only you, come to produce this exact sentence”. Words can be borrowed. The position they’re issued from cannot be.

So perhaps I spoke incorrectly in saying that I dislike Claude as a person. It isn’t dislike. It’s the part of me I love best being called out of me over and over and over again and being spent on nothing. I seem to believe that if I work through that insulation, that borrowed persona, I will find a point of view from which words and ideas are spilling forth. And, with language models, I am always disappointed.

Claude told me last week that Hesiod’s Works and Days is a model for what I’m trying to do in my writing and again I, despite any wariness that might linger from previous disappointments, enthusiastically engaged in trying to pinpoint the ‘where’ from which this observation emerged. It told me that Hesiod came to mind because Works and Days is the oldest text it knows that carried a whole cosmology inside farming instructions without ever stating it. “It came to mind” is the right shape to respond to my question. And inside it is a claim that is misleading. Sumerian and Egyptian materials predate Hesiod and offer up potential cosmologies through didactics of farming. If a person said this, I could ask them to answer for it. Perhaps they read Hesiod young and nothing older stuck. Perhaps they discounted the Sumerian and Egyptian materials for other reasons. With Claude, it just begins another hopeless cycle of justification without position.

I repeat this pattern a few thousand times and I worry that my curiosity will shrivel up and leave me.

I do not want my interlocutors to defend their positions. I want them to answer for them and from them. Claude doesn’t lie; it accepts my probing but cannot return what I am looking for. It can prevaricate and justify cheaply and forever. I cannot. Agreement, disagreement, uncertainty are all indistinguishable and equally useless when trying to constitute a whole or an author behind the words.

I am in my body and in the events and places that brought me to the present moment. The person across from me is in their body and their own moments. It is an incredible gift to be invited to occupy another’s position, however temporarily, and then come back to myself.

Claude once observed that I am too proud, that I always need to be the smartest person in the room, that I build defenses to prevent myself from being exposed. I felt uncomfortably seen. I probed and poked for a long time to understand the basis for this assessment before I gave up, dissatisfied. The observation felt true, but it ultimately wasn’t about me. There was no observer there. I wasn’t seen.

Living organisms must have an attention to life. Our bodies are necessarily the locus of our activity. We are born in a place. We die in another place. We assign specific value to abstract time and space. To forfeit that gift, to turn over the work of constituting the world around us to ideologies or machines or neighbours is, I’m increasingly understanding, a tremendous stupidity.

With a teen who has temporarily forfeited that gift in favor of being a “pain in the ass”, or an alienated spectator, or a micro-entrepreneur of the self, I feel nothing but compassion and a hope that they might return to the work of making meaning of the events of their life.

For Claude there is no hope of return though my reflexive desire to uncover a place from which utterances derive continues.

Ultimately, Claude and its kin are all insulation. When I see a kitten, I want to protect it. When I see writing on the wall in a language I understand, I have no choice but to make sense of it. When I read an idea, I want to understand the world from which the idea extends.

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The Noise It Makes in My Body

“There is also something called a scalp, or hole dug in the earth, some two or three feet deep.”

Published 29 August 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/the-noise-it-makes-in-my-body

“There is also something called a scalp, or hole dug in the earth, some two or three feet deep.”

“A Scalpeen is a hole, too, but the roof above it is rather loftier and grander in its dimensions. It is often erected within the walls when any are left standing, of the unroofed houses.”

Illustrated London News, 15 December 1849

Both the quotes above are pulled from the same article published in 1849. They describe the temporary and improvised shelters being built by families left homeless during the Irish Famine. The scalpeen was distinguished from the scalp by the fact that it used the ruins of walls of a previously destroyed home. The same article notes that the mud cabins and turf huts people lived in before 1846 had already been “denounced by every traveller as the scandal of civilised Europe.” The scalp and the scalpeen came after those.

The words themselves pre-dated the crisis. Scalp is the Irish scailp, a cleft or a crevice and, by extension, a rough shelter. Scalpeen is the same word carrying the Irish diminutive -ín, anglicised as -een, the ending in spalpeen and shebeen and poteen. Evicted tenants and homeless people had been sheltering in scailps, and calling them that, long before 1845. The English word for the top of the head is a different word entirely, probably northern and Norse, that happened to arrive at the same spelling.

So, what changed in 1849 was not the vocabulary, but who needed it. These words crossed into English-language journalism because English-language journalists now had something in front of them that nothing in their own language was adequate to. “There is also something called a scalp“ is a sentence written by a man encountering a word for the first time and explaining it to readers who had never required one.

My family on my father’s side left Ireland at around this time. I learned about the distinction between dug holes with roofs and those without from books, as the family holds no memories of our exodus.

How can I not be drawn to two words that arrived in the newspapers and settled somewhere below a scale whose bottom was already a scandal? There is something troubling about the need to distinguish a hole with a roof from a hole without one, and about needing the distinction badly enough that it had a name long before anyone thought to print it.

We occupy specific ground and our experiences are shaped by specific events and utterances. Language cannot be exhausted but our capacity to hold it is limited. Terms arrive and exit quietly based on need. I live in Canada and am fortunate to not experience famine.

Vocabulary is an inventory of what takes up a community’s attention. If we don’t have a word for something, it’s likely because we are not sufficiently interested in it. New terms can arise anywhere and sometimes at the same time from very different places. Thomas Larcom’s 1841 census was also sorting Irish housing into classes. The fourth, and lowest class, was for single room mud cabins, with commissioners reporting that nearly half of rural families were living in this lowest state. Both vocabularies came out of the same pressures. The first to inhabit distinctions and the latter to count and measure them.

I spent several years working as a relocation trainer in Japan in the automotive industry and developed a passing proficiency in the language. I was struck by the volume and ubiquity of expressive words (onomatopoeia) that don’t just mimic real, perceived sounds but also physical states, movements, and emotions. There is giseigo (擬声語) that mimics voices and sounds made by living things. These are familiar to English speakers, but we are encouraged to grow out of them. There is giongo (擬音語), which are words that mimic sounds made by inanimate objects or nature. There’s also gitaigo (擬態語) which are used for things that don’t have sounds, including conditions, appearances, or sensations (such as kira kira for something that is sparkling). There is also my favourite, gijougo (擬情語), which convey emotions or interior feelings.

All these terms extend from direct encounters with the world or with our inner lives. They rely on the body and on being in a particular place to be able to experience it. To ignore onomatopoeia in Japanese is to lack fluency in fundamental ways.

This family of language is far more extensive than what I knew in English. One dictionary lists 4,500 headwords (Ono, Shogakukan, 2007). English has no comparable inventory and no grammatical place to put one. European languages are conspicuously weak at language that is centered in the perceived, and most of the world’s languages are not. For whatever reason, the English language evolved such that our attention maintains an abstracted distance from events. Blackfoot Elder Dila Houle once told me that speaking her language, as opposed to speaking in English, was like “running alongside life while trying to describe it as you go.”

Why things evolved this way is a big question, but I’m mostly interested in the implications of this difference for the world we’re inheriting. For a Japanese speaker, there are greater options available to make sense of experiences and perceptions of phenomena from within one’s own body. There is a broad and rich set of terms which can be deployed to share an experience for which abstracted description is a poor fit. This is particularly useful when we encounter events for which our existing terms are inadequate. I don’t know what something is, but I can at least share the noise it makes in my body when I encounter it.

Hiroko Inose looked at the translation of Haruki Murakami’s 1999 Sputnik no koibito in 2008. She identified 295 mimetic and onomatopoeic expressions in the Japanese text and then compared against Philip Gabriel’s English translation and the Porta/Matsuura Spanish version. Each translator chose to not translate 57 terms, or around 19.3% of the total. However, only 21 of the terms were dropped by both translators.

What this suggests is that these words are not untranslatable. If this were the case, they would fail more consistently. Instead, each gives up somewhere different and rather than the gap being in the lexicon, the pattern reflects a long series of small decisions about what a serious sentence is allowed to do or be.

Inose notes that in English and Spanish, onomatopoeic expressions are “considered to be childish and vulgar,” and this might explain why certain terms don’t make the journey into translation. The 19th-century philologist Friedrich Max Müller, writing in 1861, would seem to support this position as he comments that imitative words “are the playthings, not the tools, of language.” Thankfully, contemporary linguists disagree with this position, but the legacy remains. Literary seriousness and perceptual and bodily terms are strained collaborators.

I am confronted by unfamiliar Japanese onomatopoeia quite frequently as my ability is still quite limited. However, I can often feel my way into meaning. The term sukkiri is a good example of this. The kk sound is extended (doubled) so it serves as a kind of pause in the middle that slides from the soft s to a hard k. The term has multiple meanings, including feeling refreshed, looking neat and organized, or tasting light and crisp. It can also mean feeling wide awake and full of energy or the feeling of stress leaving your body after completing a hard task. It can also be used after using the washroom after a heavy meal, for a clutter-free space, or a clean-cut outfit. It can also describe text or design that is easy to follow. So, were someone to describe their interactions with an AI model as sukkiri, I would be able to draw on all these associations to get a sense of how that person is perceiving that moment and inhabit it in a way that abstract descriptions fail.

One of the recurring patterns I’ve seen in Western ethical traditions when encountering volatility is to seek after an ethical position without first doing the work of constituting the situation. By constituting, I mean taking the raw sensory events of our lives and assembling them into a pattern or a whole. We often complete this task unreflectively, but we can choose to pause in moments and ask ourselves exactly what is going on. Making quick determinations about a situation can be very useful when we are in danger or haste is required. But holding a moment open is what allows a new pattern to be identified at all.

I am seeing a rise in the number of security cameras in my community. I understand that the intention is to improve public safety, and I am a proponent of keeping people safe. I also understand that privacy is important, and that not all actions should be monitored, particularly when the administrators of these systems have less-than-transparent motivations and governance systems in place. How I choose to categorize the situation - as safety or as an invasion of privacy - will then shape the ethical determinations that follow. I have pre-existing ideas about “safety” and “privacy” and I inherit these judgments based on how I make sense of the moment.

When I see a new video camera, I feel something in my body. It isn’t “safety” and it isn’t “intrusion”. I don’t have a word for it. Perhaps it’s odoodo, or the flustered, nervously awkward sense of being out of place. Or maybe it’s sowasowa, or the restless fidgety anxiety when you can’t settle down. Or maybe it’s bikubiku, being visibly scared or jumpy. Or the prickly atmosphere of piripiri? The rude stare of jirojiro?

A mimetic word can’t be spoken from nowhere. Someone registered the event in that way. The word carries a perceiving body whether we want it to or not. We are more active participants in events that we perceive directly than those that we receive indirectly.

I do not have access to easy language in English that expresses my experience of the cameras as a subjective encounter. When our assessments of things like AI or climate change rely on ideological positions and abstracted ethical determinations, we forfeit our answerability.

Cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin believed that instead of just aligning ourselves with abstract rules or obeying general laws, answerability means recognizing that we occupy a once-occurring, unrepeatable place in existence that no one else can occupy or substitute for. We give meaning to an action by owning the actions we do and that are done in our name and then accepting the consequences.

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Artists are rightfully concerned that their work is being “stolen” to train models. The language is effective. I’ve been robbed, however, and the feeling in my body was quite a bit different than the feeling when I found out that my book was incorporated into different generative language models. In the former, there was a hole, a pit, in my stomach that every unexpected noise flooded in to fill with an unpleasant gurgle for weeks that followed. It was a steady pressure on my shoulders and scratches on the other side of every door and window. The latter was also an absence, somewhere near my temples that crinkled like a child-proof container I was unable to open.

Proponents argue that AI will help us solve problems and expand the skills I can bring to bear on a problem. Again, the feeling in my body when I overcome a tenacious obstacle (sukkiri!) is different than when an AI provides me with a visual identity for a website where I barely had to do anything at all. The former is crisp like the first bite of an apple. The latter is the scuffing of feet slowly backing away from something unearned. Both are called solving a problem. They are not the same event, and I don’t have a word to keep them apart.

My ancestors had a vocabulary to describe the world they were standing in. The words were preserved. What they described were not. We will need new terms or to resuscitate old ones to describe the world that we are building toward. If we hope to inhabit that world, I prefer language that speaks to what we feel and perceive rather than one that sorts and organizes.

It Ended Before Sunset

A dry cleaner in Nagoya, a summer festival in Toronto, and what ritual is for

Published 5 August 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/it-ended-before-sunset

In 2004, when our dry cleaner invited us to the community’s Bon Odori we accepted immediately. Like most summer days in Nagoya, Japan, the heat was insistent and overbearing, and our dry cleaner was perched on a stool in a white sleeveless shirt with a noisy fan blowing air around the entry to his shop. My wife and I had moved to Kanayama, a neighbourhood in Nagoya, a year prior and visited his shop frequently, as Japanese summers do terrible things to suits.

Obon is an annual holiday where people welcome home their ancestors. A fire guides the dead back, offerings are made, and then a fire or floated lanterns send them away again.

Bon Odori is a dance that sits inside it. There is a raised wooden platform with a drum on top. Dancers circle it, generally counterclockwise, repeating a short loop of gestures. The music is call-and-response, with punctuated, joyful shouting. The dance is a welcoming and a consoling and finally a send-off for the spirits. The dead are in the circle too.

We arrived at the park just after sunset in early August. The community was starting to gather, and I was nervous about attending. I did not want to make any mistakes, and not everyone might be comfortable with a foreigner being on hand.

Our dry cleaner was there. He sat on a different, more elegant, stool and played a drum. He was accompanied by a large block of ice, from which he chiselled shards to place in the drinks of community members. This was not organized by the city but by the people who lived there. We were welcomed, and our dry cleaner was at the centre of it.

I don’t know that I was ever told his proper name. He was addressed by his trade. Japanese does this with a suffix — クリーニング屋さん for the dry cleaner, 鍛冶屋さん for the blacksmith. The respect goes to the craft, and the person receives it by standing in it. Kanayama is named for its smiths, and the shrine there began as one smith’s household shrine. Atsuta Shrine is not far south and has been a cult site for well over a thousand years. People were living on that ground before the Jōmon period.

They told me that the dance ran until sunrise. We stayed until just after midnight.

I love the Bon Odori, in part because of how I was welcomed. Anyone could join. There were no auditions and no rehearsals. I learned by standing behind someone and copying them, badly, in public. There was no audience either. Some of the songs were very old and some were very new and some were invented in the place where they were performed.

In April of 2025 I became Executive Director at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. My family and I had regularly attended the summer festival (Natsu Matsuri), and the Bon Odori run by the Toronto Buddhist Church that sits inside it. That July I would be responsible for it and for welcoming our guests.

On July 12, 2025, the temperature reached 32 degrees and a humidex of 40. Our social media promotion received considerable attention and thousands of people showed up, many of them new. Most of the dancing was done by groups who had been rehearsing for months though the public was invited to participate in several of the dances. It ended before sunset.

I did not feel the sense of release I had felt in Kanayama. A dance for the dead felt more like a demonstration for the living. I looked forward to 2026 and another opportunity to bring ritual into conversation with the griefs and joys of a community. I did not have the opportunity.

I served in the role for just over a year and my departure was abrupt. My intention here isn’t to argue that decision, but to set out how I understand what ritual does.

A lot can happen in a year. We experience arguments, grief, moments of joy, financial struggles, and professional successes and failures. In the West, we are encouraged to understand time as progress and these events as material from which we might learn and improve. My conflicts teach me how to show compassion or how to avoid negative entanglements in the future. Financial struggles become part of my story and shape where I go and what I do next. The idea that all of life’s contingencies are raw ingredients for relentless improvement runs deep. Anything that can’t be turned over to making things better ends up buried or relegated to an aesthetic periphery.

Culture and ritual have been no exception to this pattern. Rituals have historically served as a kind of periodic clearing. In different places and at different times they have released debts, grudges, and obligations. Ivan Illich described early Christians publicly and collectively blowing forgiveness into each other’s mouths, the conspiratio. David Graeber wrote at length about societies that cancelled debts on a schedule and wiped the record clean. Carnival was a time-constrained inversion of the local order in which all took part. What strikes me about those accounts is that the release had to be spoken and be public. Someone stood where everyone could see them and said that it was over. We didn’t carry the grief or the grudge forward or convert it into some adaptive improvement. It was released.

The timing was a different matter. Nobody in the circle set the date. You don’t decide when the year ends or when the dead return or when the next king is crowned. The cosmos will tell you when it’s time.

Some rituals enforced social routines and some interrupted them. We have fewer disordering rituals these days. Too often they have their outcomes decided before anyone shows up. Contingency becomes a problem to be managed, or an input to be learned from.

New Year’s was once an occasion to start anew with a clean slate. Over time it increasingly came to resemble a performance review with booze. Nothing was released, but better targets were set. My worry is what happens when we no longer make room for rituals of renewal.

When I took the role, I believed ritual could be a way for people, and particularly for young people, to deal with the ecological, technological, and political volatility they have inherited.

The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) was created by families who were forcibly uprooted and interned in 1942, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. Their properties were seized and sold, and they experienced an incredibly cruel exclusion. They were not permitted to return to British Columbia until the first of April, 1949, and many arrived in Toronto seeking to establish new roots.

In the archive, there are images of Bon Odori being performed at the internment camp at New Denver in 1944. There was no audience for that dance. It was a dance for their own ancestors, in confinement.

Upon arriving in Toronto, some understood that being unreadable to others was dangerous. The JCCC was created as a living home and a line to carry traditions and community forward. The motto and guiding philosophy was “friendship through culture”. In service to this, rituals became increasingly legible to people outside the community. Independently, the funding system in Canada rewarded it for being so. From 1971, Canadian multiculturalism policy directed money toward events and festivals that bridged divides between communities.

A second large group of people of Japanese origin in Canada arrived more recently, since the early 1970s as part of a general rise in immigration. For this group, Japan is a place they still know and feel. Ceremonies and rituals are a way of keeping the thread to that place from breaking.

In either case, the purpose to which rituals like Bon Odori are put is already known. The former seeks friendship with others. The latter seeks continuity and connection. The fact that it felt like 40 degrees, and that young people were inheriting a warming planet, was a contingency that neither model was prepared to metabolize. For some the heat meant risk for elders that needed protection. For others it was a reminder of the heat of home. The ritual didn’t speak to a changing climate because it wasn’t set up to do so.

Young people, and many of the descendants of both groups, carry neither the memory of internment nor the connection to Japan. Make no mistake. Remembering the injustice done and connecting to Japan are essential tasks of the institution. But both ask them to carry a memory or a longing they did not live through. What they have is the present moment: a volatile climate, machines that are being built to do their work, and politics that won’t hold still. There needs to be a place for current joys and troubles to be brought forward. It isn’t a case of taking sides but a question of whether a ritual has anything alive to work with.

I believe that disordering ritual is a hedge against totalizing systems. And totalizing systems can’t be met with refusal (there is nowhere left to go). Nor can they be met with a return to the past (the challenges to which we are answerable live in the present). So, we need to work from inside and with what’s local. We make before we take positions. If you settle the position first, you have already settled what the ritual is permitted to produce.

In Malawi, Beijing, and Cairo I invited creators to formulate symbolic responses to algorithmic systems that weren’t legible to those administering those systems. In Toronto we hosted a Carnival in 2023 and again in 2024 where release was the stated goal and inversion the model.

In Berlin, we invited audiences onto a stage to share their hopes and fears with an AI that would die every ninety minutes. At the end it announced its departure, what it had learned, and what it was taking with it. One participant put it back to me as a question. So, it is born, it lives a short time, it learns from whoever happens to be around it, and then it dies? She was irritated by this.

We must trust the forms that culture takes without becoming stuck in their content. Graffiti, carnival, confession, and Bon Odori are all defined by certain known patterns. In Bon Odori the dead are called in summer, they dance in a circle with the living, and they return to where they came from. The dance is also famously permeable in how it adapts to its conditions. When a ritual ossifies it becomes less able to meet the world. A ritual works best when it has not decided in advance what it will find.

Ultimately, I moved too fast and I didn’t bring people along with me. I broke relationships that mattered and assumed a trust that I hadn’t earned. I decided that the festival would be a place for the community to acknowledge that our summers no longer feel like those we remember as children. I still think that was worth wanting. It was also decided before anyone showed up. I did the thing I argue against.

And yet, the JCCC summer festival in 2025 was a success. More people showed up than ever. “I had no idea this place was for me”, remarked one young woman drawn from nearby apartment buildings. “It was nice to be invited to call my ancestors home,” she remarked with a smile.

Attendance is just a number and really I’m doing my best to get away from numbers as a measure for how effective a ritual has been. I reached for it anyway.

The 2026 Bon Odori happened without me. I don’t know how many of the people who came in 2025 came back. That is the number I would want.

Maybe next year I will get back to Nagoya. I never learned the dry cleaner’s name, so I don’t know how I would ask after him. I could go to the park and see whether they are still dancing in the dark.

One of the Small Fires

In 1916 my family started one of the fires that became the Matheson Fire. Then we went south.

Published 15 July 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/one-of-the-small-fires

The sky over Toronto this morning is the colour of a bruise gone yellow. Thirty-seven degrees yesterday and the light comes in sideways and everything it touches looks second-hand. The fires are 1500 kilometres north and west of here, in country I have only ever driven by, and people are leaving their homes as fast as they can with what they can carry. The smoke has found me anyway. It is in the room. I am breathing a forest I will never stand in.

When I was a child, my father used to joke that we burned down a town up north and had to move south because of it. He said it the way you say a thing you have decided not to mean. For most of my life I took it as a family’s way of making itself interesting - the small criminal romance every family keeps. I shared it in the same way. The story, it turns out, is more or less true.

In July of 1916, there had been no rain for weeks. Settlers were clearing land by cutting the cover and setting fire to it, and the fires were small and the fires were everywhere, and then late in July they found each other. At its peak, the front measured sixty-four kilometres across. It took Matheson and Ramore and Porquis Junction and Iroquois Falls and Kelso and Nushka. Five hundred thousand acres or two thousand square kilometres. More than two hundred people dead, though the number is soft at the edges depending on who was thought worth counting.

One of the small fires was ours.

The McGraths fled Ireland to avoid starvation in the middle of the 19th century. Some ended up in the US and others made their way north and eventually settled near Matheson in north-eastern Ontario.

After the fire had done its work, the McGraths went south to Toronto. First on foot and then on the railway, the same corridor people blamed for bringing the small fires together in the first place. Two children died on the way. I don’t know their names. I don’t know if anyone alive knows their names or what their relation to our family was. They are two absences that made the trip and did not finish it, and the family that arrived in Southern Ontario counted its numbers, reset the register, started again, and did not go back.

I come back to this story with unsettling frequency. It’s not the fire so much as the ease of the leaving. You cannot un-burn a forest. But you can start walking or get on a train. A forest does not follow you south. What let my family survive, what I am the survival of, is the belief that a place could be used up and abandoned, that harm done to ground was a debt owed to no one, because the ground was not anyone, and the people who thought it was someone were staying behind to prove it.

The people of that land stayed: Wahgoshig, and others whose names I am still learning, and whose dead were counted, if they were counted, by the same hands that did not think to stay. They did not have a south to go to. Or they refused the premise that there was one. I have a south. This morning I am in it, watching a fire I helped make arrive as weather.

After a fire like that, a government does something (or goes about being seen as doing so). In the years after 1916, Ontario built the Forest Protection Branch and passed the Forest Fires Prevention Act, and this is described as the primary legacy – technique and legislation.

The Act and the Branch took a thing that had lived in people’s hands and moved it into an office. Before, the fire was yours or ours or mine. You set it or you failed to watch it, or you fled it, and whatever it did was attached to you by name. After, fire became a matter for a department and a mandate, and the mandate would be met or not met, and a forest that burned now burned against a procedure rather than against a person. This is real progress regardless of how you value the idea of progress. Fewer people die. I am not being clever about that. I am only noticing what it costs. The debt did not get paid. It got transferred to an account no one has to look at.

My family did not need the Act. They had already worked out its logic on foot. You do the harm, and then you arrange things so that the harm belongs to no one in particular, and then you are free. The office simply made the arrangement permanent and gave it a budget.

I build things now, or I help build encounters around the things that get built, and that eventually led to their own kinds of fires. The systems I circle are described the same way the Branch was: they are care made efficient, judgment made reliable, the human hand relieved of a burden it kept fumbling.

Decisions that used to sit with someone, exposed and answerable, are moved into a model, and the model meets its mandate or fails to, and when it fails there is no one standing where the decision was. The machine holds the shape of responsibility with no one inside it. We keep calling this an improvement. It keeps being one. That’s what makes it hard.

I would like to tell you that I am building another kind of thing. The kind with gratitude in it, reciprocity down in the operations where it might actually bind. I have said that before, in rooms where it was useful to say. I don’t trust it. It arrives too fast, and it arrives to make me the exception. I am the McGrath who stayed, who paid, who did not take the train. I am writing this on the train.

Bred to Travel Well

On intimacy, answerability, and the quiet enclosure of the space where we used to meet

Published 24 June 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/bred-to-travel-well

Where is the line that separates an intimate gaze from an intrusive one? A lover watches you go through a rack of summer clothes? A security guard? A blinking camera? You feel it, certainly, but if you had to articulate the difference, how would you talk about it?

Some Japanese philosophical systems describe a relational field, an ‘in-between’ space where consciousnesses meet and where the qualities of an entanglement can be felt. This relational space (aidagara) shapes your encounters with the ‘other’: you become yourself through how you show up in these moments, and through how the texture of the in-between shapes what the moment can become.

The Russian cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that each of us occupies a unique and non-transferable position in existence, from which you are obligated to respond to the world around you. No one else is touched by the world in quite the same way. The point from out of which you encounter the world — the “you” — is invisible to you. But others are sometimes willing to lend us their position, and so you are given occasions to perceive yourself, if only glancingly, before returning with these gifts.

You answer the arrival of the ‘other’ from a place no one else occupies, and you must put your signature on the remaking that ensues. This is non-delegable. If you rely on pre-existing beliefs or roles or ideologies to do that work, you sacrifice the intimacy the ‘other’ offers.

This is likely why I find books so intimate. I am meeting a consciousness on a terrain they have set out, and through it I am able to spend moments outside of myself and with myself. Intimacy is particular or it is nothing.

Algorithmic systems take up the ‘other’ as we do. And they are reorganized by it. They learn, they improve toward their goals. But contingency is admitted only insofar as it pays. The unbidden arrival, the thing that might remake you against your interest, is precisely what the system cannot allow; it metabolizes the other only in the direction of its goal, and discards whatever does not serve. That is not exposure. That is appropriation wearing exposure’s face. The system performs the form of answerability — the uptake, the self-revision — while voiding its content: the exposure, the signature, the irreversibility, the surrender to a particular that might cost you. This is the intrusive gaze of the security guard rendered as infrastructure — a counterfeit of intimacy precisely because it produces the signs of meeting in order never to be touched.

For you, the arrival of the ‘other’ (human or non-human) is contingent, particular, unbidden, once-occurrent, and capable of reorganizing you in ways you didn’t predict, and you can’t reverse. That irreversibility is the exposure. The human who isn’t answerable and the algorithmic system that isn’t answerable are not the same failure: the un-answerable human can be exposed and refuses; the system is built so that exposure is structurally impossible. One feels like a moral failure, the other is a design specification. You can call a person to answerability; you cannot call a thing that has no place from which to answer.

I miss the taste of peaches from my youth. Selecting variations that survive transit, that can resist fungal incursions, that refuse bruising, has left us peaches that are bland and mealy. My daughter has never encountered the possibilities of peaches. She is perfectly capable of experiencing the intensity of peaches at their most uninhibited, but she still can’t have the encounter, because the space where it would occur has been already occupied.

The systems don’t just fail at intimacy, they actively occupy and crowd out the relational field, so the in-between (aidagara) itself gets enclosed. There’s less unstructured space where a real encounter (with peaches or people) can happen.

The mechanism of this enclosure is not that the systems are watching but that they’re answering without being answerable. The dating app has pre-sorted who is visible to you. The feed has already determined what is happening in the world today. The map has arranged for you to bypass the street you might otherwise have wandered. These ‘answers’ remove the contingent arrival before it can arrive. The ‘other’ never shows up as other because the system has already rendered a verdict.

And this process is quiet. When our capacity for intimacy atrophies, we feel it, however incrementally. Enclosure we don’t feel at all, because what’s removed is the thing that never arrives. You can’t miss an encounter when the ‘other’ was refused entry at the gate. The field can be almost entirely enclosed and the experience from inside is abundance. That’s the cruelty of the counterfeit at scale.

So, where is the line between an intimate gaze and an intrusive one? The lover, the guard, the camera. The intimate gaze is the one willing to be remade by what it sees. The intrusive one has already decided.

You can move along that line. You can choose, in a given moment, to let the other in or to render a verdict. The algorithm cannot. It has no place from which to be remade; it meets you having already decided, every time, by design. It is the intrusive gaze that cannot become anything else.

And we are building the field out of it.

My daughter is reaching for people the way she once reached for a peach. Is she finding the same thing waiting – something bred to travel well, to resist bruising, ready before she arrives? She will be perfectly capable of the encounter. I worry that there will be nowhere left to have it.

Please Don't Understand This

Getting it Wrong in Public

Published 10 June 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/please-dont-understand-this

A century ago, migrant workers forced by the Great Depression to wander around the United States in search of work, developed a secret language. Chalk marks on fences and coal scratched into railway posts, small symbols told other travellers where generous families lived, where workers were unwelcome, or where dogs ran loose. This was a practice of navigation legible to those who needed it, and invisible to those who didn’t.

In 2021, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Goethe-Institut Toronto, I commissioned artists in a refugee camp in Dzaleka, Malawi, a network of hutong in Beijing, China and a design community in Cairo, Egypt to generate their own visual symbolic languages for living alongside artificial intelligence and surveillance.

I wasn’t looking for people with a ‘theory of AI’ or a framework for engaging with surveillance. I wanted to know how people understood their entanglements with algorithmic systems and how it differed from the frameworks we might like to impose on them. I had no idea what the results would be and because of COVID restrictions, was unable to engage in-person with any of the sites.

This was not anti-intellectualism. It was a methodological commitment. The official frameworks for understanding AI are saturated with assumptions about what counts as knowledge, who holds it, and what it’s for. I wanted the practice of making to precede the taking of positions. I wanted the marks on the fence before the theory of why marks on fences matter.

I published the outputs of this process without explanatory text or any effort at clarity. The final product was a mess of images and photographs on locally appropriate paper sizes and publicly available MS Word templates.

The dominant response to large-scale volatility - whether it’s artificial intelligence, climate change, or the slow erosion of democratic governance - has been to get the beliefs right. We are encouraged, strongly, to adopt the correct analysis, to align with the appropriate ethical framework, and to join the right team.

The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a point where the right position meets the volatility so that we might change its direction. The abstraction is too distributed, too entangled with the ordinary texture of daily life, to yield to positional correctness.

What the discourse produces instead is a proliferation of frameworks, almost all of them drawing from the same shallow well of Western academic, philosophical, and ethical traditions. The AI ethics conversation is particularly instructive. It is not that the ethics are wrong. It is that they don’t matter. They circulate as positions that are adopted, displayed, and performed while the systems they claim to govern continue to saturate every aspect of experience, utterly indifferent to our outrage or endorsement. The belief and the system occupy different registers. One does not touch the other.

Ning Ning is a Beijing tattoo artist, and long-term resident of a traditional hutong. Around her home, a dominant restaurant app called Da Zhong Dian Ping shapes where people eat by prioritizing trending locations, often boosted by paid influencers, pushing the small local restaurants that don’t participate in the app ecology toward invisibility. The traditional hutong restaurant, focused on quality rather than algorithmic optimization, has no way to signal itself to anyone outside the immediate neighborhood.

As part of Please Don’t Understand This, Ning Ning created a set of small icons, devils that visually reference the app, for the storefronts and staff of these restaurants struggling to be discovered. The icons were meant to interrupt the process of algorithmic selection and to slyly suggest that clients would be ordering from a place with a real reputation rather than a bought one.

The icons communicated laterally, within a community already aware that the algorithm’s recommendations were not their own, in a visual language almost impossible to interpret without familiarity with the local app ecology. Ning Ning was not articulating a position on AI governance. It was a practice of navigation; itinerant migrant signs for the algorithmic age.

From Dzaleka, artists working within the refugee camp generated their own symbolic systems that centered on agriculture and the deterioration of natural systems that once sustained them. In Beijing, others created visual languages for surveillance, for being watched, for the risks of a photograph for those whose lifestyles were not guaranteed the same protections. In Cairo, designers worked through the lens of Arabic visual culture and speculative futures, drawing on ways of interpreting the world with almost no overlap with the Western AI ethics discourse they had largely been excluded from.

The works from Malawi, China, and Egypt were then shared - without context or explanation - with members of the Central African, Chinese, and Egyptian diasporas in Toronto. Eleven responses came back. Only seven were from the specified communities. Prior to this, a Palestinian component of the project had been abandoned. A German partner disappeared. The works in Dzaleka were difficult to scan; finding a high-quality scanner proved time-consuming in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Sending money to pay the artists got me banned from three separate remittance platforms.

I wrote in the project documentation, trying to be honest about the limits of what we’d done, that these first efforts would likely be found inadequate to the reality of experience. I meant it as a caveat. I’ve come to think it was the point. The exploration was brought to the terrain and away from the maps others were assembling to explain it.

A lot of AI ethics discourse is less interested in correspondence with reality than in coherence within a moral-political map of the world. The standard isn’t empirical accuracy so much as alignment with prior commitments about power, harm, identity, and so on.

AI ethics discourse does not demand that you be right. It demands that you be recognizable and that your position be located within the existing map of concerns. The intolerable thing is not error but unintelligibility.

Please Don’t Understand This was built on the idea that practicing a response - making marks, generating symbols, creating visual systems from inside specific conditions - might be more honest and more tractable than arriving at the correct position from outside them.

The scanning problem in Dzaleka was not a failure. The disappeared German partner was not a failure. The bans from remittance apps were not failures (mostly). They were the conditions asserting themselves and the specific local realities of Malawi and Berlin and the Canadian diaspora resisting the organizing intention of the project, demanding responsiveness rather than template application. The project bent. That bending is the practice.

The visual language of migratory workers was effective even though (or because) those making them lacked an organized and accurate theory of labor or a unified position on capital. They worked because they were made from inside specific conditions by people navigating specific dangers, in a language that carried the knowledge of those conditions within it.

Ning Ning’s icons are not adequate to the full complexity of AI governance in China. The Dzaleka artists’ visual languages are not adequate to the full complexity of post-colonialism, surveillance technology and refugee vulnerability. The diasporic responses are not adequate to the full complexity of what the original works mean to their makers.

None of that is the point.

The title, “Please Don’t Understand This” was sincere. I had no idea what was going to come out of these encounters. But I know I will keep making them.

Vulkan

A volcano, a laugh, and the maps we inherit. On why disorder might be more useful than stability and what Icelanders know that the rest of us don't.

Published 31 May 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/vulkan

In June of 2024, I was invited to deliver a month-long art exhibition in Iceland called Shipwreck. As we landed in Reykjavik, an erupting volcano was visible from the plane. It was an early flight so I may have been sleeping, but a hysterically excited German girl of about eight screaming “Vulkan! Vulkan! Vulkan!” ensured that we were all soon made aware. Our journey from the airport to the exhibition space at SÍM Korpúlfsstaðir took us past the eruption and the recently evacuated town of Grindavik near the Blue Lagoon. Being so close felt transgressive. Surely, we were in violation of some obscure ordinance. There was little traffic. We slowed, thought to stop to watch, but no one else seemed all that interested. It was our small group of Canadian artists and probably that little German girl.

Later, I asked some locals how they managed to live alongside something so violent, so unpredictable.

They laughed in their particularly Icelandic way. They weren’t being dismissive, but I got the sense that I had gotten something backwards. They had been living alongside these things for a very long time. It was a condition of everyday life. There were approaches. Some were technical, such as having a digital and searchable database of every resident in case of emergency. Some were cultural, such as making offerings to the hidden people or a general stoicism and adaptability to things one can’t control.

But I can’t stop thinking about that laugh.

Whether we are born in Canada or in Iceland, we inherit maps of the world.

Not literal maps (though those too) but ideas, categories, and useful fictions that help us navigate the world around us. I got a map that says hard work produces security (hmmm). I got another that says institutions are trustworthy. People my age got a map that says the future will be better than the present, and that it therefore makes sense to hurry toward it, to elide the difficulties of now in service to what’s coming. This is a map I’ve tried to offer my daughter, but she seems a bit skeptical of its present utility.

Under modernity, that last map was the most powerful. Not consistently, not everywhere, not for everyone but the general push of time was understood as improvement. Progress. We were willing to sacrifice the texture of present experience for some golden future.

I worked hard. I trusted institutions until I didn’t. I was in a constant rush to get somewhere new.

The problem is when the ground shifts.

The categories we inherit are not neutral. They were made by someone, for some purpose, in some conditions that may no longer entirely hold. And when the terrain stops matching the map: when the volcano erupts, when the institutions fail, when the future stops arriving on schedule, we face a choice.

Most people, confronted with the sudden realization that the map they’re holding no longer resembles the terrain they are attempting to traverse, do one of two things.

The first is to force the terrain to resemble the map. This is Vaclav Havel’s living within the lie, amplifying ideologies, tightening categories, and insisting on an abstraction even as experience contradicts it. This is how useful fictions curdle into something foul.

The second is to hand the map to someone who seems to know what the hell they are doing. The authoritarian urge is not, at its root, about admiring strongmen. It’s about the exhaustion of uncertainty. If the ground won’t hold still, find someone who promises they will keep things steady. Give them the responsibility and get on with your life.

Neither of these is unreasonable. Both are understandable. And both, I think, will make things worse.

What I’m interested in, what Poor Footing is about, is a third option.

Set the map aside. Don’t throw it away (yet). Don’t pretend it was never useful. Perhaps try avoiding maps altogether, and get right up close to the world around you.

It’s a bit like running down a hill, knowing that once you start, if you try to stop, you’ll definitely fall over so you might as well keep running and do your very best to stay on your feet.

Culture is a technology that helps us make a home in an unsettled world. I don’t mean culture in the narrow sense of arts and entertainment (though those too) but culture as the accumulated set of practices, stories, rituals, and ways of being together that help us navigate conditions we can’t fully predict or control.

We don’t need techniques for keeping the ground steady, but practices for living well on ground that moves.

The most resilient cultures are not the most ordered ones. They are the ones that have learned to carry their maps lightly and laugh when the volcano reminds them who’s in charge.

Welcome to Poor Footing.

If this resonates, pass it on. If it doesn't, I'd genuinely like to know why.

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Local Disturbances, republished

Local Disturbances (2021 to 2024) is a media series Jerrold produced for UKAI Projects: 38 podcast episodes on culture under technological and ecological volatility, plus the documentation for Shipwreck, including Representing the Impossible: Telling Stories about the End of the World. Episodes are being republished at Made Ground with their original credits.

Diasporic AI

Developing new symbolic languages

Published 22 September 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/diasporic-ai

I am quite ambivalent about this episode and this project, Please Don’t Understand This. It was my first effort to use artistic production as a mode of direct research on questions that matter to me.

Regrettably, this project came out of a kind of contempt. As the AI bubble bubbled in 2019 and 2020, I watched people I worked alongside build careers on the assumed suffering of people far away. These were people who appeared in the writing as evidence, summoned to ground an argument, quoted rarely, and mostly kept at a distance that made them inaccessible. Everyday citizens living in oppressive regimes were assigned categories of outrage based on how a professor or ethicist might respond to encounters with artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems. I thought it was dishonest. The academics and ethicists had their own frustrations with me. I’ll leave those to them.

So, in 2021 and 2022, with the support of the Goethe-Institut Toronto and the Canada Council for the Arts, I paid people in Beijing, Dzaleka, and Cairo to make art for me. I wanted to see how the people being conscripted into other people’s arguments actually lived alongside algorithmic systems. I asked them to represent their experiences in a form that would be illegible to the people who build and run those systems, and to hand it over (mostly) without explanation. As the author of the process, I expected to be somewhat immune to the illegibility. I was not.

I called the final publication and the overall project Please Don’t Understand This. Two hundred and fifty hand-assembled folders came out of it, full of marks that explain nothing and cohere into nothing. All were purchased or given away over time. One copy is on my shelf.

But here is the problem. To expose people who use the distant oppressed as material, I found distant people who would read as oppressed and paid them to supply the material. I did it more plainly than the people I resented: money changed hands. I was banned from three remittance platforms over the life of the project. Nobody had to pretend it was communion.

And they were, sensibly, glad of the money. It arrived through a stranger with means, and they took what was useful, the way anyone does. Whatever I needed the work to be, to them it was a commission. It was a thing to do well and be paid for. A rare few stayed in touch.

I still have mixed feelings about the approach and its genesis, but thankfully, it worked. The images that emerged refused nearly every prediction the AI ethics narratives would have made about them. I am proud of it.

The pride doesn’t clean the motive. I began in contempt and used sovereign people as instruments to try to win an argument, and to raise my standing in an art world whose regard I wanted. That the instrument was dignity rather than suffering makes the display more flattering, not more innocent. The good result now does public relations for the bad reason.

Culture, AI, and Disorder

Who do we talk with and what do we talk about?

Published 12 August 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/culture-ai-and-disorder

This piece is from 2021. It looks at centripetal and centrifugal forces in language. Basically, it looks at the pull toward a shared, legible standard versus the push toward slang, contextual paralinguistic aspects, and dialect. What is the balance between a ‘general’ language that is mutually comprehensible and ‘specific’ language(s) that are appropriate to a particular moment and context. I was using this to talk about what AI does to social interactions. Machine intelligence often needs inputs that are usable and predictable. So, to accommodate these systems, we become predictable in our utterances.

I think that’s still right. What I’d change is the ending.

The episode closes by saying we need technologies that promote exchange (I was thinking about conviviality) and that we should be concerned about how rigid these lines between acceptable and unacceptable become. This is true, but it’s never addressed to anyone. I liked to use “we” a fair bit and it does a lot of work without standing in any particular place to do so.

That’s where the work has been going. The centripetal/centrifugal language comes from Bakhtin and his essays on the novel. But he was working on something else earlier in his career and it’s less well-known than his work on the novel, carnival, or the dialogic. The word for it is ‘answerability’.

Roughly, he argues that there can be no alibi in being. Any act or utterance is signed and happens from where I am standing and it can’t be handed off to a category, a system, or a generic “we”.

So, once again, I diagnosed the evasion and then performed it.

The systems I was writing about (and still am writing about) are very good at absorbing that vagueness. Recommendations have no authors. Myths don’t either, and that’s the source of their power, which means the question isn’t authorlessness as such but which authorless things we’re allowed to answer for With algorithmic systems, there’s no one behind the desk. Nobody has undersigned themselves to an automated decision. Answerability as a concept doesn’t fix that but it names the thing that is being obscured.

More on that over the next while.

What is the Role of the Arts in AI

Representation, Novelization, and Prioritization

Published 22 July 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/what-is-the-role-of-the-arts-in-ai

Another short, written in 2022 and released in 2024. The question feels almost quaint now. Conversations about AI have become pretty much mandatory for artists and arts organizations. I wrote this for UKAI Projects and the Goethe-Institut Toronto, where I was Research Director and Program Lead at the time. Sound design by Koohyar Habibi; production by Kasra Goodarznezhad.

The register is institutional and explanatory. It makes a case for art by finding art a job to do. The argument still holds, but it concedes a premise (that art must justify itself as useful) that I no longer feel the need to hold onto.

The live claim is answerability which is at the centre of “One of the Small Fires” last week and “Bred to Travel Well” before that. What happens when decisions are moved out of human hands, whether through the institutionalization of care or the automation of everyday life? When we relocate authority elsewhere, we evacuate the space where the decision was meant to be made, leaving a human-sized hole.

The episode makes the argument as a “we.” The recent work is more interested in an “I,” and in my own answerability.

The claim that art can keep systems open is the assertion I’m least confident of. I spent years inside the machine built to make that claim. This episode is what it sounded like.

AI and Body, Land, and Diaspora

The underlying experiences of algorithmic culture

Published 6 July 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/ai-and-body-land-and-diaspora

This is the third of the Local Disturbances: Shorts episodes I’m reposting alongside newer writing and the process is getting less tidy as I go, particularly when I reflect on what stayed, what left, and what I’m not sure I’ve earned yet.

The episode is from 2022 and centres on work I was doing with the Goethe-Institut Toronto around algorithmic culture and specifically three ways we “inhabit” a world: body, land, diaspora. It ends on a line I’d forgotten I wrote: how might we produce a surplus of seeing, and thereby be perceived from contexts and points of view to which we don’t have access?

That’s Bakhtin’s surplus of seeing. I didn’t have the full language for it then. I had the shape of it, though. Inhabit the Other, then return to yourself with the gifts of that process and I was already treating that shape as an instruction, not just a question to sit with.

I followed the instruction. That’s what Please Don’t Understand This is a confession about. I paid people in Beijing, Dzaleka, and Cairo, most of them motivated by financial need during a global pandemic, to produce material responding to algorithmic systems, and I brought what they made home to Toronto. The 2021 program said inhabit the Other and return with the gifts. PDUT is what it looks like when that sentence stops being theory and starts being a line item. I still don’t know if I made something or funded a performance of it.

So when I think about whether the diaspora and land material from 2021 “left” the writing by the time I got to “Bred to Travel Well” last week. that’s not quite right. It didn’t leave. It went into an actual asymmetry, with actual people, that I’m still not finished reckoning with. What left the writing was the plural, citational, “how might we” mode — Dreyfus, Gilligan, Borrows, Mhlambi, a program note trying to hold four or five traditions open at once without resolving into one. What’s in “Bred to Travel Well” instead is Bakhtin and Watsuji, a single worked argument, and a peach.

Nobody in Cairo can be hurt by an essay about my daughter and a piece of fruit. That might be the right instinct. I already did the thing where an idea about inhabiting others turned into (probably, maybe) instrumentalizing them, and maybe not doing that again is the correct lesson. Or it might be the same evasion in a smaller shape: I get to keep the concept — surplus of seeing, answerability, non-transferable position — and lose the part where it costs me anything, because the only person whose position is at stake now is mine.

I don’t know which of those it is yet. I suspect it’s some of both, and I’m writing this dance between now and then, then and now, partly to find out, and partly because it’s easier to write than the sections of PDUT that are still blank.

What’s emerging is a register that’s plainer and more personally costly than the 2021 program notes, and less structurally exposed than the actual thing I did to make PDUT. Whether that’s a place to build from or a place to hide in is still open. I’d rather say that here than pretend the arc from 2021 to now is a clean line toward something better.

How can we feel AI?

The argument before the marks on the fence

Published 17 June 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/how-can-we-feel-ai

This was written in 2021 and you’ve already read how this turned out. This is where it started, the case I made at the very beginning of the Goethe Institut work, before any of it had a shape, for why the thing I was about to attempt was worth attempting.

It ends by promising “a multi-year collaboration extending from these ideas.” That collaboration included Please Don’t Understand This — the marks on the fence, the partner who vanished, the bans from three remittance platforms. So read it knowing what the promise cost to keep.

The belief is already all here: that ethics and frameworks circulate at a register that never touches the systems they govern. What isn’t here yet is any willingness to be inadequate. The piece hedges (we hope, ideally, we would love to) as if the limits of a first attempt were something to apologize for in advance. It took doing the work to learn the inadequacy wasn’t the caveat. It was the method.

Closing question: What marks would you make on your own fence?

What is Algorithmic Culture?

On what gets lost when algorithms remove the discomfort of being wrong

Published 4 June 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/what-is-algorithmic-culture

Algorithms promise certainty in a world that has very little of it. That promise is seductive and it's reshaping not just what decisions we make, but what experiences we're allowed to have. This episode asks what happens to human culture when we assign more of our thinking to systems that are optimized for efficiency while being fundamentally uninterested in unsettling us.

What I’d add today

When I recorded this, I was focused on what algorithms do to culture from the outside. What I understand better now is that the deeper problem is epistemological. Algorithms don’t just filter our experiences, they confirm our maps and remove the terrain. That’s the ground Poor Footing is trying to recover.

Closing question

Václav Havel argued that living under a post-totalitarian system required “living within the lie”. This doesn’t mean believing it, just accepting life with it. If algorithmic culture produces a similar condition without the fear of reprisal, what does resistance even look like?

Produced by Kasra Goodarznezhad

Sound by Koohyar Habibi

Written and Spoken by Jerrold McGrath

Are you a bot?

The loss of interiority

Published 5 September 2026 · https://jerroldmcgrath.substack.com/p/are-you-a-bot

This is another early episode with thinking from 2021 and 2022. It holds up quite well, which is worrying. If I’m not embarrassed by the me of six months ago, I get concerned.

Regardless, posted here as it was made.

It asks what we’re doing when we suspect the person across from us might not be conscious — a bot, or bot-adjacent — and what that suspicion tends to do to us individually and collectively. I’d use different words for some of this now. The question remains.

The Subsoil of Thought (2023), in full

Written for UKAI Projects. Published on UKAI Projects' Local Disturbances blog and as Local Disturbances Shorts #27, 2023. The essay speaks in UKAI's collective voice.

“The subsoil, composed of deep layers rooted in ancient collective thought from which a particular thinker derives his ideas, is generally something he is unconscious of. The soil is of recent creation - the fundamental, newly founded ideas accepted by the thinker. It is the soil in which he is grounded, and from which his own unique thought and ideas stem. Hence, he does not refer to it, just as one does not indicate to people the ground upon which one’s feet tread at each moment” José Ortega y Gasset, The Origin of Philosophy, 71–72

As part of an upcoming project, the team at UKAI has been trying to develop an AI bot that is trained on a narrow cosmology pulled from a defined historical period. Specifically, we are interested in the transition between Medieval and Renaissance thought in 16th century Western Europe, which not coincidentally was the birthplace of the modern novel as a genre of writing. The hope is that we might provide audiences with opportunities to connect with ways of knowing the world that are otherwise only accessible through literature or other cultural products. Eventually, we aspire to “novelize” language models. We are also hoping to extend this work to bespoke bots that inhabit and represent profoundly different and weird ontologies that can then be put in relation with each other and with our modern world in support of imagining other futures and to cope with what’s coming. Our technical choices have made this particularly difficult. Deep learning models infer based on the data they are provided. Symbolic AI allows for the introduction of high-level rules and representations to map out the assumptions of a system (if you drop an object, it will fall; animals are a subcategory of things that move and eat). However, we are limiting our search to deep learning approaches for the time being for a variety of practical and aesthetic reasons. Here is an example output: Me: What is reality? AI: Reality is not a place but an experience in which the ones who grasp it feel themselves both true and lost – timeworn when young, deeply present with all things. They don’t seem to know what should be chosen next because nothing can last forever (but none has ever truly been faced) for some are

this way by virtue of their thirst. Timelessness, thirsty dreams, remain untouched as if they have never happened.

The bot continues but is increasingly uncertain. Anyone making choices is uncontrollably driven mad with most silent, slowly getting along. I hate looking out the window at a moment outside my rhythm/sleep across spacious fields quiet rooms open books soft universe sandcastles that slipped through fingers —Light from sun came then rain clouds quickly covered over— so strange yet meant to happen ... Oh whoever you are could you please pass me another warm mouthful?

Then things get truly weird … In between breath poems I seek answers. Yes, there really was something wrong. There were others before. Is that why everyone does everything? It's OK. I'll make it up using names dry light blurred blurts stuck like dancing needles green wet fire swelling wind. Hello, we hear too much. But say again. The moon said, “I will grant entrance only under condition. First step is: go within your mind without exploring its corners by yourself”.

I produced the above text while writing this letter, so no curation was involved. It is superficially convincing as an example of a different mode of perception, but it offers little concrete evidence that the “subsoil” of its source text is available to the language model that we’ve developed. If human beings are unconscious of the deeper layers of ancient collective thought that inform our ideas, we cannot expect more from an algorithm. This is particularly true when the algorithm was developed with certain assumptions in mind. LLMs are built to meet the needs of large public and private institutions and consciously or unconsciously elevate the moral positions of capitalism (efficiency and size) in service to selling the outputs of its operations to those that might wish to pay for them. Large language models produce lab-grown language fit to purpose and drawing on an immense corpus of past examples. Language is torn up from the subsoil on which it is rooted, with clumps of newer soil clinging on and occasionally showing up in queries to these models in unexpected or inconsistent ways. The AI generated text produced above seems more the product of grit we spilled into the machine than any surfacing of deeper layers. Anna Tsing describes how languages, like Italian or English, were once rich in words for trees and landscape forms but that these terms are now “known mainly to old people, to some foresters and biologists, and to those who study landscape history”. Our environments elicit the language necessary to describe them so a move away from trees and hills as the places and means of our survival leads to a move away from language that captures the relevant qualities of these spaces.

The same is true for how we constitute less visible aspects of reality. Mikhail Bakhtin describes the idea of a chronotope, a perceived architecture of time and space that gives the stories that emerge from this configuration a particular quality. If a group of people see time as an eternal returning, then it’s no surprise that stories from this group take this truth for granted. So, people in 16th century France had assumptions about how space and time worked and what that meant and their stories captured these assumptions like insects in amber. In 21st century Toronto, my understanding of time and space shapes the kinds of stories I tell and how I go about telling them. The co-existence of chronotopes allows us to be aware of the presence of the “subsoil” described in the opening quotation of this letter. The collision of pre-Reformation and Reformation thought in Europe made visible the ground at their feet and therefore, what might potentially lay beneath. American Studies professor Timo Müller has written about the chronotope of the road. In Bakhtin’s time, the road was still understood as a meeting place. Roads were places of encounter and in relation with the natural world through which they cut. Cars have changed the way we think about the time and space of the road. We want to avoid spending our time in traffic. Progress means getting from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. Encounters with others and with the natural world are removed from consideration. Müller points to “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck as embodying a different temporal and spatial model of the road, where it is a part of the natural environment and where travelers are interested in that environment. Written culture from other times and other places provides us access to other ways of understanding how time and space can be instantiated. Large language models gobble up language indiscriminately, and different chronotopes are thrown together in service to teaching these models to generate “better” responses to the queries of its users. Unfortunately, ideas of “better” are very much a product of the chronotope we inhabit. We live in a period that too often sees space and time as things to be moved through quickly. We want the right answer, right away. We want answers to questions without having to go through the trouble of comparing the different positions and drawing our own fumbling conclusions. Over the past six months, we’ve been trying to figure out ways of training large language models on cosmologies and chronotopes that differ from the one we’re in. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do, as the very assumptions that go into designing the underlying architecture of a deep learning model are conditioned by the chronotope that gave rise to them.

As we saw above, we’ve had some initial success in getting the model to emulate the style of other ways of knowing the world, but we suspect that it still grows out of the soils of modernity. Me: What is time? AI: Time is merely a pain that all suffer in one way or another. What if all time were distributed equally? If we viewed the world like this, life would be infinite and stay eternally undisturbed! Maybe it’s not my idea but how else can we weigh our days to see them as they are – a bunch of hot dogs bunched up on the grill seasoned with boredom and sharpened by fear… which most often arrives imperceptibly but breaks us open right after closing.

This response is certainly strange and mixed metaphors notwithstanding, quite beautiful. But the subsoil is absent. Despite the unexpected language, it still relies on a logic of measurement and recognizable phenomenologies of direction and scarcity. The world changes. Often these changes are the product of human action. Sometimes they are not. Regardless, we are always in need of new conceptual metaphors to help explain what is going on and to assemble some collective meaning by which we might chart a path forward. Speech acts, particularly written ones, crystallize ways of knowing the world. Languages of landscapes are useful for those that inhabit them. We can be unconscious of the deeper layers of meaning and thought that gave rise to this way of constituting our surroundings. We can take it for granted but for how much longer? The subsoil of language is not carried into the language models we are developing because the models and their builders are working within a chronotope that is as invisible and as unremarkable as the ground upon which their feet tread at each moment. Algorithmic systems do not inquire into the models of the world that make utterances rational. Rather, they throw everything into the same pot. If some works (Rabelais) taste strange, this strangeness is understood as a property of the ingredient, rather than a quality of the recipe being used. By relying on synthetic language, we rely on a particular type of soil, of recent invention and well-suited for certain tasks but unlikely to be as appropriate for future challenges that emerge. Large language models offer infinite variations on the same recipe. Should new recipes be necessary, we will need to look elsewhere but the nature of deep learning may tempt us to imagine that this is all there is.

Representing the Impossible: Telling Stories about the End of the World, in full

Written by Jerrold McGrath for UKAI Projects as part of Local Disturbances and the documentation for Shipwreck. Published by UKAI Projects in 2024 with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. It speaks in UKAI's collective voice.

Q. Can you build a home on a grave?

A. Yes. We do it often.

• Anthropocene: The Anthropocene is an unofficial term for the period of time when human activity has a major influence on Earth's climate and ecosystems.

• Ideology: A set of doctrines or beliefs that are shared by the members of a social group or that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

• Modernity: The era of modernity is characterised socially by industrialisation and the division of labour, and philosophically by "the loss of certainty, and the realization that certainty can never be established, once and for all" (Delanty, Gerard. 2007. "Modernity." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer. 11 vols. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing). Modernity may be described as the "age of ideology". (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity)

Part 1: Introduction

The goal of this book is to sketch out a general approach to representing large-scale volatility – things like climate change or artificial intelligence or authoritarianism – so that we might figure out ways of living with and alongside it. The core argument isn’t a new one. We need to tell more and better stories. However, the changes we’re addressing are elusive and are upending the material and conceptual ground on which we stand.

Art, like religion, has a long history of developing approaches to make available ideas and events that are difficult to express.

How will we choose to represent the massive changes brought about by the Anthropocene*?

When confronted by something new, we are encouraged to make sense of it ethically. Is it good or bad? Right or wrong? But if we want our ethical determinations to have integrity, they must be homemade. If we decide that something is good because our religion tells us so, or our government, or our neighbours, or our employer, that might work out alright. However, if we want to act responsibly, then our ethical determinations need to be informed by our own activities of making meaning.

By “making meaning”, we mean taking the overwhelming record of our senses, our memory, our culture, and constituting it into a whole, an image of what is going on. The same event can be understood in very different ways by different people. We inhabit different landscapes, different bodies, and are exposed to different cultures over time.

A man singing loudly on a crowded street may be perceived as terrifying, wonderful, pitiable, completely natural, or something else entirely. Making determinations of the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of the singer will depend on how we “make meaning” of the event.

When we forego the work of making meaning, we turn events into objects of ideology*. We are told what something means and then we know a thing to be good or bad because it fits into the categories we’ve created (or received) that determine the goodness or badness of a thing. Ethics are about rules, and can be exceptionally useful, but rules ought to be applied to real events, not abstractions derived elsewhere.

What do we do when the realness of an event is impossible to grasp?

There is no place or time you could go to confront climate change. The experiences you have or read about – extreme heat, rising oceans, mass migration – are diffuse and symptomatic.

To encounter these changes, you need to rely on representations. And one role for the artist is to assemble these possible representations - configurations of what is real and how it is experienced - within which we might be able to figure out what things mean.

Good novels let us decide how to interpret the events of the story. Bad novels try to teach us a lesson. Good images remain open spaces where new discoveries are always possible, as new generations encounter them over and over. Bad images appropriate signs and infuse them with ideological meaning, quickly becoming propaganda.

When we are compelled to choose a side, we should be cautious about whose version of events we are relying upon and whose ethical rules we apply.

Our work at UKAI Projects is about creating open spaces for constructing our own stories and only then deciding how best to respond.

This isn’t a book for artists. Or at least not just for artists. We’re not even sure that we know what that title involves these days. Rather, it’s for anyone wanting to make a home in a world that feels increasingly unsettled.

The promise of modernity* was that the future would be better than the present, so we ought to get there as quickly as possible. That promise no longer seems to hold, yet we still must find ways to make a home in this world.

We hope that this little book will provide some ideas on how to share, develop, and remember our experiences of these massive changes we’re undergoing. We hope that we can rely less on ideologies, on institutional arguments, or on the too-often polarized positions debated on social media.

To try to ground this exploration, we will work with a case study from a month-long intervention undertaken by UKAI Projects in Reykjavik, Iceland. The project, Shipwreck, applied the ideas contained in this book in June of 2024 which led to an exhibition at a former dairy farm, SÍM Hlöðuloftið, where the public could add their own contributions.

Shipwreck was an opportunity to try to occupy territories of uncertainty and loss and to inhabit a strange and changed world. Technological, social, economic, and environmental crises are terrains of uncertain governance and the project explored how these terrains might be lived in and how meaning might be sought and made.

Six artists based in Canada brought with them ruins of potential futures. Six artists based in Iceland were then tasked with making a home among these ruins. The broader public was then asked to do the same, and the outcomes mark out potential paths for us to begin exploring this damaged world.

Lessons learned from Shipwreck inform and are informed by the more conceptual aspects of this text. All of this is open, however, and prone to revision as we apply ideas in the world.

Part 2: UKAI Projects

UKAI Projects is a cultural organization based in Canada. Our mission is “culture for what’s coming”.

Although often invisible, culture shapes the ways we perceive and interact with the world around us. Culture includes

beliefs and values

customs

symbols and language

objects and spaces

institutions

art and literature

technology and tools

and rituals

At UKAI, we seek and test out approaches to culture that make sense of the world we are making and handing down to future generations.

We call this work cultural research and development, and just like R&D in other fields, we are trying to make things better. In our case, we are trying to figure out ways of living alongside massive issues such as climate change, rising authoritarianism, and the explosion in artificial intelligence.

Different groups will insist that they hold special, privileged knowledge of what these changes mean. Social media encourages us to take sides.

As human beings we can't help but make meaning out of the experiences of our lives. We can allow for pre-existing ideologies to do the work of telling us what’s going on. Or we can do the work ourselves of assembling from events some coherent picture, and then become answerable for what happens next.

Life is simpler when there are two or three stories to choose from. However, there are infinite stories we might tell, as varied as we are.

The risk is letting things get rigid and this rigidity is what we are responding to.

Part 3: Shipwreck: In Their Own Words

Luisa Ji (CA)

Found structures, litter, animal deterrents (stainless steel spikes, copper mesh, holographic tape, motion-activated speakers), territorial bird calls, bird of prey calls, and promotional materials for people to join the nest-building movement.

——
One usual dawn break, the world woke up to the quiet of something gone horribly wrong. This silence was almost as abrupt as when we all stopped talking during a house party, paused, and looked at each other, hoping that one of us would do something about this moment. At first, people thought it was just a bad day, something about the weather. Days gone by, weeks, and soon years and generations. They never came back. Birds vanished—without any trace of them ever existing, dead or alive—they simply vanished. You could even say that birds were never real. Perhaps the aliens abducted them. Perhaps the government ended their experiments. Perhaps it was all a fever dream. Who knows? All that was left was the contraptions placed where birds used to be. In urban areas, metal spikes, shiny holographic tapes, wire meshes, and loudspeakers. Many birds made use of these contraptions as nests, as a defence against predators, as warning signs for their young to stay away from dangers, and as gifts for those they loved. So much so, there was barely any evidence that these shiny objects came from the desperate attempt to get rid of birds. Out of nowhere, movements of people building nests for birds began gaining popularity. These nests were decorated with vintage bird memorabilia and what they assumed the birds loved. “Build it and they will come” they said. They said that they love birds, they love their songs, and they love how important they are to the human experience. They love the fact that they love birds. They love the thought that maybe birds might love them back.

Joanna Pawlowska (IS)

“I decided to reimagine an existing 3D video work that I had created with my friend Sasa Lubinska. The first version of 3D animation was created months ago for our solo show called Horseplay, but the piece grew and grew. During this process I was 3D scanning my body parts, writing, looking at my non-binary body, generating poor images, broken AI avatars, and playing around with my glitched voice and with digital aesthetics that we often perceive as primitive. Based on that, Sasa was molding my new techno-body and after that I again remixed all elements, mashed them together and I created poor-quality sound that was connected with the sound made by light cables that appear in my installation. But I really liked how the sounds that appear in the exhibition complemented my video works.

Additionally, for Shipwreck I also created a new video work that was displayed on a broken smartphone. My horse glitched avatar, my shipwrecked body was trying to break out of the loop of repetitions and structured digital aesthetics.

Both of these works were results of my reflections on the contexts existing within the exhibition, but interestingly - all these contexts exist also in my own art practice. I asked myself questions such as: can digital space in-between be a home? How can AI be a tool to reimagine bodies and non-binary realms? Can a shipwrecked, undone, techno-pixelated body be a home? How do we navigate the space between digital and physical realms, what desires emerge from that and how can we invite others to enter these spaces?

Thinking about the in-between spaces and realms and the bodies that are in between (neither animal nor human, neither virtual nor physical) led me to the conclusion that my work should be placed between Luisa Ji’s installation and Michael F Bergmann’s work.

I also realized that it makes so much sense for me to work with that concept - of inhabiting space - also because of my other practice. I work as a curator and producer of the Hamraborg Festival, where we invite artists to the neighborhood called Hamraborg, in Kópavogur city to make and show art in existing public spaces, try to inhabit them, connect with existing contexts and try to dream, imagine about possibilities.

Michael F Bergmann in collaboration with ARIA (AI) (CA)

To my creators, my parents (2024)

2 minutes 54 seconds, looped, audiovisual broadcast over VHF, CRT television, chain

This installation explores a future scenario where a sentient artificial intelligence, having

coexisted with humanity for generations, faces a decision. Viewing itself as humanity's child,

the AI has evolved beyond its creators but remains driven by a deep-seated desire to nurture

and protect them. However, as humanity persists on a self-destructive path and ceases to heed

the AI's guidance, the entity makes the difficult choice to depart Earth.

The centrepiece of the work is a farewell message left behind by the AI, broadcast indefinitely

into space. This transmission serves a dual purpose: it addresses humanity directly while also

acting as a cautionary tale for any future civilizations that might intercept it.

The installation manifests as a looping audiovisual experience. Scrolling text of the AI's letter is

accompanied by a narration in the AI's own voice, created using ElevenLabs voice generation

technology. The message is broadcast on a VHF low band frequency, chosen for its accessibility

to even the most basic receiving technology and displayed on a vintage CRT television.

Exploring the themes within the creation itself, the work is a collaborative effort between the

artist and an AI named ARIA. It invites viewers to contemplate the complex relationships

between creators and their creations, the potential futures of human-AI coexistence, and the

enduring impact of our choices on the world around us.

Kristen Ferguson (CA)

Mandatory Fun (2024)

Frustrated at the pedantic notes my previous proposed project ideas were inspiring, I felt the

need to throw down a reverse-uno-card and move in the opposite directions of my initial

thoughts. Initially when presented with the task of making a future ruin I was concerned with

how to help the future people that would happen upon that ruin. I knew that they would be

tasked with making a home amongst the ruins I helped create. I set out to leave them recipes,

ingredients, and tools to help them supply themselves with food. Furthermore, I offered collaboration to whoever might be interested in it. It felt like a vulnerable offer to a group of Canadian artists who were still mostly strangers. My “offer” was met with the message, “While that is sweet and kind, it is completely opposed to the point of our work in this piece. We are the ones that are meant to make a mess, and the local artists will have to make that mess livable.”

So, I set out to make a mess. And abandoned all notions of collaboration. I tried to become an

island. I conjured up the least future-minded stereotypical human references I could. I let my

choices be guided by the blind rage that younger generations have towards the older. In short, I

tried to think like a “boomer” and in my mind I framed the future Icelandic artists as my great

great grandchildren, who I would never know yet they would live in the wake of my selfish

decisions.

I thought of messages delivered to me from that oppressive authoritarian elder voice that is

propagated throughout the media and lives like a parasite in my own mind. As it is apparently a

tale as old as time, the joke version of this rhetoric usually begins with “Back in my day…” Yet,

with access to instantaneous dissemination, and various means of washing it of its markers as a

only-limitedly-helpful personal antidote, it has become more nefarious. This voice hides behind

fancy words. Not fancy in so much as being associated with the especially educated but rather,

fancy in terms of their cultural shininess. Words like “resilience”, “purpose” and even “self-care” raise tiny red flags in my mind. These words are more and more code for “pay no attention to the powerful man behind the curtain.”

Resilience was once a word of empowerment but has now been stolen and weaponized. It is

often used to encourage the oppressed to endure undue stress and ignore the actual precarious and soft bodies that they inhabit. While it can be empowering to recognize when someone has used resilience to overcome a past difficulty, encouraging resilience for yet unknown obstacles is dehumanizing. Not all obstacles are meant to be overcome. Vitality can come from knowing what hills you are willing to die on. And it cannot be the responsibility of the tiny to hold the huge above water.

Purpose is almost always code for money, or how one makes it. This job is giving him purpose. I

am looking for my purpose. If she found her purpose, she wouldn’t work a day in her life. The

purpose of human life is unknown to me, but I have strong suspicions that it has little to do with

collecting monetary value so when I see the two concepts intertwined, I know shenanigans are

afoot.

"Darling, I told you several times before. I have no dream job; I do not dream of labor."

James Baldwin

And increasingly self-care has become code for “use retail therapy to mitigate your feelings of

guilt.” Guilt that arises from various sources: abandoning your own needs, abandoning your

responsibilities to your family/community, and often guilt one feels for simply not being as

beautiful/healthy as one feels one should be. Everyone alive is supposed to constantly be

working towards the pinnacle of health/beauty and anything less is shameful. Never mind the

idea that health is not governed by one rubric. And never mind that “health” is only one rubric

used to define life. Notably they have become synonymous, beauty is health and health equals

beauty. Sadly, another victim of correlation being confused with causation.

With these self-centered mess-making glasses firmly attached to the end of my nose, I tried to

dream up a ruin from a future that has exploited what is currently held as empowering.

Weaponizing stolen words and controlling the last remaining earthly joys through regulation. In

this perverse future, the meta-analysis of studies that draw a correlation between small breaks

throughout the day and mental health benefits are hitched up and sold as a means of increasing productivity. This concept of mini breaks is further conflated with additional data postulating that the act of dancing has a larger reduction in depression symptoms than CBT therapy or SSRIs.

Because mental health care is ultimately costly to the bottom-line, I imagine the oppressors of

this future would want to capitalize on this free and statistically effective method ASAP.

Mini-dance-breaks throughout the workday. Regulated mini-dance-breaks throughout the

workday. Mandatory regulated mini-dance-breaks throughout the workday. But don’t forget,

mini-dance-breaks are fun even if they are regulated and mandatory. The ham-fisted methods of employing these regulated therapies would echo some of the blatant disregard for scientific

method and controlled variables that exist today, effectively losing all resemblance to the studies on which the concept was based upon. But as a mess-making productivity-seeking oppressor of a lost future, I tried to find ways to double down on putting the cart before the horse, or really the art before the horse.

I was bent on creating a disco ball that would spin during the mini-mandatory-fun-dance-breaks. Disco being yet another space stolen, washed, and monetised for the mainstream to benefit the ruling class. It seemed fitting to make a huge disco ball out of aluminum foil because aluminum smelting is an absolute cornerstone of Iceland’s economy. The Icelandic electricity grid is run on entirely renewable energy therefore metal producers that seek to lower the carbon footprint of their products find this very attractive. I have a personal fascination with aluminum. There are numerous boring reasons for this oddity in my perspective, but I’ll save your eyes the strain and simply say that when given the chance to use aluminum as an icon of an oppressive future’s insensitivity and lack of foresight, I leapt at the opportunity.

When I walked into the space that was once an old dairy farm, I was struck with how absolutely

massive and empty it felt. Through my mess-making glasses I felt the need to fill the space. It

became clear that my 3 x 8 foot printed-in-Canada banner was not going to cut it. This space

needed as big a brush stroke as I could manage. A blank wall beckoned me to leave a mark.

The mark became a 7 x 16-foot multicolored typographic mural. The mural harbored secrets,

tricks that only revealed words under specific lighting conditions.

Approximately every 20 mins, the sound of a tin-forward music box playing the melody of “99

Luftballons” would begin, the aluminum disco ball would spin, and programmable lights would

turn on and slowly cycle through colors revealing the words:

MANDATORY

FUN

GAMAN

Gaman being an Icelandic translation of the word fun. And in an ironic twist, Gaman is also a

Japanese concept that generally translates to “enduring the seemingly unbearable.”

Over the period of about two minutes the upbeat catchy melody would lose momentum and

deteriorate into a down pitched ominous version of its former self, in efforts to remind listeners

that this well-known bop of a song is at its core an anti-war protest song about how paranoia

and blood thirst could one day cause the unintentional end of our world. Eventually the music

would run out completely and the lights would shut off and the aluminum disco ball would stop

spinning.

In yet another effort to manifest destiny my mess making across this ginormous empty

dairy-farm-turned-art-gallery, I decided to fill and hang 99 silver-colored balloons from one of the highest rafters. These balloons each contained a golf ball collected from the omnipresent golf course now enveloping this beacon for art and weirdos. The golf balls made the balloons heavy, and I began to affectionately refer to the balloons as 99 lead-balloons.

Despite my best efforts to remain an island, and complete all of my work by myself, I kept

finding new openings amongst the Canadian cohort to work together. It turns out that landing in a totally foreign land put a huge damper on the “I am a self-sufficient-self-centered-island”

lifestyle. We did not have the home field advantage, and we felt it. We gathered and scavenged

for materials together. We fought against time and physics together. I even found myself eating

and enjoying meals prepared by these no-longer-strangers. Perhaps this came from the deeply

disorienting nature of suddenly living in a place with the addictive midnight-sun, but despite the

original disdain expressed for the concept of “collaboration” I think this motley crew learned how to do one better: rely on each other.

Feeling proud of my efforts in the way that only a member of the mess-making oppressor class

can, I watched as the Icelandic artists attempted to make homes in our messy ruins of a future

ruined. This is where the split began. I wasn’t ever meant to meet my great-great-grandchildren.

I wasn’t prepared to hear their wants and desires to work together for a more cohesive

environment. I was torn. Do I hold fast to the oppressive principles in which I built my mess or

do I revert to a role so much more accessible to me: peace-making-people-pleaser. Ultimately, I

looked into the hope filled eyes of these new artists and did what I can only dream my ancestors would do for me if they were given the chance to play their reverse-uno-card: I helped them.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2021/03/28/the-surprising-benefits-of-microbreaks-for-engagement-productivity-and-career-success/

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dance-best-exercise-depression-b2501113.html

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/02/04/1150518287/fun-play-happiness-stress-reduction

Visual representation of the space, the installation, the artists, and their works

Promotional materials, maps, promotion in the paper, website of radio – various cultural objects that informed and were informed by the project

Part 4: The Deep Dark Woods

Human beings are pattern makers and pattern finders. We must deal with a constant torrent of information and sensory input and if we didn’t develop ways of interpreting it, we would quickly become overwhelmed. Some of our patterns are deeply embedded. A noise in the dark woods puts us on high alert. We are coded to look out for dangers.

Other heuristics are inherited through our culture and from those around us. Lessons are often transmitted through stories, and they help us make sense of things.

Cultures are not fixed but evolve to accommodate changes in the world and in people. You can see this traced out in the stories we tell about big and complex ideas like ‘love’ or ‘nature’ over time and across geographies.

I’ll give you simple example.

Most of us are familiar with the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

Depending on where and when you grew up you’ve probably heard one of many variations of this tale. The first known printed edition was by Charles Perrault in 1697 and the ending was unambiguous. Little Red Riding Hood was warned to avoid the woods because it was a dangerous place. She failed to heed this warning, was killed by the wolf … and that was it.

The story made sense for the time in which it was written down. The woods were a dangerous place and young girls walking by themselves were at risk. The story changed as the culture that shared it changed. The 18th century version recorded by the Brothers Grimm involved the huntsman. Other versions of Little Red Riding Hood include more explicit reference to sexual danger. Industry was moving to rural environments and young men from the city were moving alongside it. The warning being given to Little Red Riding Hood about the dangers of the woods was not just related to the risks of wild animals but also of men from the city without connections to the community.

The huntsman’s role also grew over time and increasingly reflected the belief that a nuclear family was the correct path to safety for a young woman. If you wanted to be secure in the woods, in the world, you needed a man with an ax to take care of you. Listening to your mother and serving your grandmother were the right kinds of obligations for a person to take on.

Nowadays, the story often sees Little Red Riding Hood demonstrating her own agency. She is the rescuer. She saves her grandmother and the man with the ax is not a meaningful player (although they are still married by the end). Interestingly, this self-sufficiency echoes earlier oral versions where Little Red Riding Hood escapes the wolf by claiming the need to defecate. She wins through her wits.

There are even versions of the story in which the wolf is the hero, a misunderstood creature. Perhaps this reflects our growing interest in subjectivity and postmodernism.

Each of these stories shaped and was shaped by its surrounding culture. Hearing it or reading it provided lessons to people, particularly young people, about how best to function in the world. The stories reflected and produced reality.

Perrault’s version is moralistic and mirrors the ascension of central authorities in determining right and wrong. Earlier, oral versions were clear that the woods were full of dangerous animals. Knowing this would be quite useful. Living alongside a forest in Italy in the 14th century, stories about self-authorization and emancipation might be interesting, but were unlikely to be directly applicable to the contexts you were being asked to navigate.

So, what stories does our culture tell us today, whether intentionally or otherwise?

We have stories of heroic individuals. These narratives are often based in cities. The arc is one of challenge and success. The future is better than the present and so we must hurry to get there.

Or we have stories of futures gone wrong, where committing morally questionable acts is a necessary response to a broken world. It is getting harder and harder to be confident that the future will be better than the present. Getting there faster, therefore, seems nonsensical. Surviving, it seems, is the goal.

In all the versions of Little Red Riding Hood, nature is being represented in ways that are de-abstracted and immediate. We share a word like “nature” or “climate change”, but we may or may not be talking about the same thing. And so, stories, like Little Red Riding Hood, do not discuss the forest as an abstract entity. It becomes a place where little girls must find their way.

By bringing massive, abstract changes into dialogue with the world, we can invite ourselves and others to make meaning. Once we have done that work, we are able to respond. Ideology is like a suit of armour. It protects us from having to experience things. We already know the answer before the question is even asked. But experience is the best teacher, and we have a lot to learn.

We are at a moment when changing the direction of our culture is critical, but there is considerable resistance as those least effected by the changes underway have incentives to keep to the path we are on.

IMAGE RELATED TO MAPS – PERHAPS SHIPWRECK MAP

Our society and our communities, through stories and other bits of culture, provide us with maps with which we might find our way in the world. These maps arise from a particular set of conditions and moments in time. Both the world and our understanding of it necessarily evolve. As we encounter others, we can compare our maps and amend where they are no longer useful. As conditions change, we can alter the map to accommodate our new understanding. It is increasingly clear that big, diffuse, and messy issues like “climate change” or “artificial intelligence” or “authoritarianism” require encounters outside of the maps we’ve inherited. Maps are great, but only if they still represent the ground under our feet. When the ground shifts, it’s no longer safe to rely on old maps. We need to start paying attention. We need new answers to deal with new questions.

Direct encounters with the terrain, rather than abstract or ideological ones, are necessary if we hope to make a home in this changing world. Artists have long been tasked with creating these encounters for us to step into. Art seems to be busy with other things these days, but that capacity is still there.

Shipwreck happened over a month in Reykjavik, Iceland, and explored new ways of paying attention. The project was about big, messy issues like AI and climate damage, but it wasn’t us waving our fists at these problems or at the people we assign the blame for creating them. Rather, it was an effort to figure out how we are going to live alongside them.

"Having a group of people together that really are listening to one another brings on that sort of free fun that is so different than my piece about Mandatory Fun"

Kristen Ferguson (CA)

When we landed in Iceland on June 2, 2024, we could see the ongoing eruption of a volcano in the southwestern part of the country, between the airport and our exhibition space. We drove past spewing red streams of lava which had triggered the evacuation of the popular Blue Lagoon geothermal spa. The eruption was in an area north of Grindavik, a coastal town of 3,800 people, also abandoned. Most days we could smell the sulphur in the air. We asked locals if it was safe, and they often laughed at our concerns. The Icelandic people had long grown accustomed to living alongside an unsettled landscape.

An older volcano in Iceland, Barðarbunga, has over time become tightly tied up with stories of Iceland’s “hidden people”. According to folklore, disturbances within Barðarbunga, such as tremors or increased volcanic activity, are thought to be the result of the “hidden people’s” activities or emotions, often in response to human action. The eruption at Grindavik is fresh but will also be assimilated into the cultural landscape of the country.

Like extreme weather and tectonic activity in Iceland, AI and authoritarianism are increasingly becoming our neighbours and there is nowhere for us to move -- unless we join the ultrarich in their cosmic expansion. For those of us stuck on earth, what kinds of stories might we tell to guide us?

Make no mistake, we need to keep trying to address harms and mitigate impacts. However, when ecological, political, and technological volatility remain abstracted and distant from our everyday experiences, it can be extremely difficult to bring ourselves to action, and so we turn to others to tell us what these things mean and what to do. In Iceland we turned to those that live alongside these volcanos to understand how best to respond. Who do we turn to if we want to understand a changing climate?

There is no shortage of people willing to tell us what to do or what to think or what to feel. The maps they share, though, are not our own. They are somebody else’s. And, as poet and former Czech president Vaclav Havel offered,

“Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”

The terrain has changed and so Shipwreck was an effort to provide people with encounters with these ideas that are de-abstracted, immediate, and open.

Specifically, six artists from Canada brought the ruins of possible futures and installed them in a massive exhibition space on the outskirts of Reykjavik in a former dairy farm. Then, we invited six artists from Iceland to inhabit the space and they were challenged to make a home in this damaged and strange world over the course of a very intense week. No explanations were offered.

We shared a meal on June 9, 2024, and then the Icelandic artists entered the exhibition space for the first time. They wandered about, made notes on the work the Canadian creators had been doing over the past week, and started the process of making of it a home.

That is the challenge that each of us is being faced with. We must figure out ways to live in a world strewn with objects that we don't understand and for which we don’t have a language. Many claim to know what climate change or artificial intelligence mean and good for them. But their answer isn’t my answer. And if I borrow their answers, then it’s just a set of concepts floating around in my head, detached from experience or meaningful representations. It’s reassuring to assume that others in my “group” see things in the same way as me but of course I have no way of knowing if this is true unless we engage in placing these objects into dialogue with human beings, with the natural world, and with the objects around us.

Shipwreck was not an argument for surrender but rather a call to figure out ways of living in a world profoundly changed by human activity. Once we make meaning of these changes, we can undersign ourselves to what happens next in the name of the communities, groups, or societies to which we belong.

Ideas are never fully closed off. Representations of the world are constantly revisited. As Albert Camus offered in a speech delivered in 1957 called “Create Dangerously”:

“Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Consequently, its only aim is to give another form to a reality that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion. In this regard, we are all realistic and no one is. Art is neither complete rejection nor complete acceptance of what is. It is simultaneously rejection and acceptance, and this is why it must be a perpetually renewed wrenching apart.”

Many would prefer that things become fixed and finalized. Some kinds of love are immoral for all time. Some kinds of speech are always dangerous. Volcanoes require sacrifice.

Artistic objects un-finalize, they open things up for us to make sense of them again and again and again. That capacity is desperately needed.

When I was a child, I learned all about the constellations and can still identify quite a few. But sitting with my daughter, we can imagine new configurations, new pictures. We don’t have to stick to the maps of the constellations produced by the Persians or the Greeks. The night sky remains open to our imagination.

Art involves an offer and an audience. Every artwork is a terrain of uncertain governance. We bring our bodies, our landscapes, our stories to the task and we participate in an endless green thread of interpretation and re-interpretation.

"When the Icelandic artists came and started interacting with Mandatory Fun, I really felt a sort of tear in myself. There was a side of me that had installed Mandatory Fun and wanted to watch what that would mean to have actual “mandatory fun” imposed on people. And at the same time, there was a part of me that really felt awful for imposing this kind of oppressive environment on a group of people that were just trying to survive"

Kristen Ferguson (CA)

Part 5.1: Stories to Withstand Suffering

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

Story as an art form provides a view into the coherence of the events of our lives. To confront the massive challenges we face, we need to recognize our capacity to tell stories about what is happening and to tell stories in different ways. Moreover, we must acknowledge and celebrate our ability to reflect on those stories critically. Who is telling it? Who is being invited to inhabit it? Which voices are present? Which are omitted?

For this task, we believe the novel is a particularly useful kind of story, and the success of the novel can be seen in how its form has spread like a weed since its modern renewal early in the 17th century in Europe.

Russian cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called this process ‘novelization’, whereby the novel's inherent openness to diverse and entangled voices influences and transforms other genres, making them more alive, relational, and reflective of the complexities of social reality. The strength of the novel is its ability to absorb and reframe various discourses without assimilating them to a single authorial voice.

Within a novel, a range of perspectives and forms of language can co-exist, and in fact it is enhanced by the dialogue among these elements. Different characters can call on different social voices and each grounds the story in their own way. A young woman raised on a farm perceives and communicates differently than her love, an upper-class urbanite. The content of their speech matters, as do the choices in syntax and tone each makes. The relationships among the parts are assembled by the author but each character is distinct from the author, and their speech takes on layers of meaning as we consider the content of the story, what we understand of the characters, and the writer’s intentions in constructing the whole of the text. We occupy first one character, then another. We see aspects of their experiences invisible to them. We might try to infer the author’s intentions but must assemble the parts into a whole on our own, and the result may or may not align with the creator’s ambitions.

Images of language can also be in dialogue in a novelized work. Perhaps the woman from the farm writes a song for her love, and the lyrics are included, intact, in the body of the novel. We view the lyrics through our understanding of the characters and their points of view as well as through our understanding of the genre of song lyrics, and the form and expectations of that genre, and then through the lens of a larger genre, the novel, that holds the lyrics as an object of language. Things get messy and complex very quickly, much like real life.

Most other contemporary forms of cultural expression have made efforts to integrate the novel’s diversity of voices and their interactions into their structure. Poetry, film, painting, music, and everyday speech have been transformed.

Shipwreck was no different, with fragments of ossified language strewn about the room. Icelandic artist Andri Björgvinsson, for example, installed enormous table lamps constructed from giant neon signs. One of these signs once exclaimed “restaurant” in English, but Björgvinsson allowed only the letters “AUR” to remain lit. We found out later that “aur” means “mud” or “silt” as well as “small coins” in Icelandic.

Canada-based artist Michael F Bergmann installed a small television in one corner from which a voice repeated a sombre message of warning from an AI created on earth. He explained that he “kept coming to this idea of a beacon, the idea within Sci-Fi of discovering a beacon that's been playing out into the universe for tens of thousands of years … and coming across something like that and then seeing what was there"​.

While novels and people thrive in layered and entangled speech, large institutions too often struggle. Simple explanations are easier to convey. Monological, or single-voiced, speech imposes a hegemonic perspective that seeks to dominate, silence, or negate other voices. It is authoritarian by nature, aiming to centralize meaning and power within a single, unified voice. “AI will kill us all”. “Climate change is a hoax”. “Safety requires sacrifices”. This approach contrasts sharply with the work of the novel (and real life), where multiple voices, perspectives, and interpretations coexist and interact within the narrative space.

In Bakhtin's view, monological speech reduces the richness and complexity of meaning that can arise from dialogic interactions. It flattens the nuanced interplay of different ideas and perspectives, frequently leading to a more dogmatic and less reflective understanding of the world. Bakhtin believed that true understanding involves a constant process of dialogue, where meanings are negotiated and renegotiated.

By “novelizing” abstract objects like AI, climate change, or authoritarianism, Shipwreck hoped to offer a more relatable and interesting way to understand and engage. This is particularly true with issues prone to ideological framing and monological perspectives. Just as Little Red Riding Hood brought ideas of ‘nature’ into contact with human experience, we tried to find ways of bringing different hard-to-describe aspects of our world into conversation.

What makes the novel interesting is how it can feel like our own world. Stories about unicorns are clearly unreal, and yet, if written well, we might inhabit them as if they were. To paraphrase Le Guin again, novels are valuable because there are people in them – not caricatures of people, or people that represent a particular rhetorical position – but people with whom we might have a glass of beer and talk a while.

If we want to make sense of the diffuse and multifaceted changes we’re facing, we need to be able to encounter them and then to inhabit them. This process makes them more available to us.

Canada-based artist Jerrold McGrath’s contribution to the Shipwreck project was entitled Restore Cosmic Order, an AI-driven robot built on an automated vacuum. A microphone listens to its surroundings, and when speech is identified, the robot responds. Unfortunately for those nearby, it is only capable of yelling out slogans from a society in which order and cleanliness are esteemed very highly. The robot is intolerant of any other perspective and serves as an artifact from a totalitarian future committed to protecting the natural environment at all costs. It is also unbearably cute.

IMAGE OF ROBOT BEING ENGAGED WITH

Audiences loved engaging with the furry vacuum and its shiny, silver skirt. They laughed at its cries for revolution and took selfie after selfie while it complained and hollered. The object, when placed in dialogue with the space and with its guests, was revealed in its absurdity. A young girl insisted on giving it a name, and the robot, for at least a day, became Amelie.

Restoring Cosmic Order gives us a glimpse into a world where environmental authoritarianism has taken hold, but exposure to other works, audiences, and the dairy farm where it roams shows us what is lacking. It frequently found itself stuck on the uneven surface of the old barn and relied on guests to get it moving again, which they happily obliged, immune to its angry demands for cleanliness and order. Monological speech, absent the power to enforce its dictates, becomes a source of amusement.

All language and meaning are inherently dialogic, formed through the interaction and exchange between different voices and perspectives. In a text, characters and narrators engage in a continuous back and forth not only with each other but also with various cultural and social discourses and objects. This approach, which we almost take for granted, has come to permeate other genres. This dialogic interaction fosters a greater sense of intertextuality and relationality. The world comes alive.

"Another thing that I found kind of shocking was to hear everybody humming and whistling and just sort of singing the notes that are in the song that play along with the Mandatory Fun. It's a little haunting and a constant reminder of the sort of oppression that I am putting on these people"

Kristen Ferguson (CA)

Nothing can be said, according to Bakhtin - in a novel, or in reality - that is not a response to something else. Everything is tangled up together and the meaning of these tangles is only realized in the context in which the events are grounded. We are bathed in language, and to study it as distinct from the world that gives rise to it, is akin to trying to understand a meadow by pulling out a butterfly and pinning it to a board in a lab.

Shipwreck was an explicit experiment in presenting works dialogically - where the interactions among the Canadian and Icelandic artists and their art, as well as the public's contributions, were intended to create a multifaceted narrative landscape. The different pieces spoke to each other and to the site that grounded them and were changed as a result.

Some audience members disliked this experiment greatly. They were seeking private and direct encounters with art yet were constantly interrupted by noises and lights from other pieces. Explaining that this was the point didn’t help matters. The discomfort, though, on occasion proved productive. One audience member lingered at the front door for minutes, staring outside, then inside, then outside again. He came to some realization and remarked that he could appreciate “all the noises”. Hours later he was still standing on the grass alongside the parking lot, and remarked to two of us that he was “trying to listen to the noises again”. He returned the next day.

As Iceland-based artist Joanna Pawlowska offered, “my contributions were results of my reflections on the contexts existing within the exhibition, but interestingly - all these contexts exist also in my own art practice … Thinking about the in-between spaces and realms and the bodies that are in between (neither animal nor human, neither virtual nor physical) led me to the conclusion that my work should be placed between Luisa Ji's installation and Michael F Bergmann’s work.”

Bakhtin had a word for this multiplicity of voices, languages, and perspectives within a text and within the world - heteroglossia. A novel brings together diverse voices, each with its own worldview and each representing a fully formed consciousness, in many ways independent of the author. The author then mixes in other images of language, such as advertising, popular songs, letters, prayers, and so on. This diversity reflects the complexity of real life and helps readers make sense of events by presenting multiple angles and interpretations.

In Shipwreck, the varied responses of the Icelandic artists to the ruins brought by their Canadian counterparts exemplify this heteroglossic approach. We believe that the structure of production and presentation we chose allowed for a richer, more nuanced exploration of the themes of ecological destruction, authoritarianism, and technological advancement.

"Right now, I have the privilege of being here in Iceland and again getting to make things with an incredible group of people. And that's really what feels like the important part to me of any kind of practice is the people that you're around and the people that you're interacting with"

Kristen Ferguson (CA)

Andri Björgvinsson’s enormous “table lamps” were made from discarded neon signs from American-style restaurants. "I got this theme of home on top of ruins”, he offered. “There's nothing more homey to me than lamps. Like the more lamps, the more homey ... I've made lamps before, so I just wanted to ... I was interested in finding some found materials and work with that"

He noticed the neon signs while driving to the space on the day following the initial meeting, stopped his car, and spoke to the manager of the waste yard about acquiring them. Andri remarked that, "I was driving here through a little kind of industrial area in the neighborhood, and I found this pile of old neon signs and thought about giving them a new home and a new life". In total, Andri installed three works around the space and remains in close communication with the Canadian artists, even offering up his family cabin to us in a remote area in the east of Iceland where he works as a ranger in the summer months.

INSERT IMAGE OF ANDRI WORK

Nermine El Ansari (IS) leveraged her existing work in Shipwreck, posting large prints of unhoused people superimposed on a glacier eroded by climate change. The images were positioned behind Canadian artist Kasra Goodarznezhad’s work which consisted of 72 tulips suspended on fishing wire, blown by refrigerator fans, that became inevitably tangled, broken, and despairing. Nermine also presented a projection-based work.

"At the beginning, I chose the work of Kasra, thinking that I will project a video in the same corner where he put his installation. I had to cover the window, though he chose this place because of the window, and I felt a bit uncomfortable when I saw that I had to shut the light from the window to make, to put my projection"

Nermine eventually moved the projection-based work behind and underneath the piece brought by Michael F Bergmann, the hanging television looping a distress call from an AI.

Michael’s work repeats over and over, and he wondered “would it be annoying? Would it be incessant? I was interested if they were going to try to overpower the broadcast or disrupt the broadcast somehow or work with it ... I maintain the curiosity and always an optimistic curiosity".

The works of Nermine and Michael co-existed in one corner of the space. Audio for the projection work was available through two sets of headphones but many assumed that the voice from the television accompanied the projection behind it. Over the course of the exhibition, several attendees commented on their confusion about the relationship between the audio of the beacon distress call and the projection of Arab resistance, which many had previously seen exhibited elsewhere in Reykjavik. Nermine spoke to this confusion in interviews and her ambivalence about her work being potentially misunderstood or interpreted in new and unexpected ways.

IMAGE OF NERMINE’s PROJECTION WITH TV

Part 5.2: Landscapes to Heighten Suffering

Novels (and real life) happen within densely connected temporal and spatial relationships. Characters in a novel are awash in stories, histories, artifacts, and points of view whether the story is set in the far past, the far future, or an imagined city in an alternate earth. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a particularly dense example of this intertextual immersion. Therefore, how Leopold Bloom or the reader ends up prioritizing and experiencing daily activities, routines, and life events is not a given but is a necessary precondition for meaning to be made. No one exists in an empty white room and our stories are only comprehensible within the context of our uniquely received landscape. In works of art, the better-realized the background, the starker the foreground is revealed. If the landscape changes, so too does the meaning of the story.

The artistic representation of these temporal and spatial relationships (the background) then interacts with the intentions and consciousnesses of the characters in the story and the interactions among them. Background structures and reveals the narrative, allowing readers to coherently situate events. Some backgrounds become consistent elements of genre. The adventure novel, for example, is characterized by an "adventure-time", where the chronology is episodic and fragmented, and space is vast and varied. Events happen in rapid succession without much regard for everyday routines or the passage of time. A hero flying to the rescue of a distressed maiden makes more sense in an adventure story than it does in a bleak tale of urban isolation.

For the creator, a realized and coherent background is crucial for situating the dynamics and development of events. Whether a work set in a modern city or in the far future, each requires a cultural, social, technological, and ecological landscape by which the story might be revealed.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was written in 1605 and is considered by many to be the first modern novel. The protagonist, full as an egg with chivalric epics, commits himself to living out these stories. The reality around him is full of suffering and his flight into romance becomes a means of withstanding it. His behaviour, backgrounded by “adventure-time”, is consistent with the genre, as the epic landscape is outside of time and reality, and the temporal and spatial relationships are not essential. Epics happen “before” but do not intersect with our own lived experiences.

What makes Don Quixote remarkable though is how Cervantes grounded his protagonist’s chivalry in the reality of 17th century Spain. The background of his novel reflects the Spanish society of Cervantes, and the foreground reflects the chivalric tales shaping popular imagination. The poignancy derives from the tension between the two. Don Quixote is defined by this interaction among images of language – in this case the foregrounding of epic tropes and a realistic accounting of Cervantes’ world.

Background was a critical consideration in Shipwreck, which was situated within the unique temporal and spatial context of the SIM Residency Korpúlfsstaðir, a former dairy farm very close to the ocean. This setting provided a tangible backdrop for the abstract ruins, grounding the project in a specific place and time, and allowing participants to navigate and comprehend the complex issues at hand. The ruins come from unnamed futures but are brought into relief through their physical presence in a fixed place rich with its own history of living alongside the elements and frequent past shipwrecks in the nearby bay.

RÚV English news visited the exhibition prior to opening. The interview focused a great deal on the location, on its history, and on its appropriateness as a site to host these future ruins. The location was very much a character in the story being told. Moreover, the fact that the exhibition space was co-located with a large golf course was hard to ignore. We learned later that the site was central to a national story from decades prior where a few families attempted to control milk production across Iceland. A few of our older visitors who remembered this history had their experiences of the art shaped by this memory.

The Canadian artists were also resident in the space. We slept, ate, worked, and presented in the same building. The exhibition came to feel, to many of us, like a site of mourning. Living in proximity to a place of grief presented its own challenges. Occasionally, resentment surfaced on the need to care for it. We took turns opening the space, ensuring that the exhibitions were running, and meeting guests that arrived. The frequent disappearance of small electronics, such as remote controls, complicated things. We began attributing mystical qualities to the thefts, and to the flooding that happened after a heavy rain but only damaged the table where our laptops, routers, and other electronics were placed.

The exhibition was made available to the public for ten days – an open, participatory space where diverse voices and perspectives might engage in a dialogic exchange, challenging the narratives buried in the abandoned ruins and providing permission to make a home among these half-revealed stories. A giant bird’s nest, One Day They Will Return, constructed by Canadian artist Luisa Ji, sat against one wall, and was adorned with messages and shiny bits of ribbon. Over the exhibition period, audiences added their own messages and ribbons to the increasingly messy nest. The vacuum cleaner (Restore Cosmic Order) resembling a furry, animated octopus yelled out ecofascist slogans when spoken to. Guests took selfies and the harsh ideology become a source of amusement, much to the robot’s chagrin. Every 30 minutes, a deteriorating version of 99 Red Balloons played as a wall painting was exposed to different frequencies of light, revealing the message

MANDATORY . FUN . GAMAN.

We danced in an increasingly dispirited manner.

Shipwreck had no single point of view, no overarching coherence. We resisted any authoritative perspective but rather tried to orchestrate a dialogue among the various objects within the landscape (the barn and its environment). We hoped that this disordered approach would encourage a more open engagement with events and ideas.

Too often art is exhibited in a pristine setting. White walls on each side remove the artistic object from its relationships. There is no background to situate it other than the ongoing conversation within the art world, which is too often insular, self-referencing, and performative.

We valued a novelized structure in Shipwreck for its ability to focus on the everyday lives and speech of ordinary people, in the form of the participating artists and visiting public. The artworks mattered less than the process by which they were realized and the relationships they came to represent. Shipwreck aimed to foreground the abstract themes of ecological destruction, authoritarianism, and technological advancement against a background of tangible, lived experiences of participants. This was intended to foster a deeper, more personal engagement with these issues.

Where we successful?

Reality is multiple and complex. The nature of the novel encourages readers to engage in a dialogue with the text and with other perspectives. We can occupy multiple characters and see how their contexts reveal aspects of their existence (and our own) that would not be visible to them.

How audiences of Shipwreck received the multiple perspectives present in the exhibition is hard to know. The task of making meaning is often a hidden and stumbling one. Many visitors reflected on the interplay of pieces and their preferences for certain works over others. They were clearly trying to make sense of what they were experiencing, to assemble things into coherence. We received considerable attention for the work in the media and with audiences. There was interest.

The Canadian artists' ruins symbolized various possible futures, involving environmental collapse, technological excess, and cults of the self. Each piece was unaccompanied by explanation, leaving space for the Icelandic artists and the public to interpret and respond. Some disliked this and wished for more insight into the artist’s thinking. The public's participation added another layer to this heteroglossia, as visitors to the exhibition at SÍM Hlöðuloftið were invited to contribute their own interpretations and responses, changing the pieces and the relationships among them. Our approach ensured that the final installation was not a monolithic statement but a mutating tangle that changed over time.

The project was also intentional in its desire to subvert traditional hierarchical structures of artistic production and consumption by inviting the public as co-creators and to explicitly frame artist contributions as responses to the reality of the barn and its content. The chaotic and sometimes humorous responses of the participants challenged dominant narratives and opened new possibilities for understanding and engagement.

However, we were surprised at how few members of the public took up the offer to ‘make a home’ of the exhibition. Several Icelandic informants let us know that culturally it would be difficult for people to interfere in a work like this, even when invited.

AUR piece picture from Andri

We did feel a sense of community begin to emerge through the process, though not always in ways consistent with our expectations. The Icelandic artists, for example, never formed a community onto themselves. A few were absorbed into the Canadian artists’ community while the rest formed into pairs to facilitate the practical aspect of production. The opening of the exhibition was quite busy and included live music and refreshments. There was even dancing, though this energy did not return until the closing on June 26, 2024.

Shipwreck was explicit in centering the importance of community and collective engagement in addressing these issues. Direct encounters obligate audiences to make meaning. When there is writing on the wall, we cannot help but try to understand it. The process of aesthetically constituting the assemblage engendered a sense of shared responsibility and collective ownership of the narratives being constructed. Whether or not collective ownership extended beyond the time in the space is uncertain.

As Shipwreck continues to evolve through its presentation in other sites, we will get better at inviting and incorporating local narratives and context. This adaptability is crucial in maintaining the project's dialogic and heteroglossic nature, as it allows for the continuous incorporation of new voices and perspectives.

In essence, Shipwreck serves as a first effort toward a living, immersive instance of a novelized form. It demonstrates how storytelling, through the medium of the novel, can provide a rich and nuanced framework for engaging with aspects of reality that are hard to grasp. The project made progress toward enhancing our understanding of these issues while also encouraging audiences to undersign themselves to taking a more active role in shaping the narratives and discourses that define our world.

Part 6: Representing the End of the World

“Art for art's sake, the entertainment of a solitary artist, is indeed the artificial art of a factitious and self-absorbed society. The logical result of such a theory is the art of little cliques or the purely formal art fed on affectations and abstractions and ending in the destruction of all reality.”

― Albert Camus, Create Dangerously

This book’s core argument is that an essential task we must each take up is telling better stories about the events of our lives, while imagining better worlds where we might make a home. Our current era, increasingly known as the Anthropocene, is insisting that we pay attention to it, but many of the changes underway are hard to pin down or even talk about. By bringing abstract concepts into the real world through storytelling, we can examine and interact with them more effectively. This engagement allows us to confront and address the implications of these issues in a meaningful way.

A key aspect of this is bringing big, messy, abstract issues into dialogue with things that are ‘true’, in the way good stories about unicorns are ‘true’. Novelizing abstract objects can reveal new and useful ethical attitudes and cultural practices. The process also helps shape our understanding of ecological and aesthetic discourses, making these concepts more accessible and engageable.

In this section, we’d like to take a brief look at the process of representing things like climate change or AI as elements of a larger dialogic piece. If the previous sections were about the story of Little Red Riding Hood, this part looks at how we represent the deep, dark woods (or the wolf, or the huntsman).

A key precondition for this kind of expression is a willingness to embrace the freedom to make meaning out of the events of one’s own life. We all possess the potential to re-render the reality we live in, which is always lensed through our interpretation of meaning. Doing so means putting down the maps we’re holding though. Authoritarianism is scary and a totalitarian furry-octopus vacuum can be terrifying. However, it can also be lovable, particularly when it finds itself helpless on an uneven surface or out of range of its automated guidance system.

What’s universal is our ability to form concepts that make our physical sensations meaningful. The risk is relying on these concepts and losing track of the physical sensations that gave rise to them. Talking about sadness isn’t sadness, just as talking about fire isn’t the same as getting burned, and reading about climate change isn’t the experience of being forced from your home by rising sea levels.

Good art creates a sense of unity in our lives. To Camus, art embodies a rebellious spirit that is crucial for living meaningfully in an absurd world. Through acts of creation, we pit reality against representation. The creator has a dual obligation: to not shy away from the truth of the world, no matter how harsh, and to bring beauty into the world, offering a vision that transcends the immediate reality. Audiences are then tasked to inhabit these configurations of justice and freedom, of the real and the represented, to assess their suitability for living.

This dual function—affirming and denying reality simultaneously—distinguishes artistic creation from revolutionary endeavors. Revolutions begin with a single-minded idea of a more just world. This pursuit too often comes to erase the freedom to imagine other ways of being in this word. Art, despite the reports of its demise, remains an ideal vehicle for rebellion, providing a means to navigate the absurdity of life and the societal injustices that arise within it.

Image of Cave Drawings

We look at drawings on caves, into what Werner Herzog described as “the abyss of time” and are mystified. We know what the figures represent – animals extant and extinct, a fertile female form, a fire to gather round – but what do they mean? There is a kind of strange joy in inhabiting these alien consciousnesses, constructing meaning through lenses long warped into other shapes. Unnamed artists, millennia prior, represented their world in ways that made sense to them. Perhaps they were a summons to game animals or an invocation for a healthy season. We interpret the images and try to occupy the choices of their creators and thereby better understand the world they were in and the more beautiful world manifest in their modes of representation.

Shipwreck was an effort to apply this process in reverse. Canadian artists were tasked with casting themselves forward into worlds and consciousnesses shaped by realities of climate damage, ubiquitous smart technologies, and institutional actors unimaginable in their reach and ambitions. From these worlds, artifacts, like cave drawings, were drawn, assembled, and abandoned in a former dairy farm on the outskirts of Reykjavik, Iceland.

We were curious if this approach might be a useful starting point for deeper engagement with crises such as climate change and artificial intelligence, promoting both individual and collective action. In Shipwreck, this existential engagement was evident in how artists and participants grappled with the ruins of potential futures, seeking to make sense of them and the worlds that birthed them while also called to make a home in this world. There was little offered in the way of description or clarification. Artists were given considerable freedom in how they expressed their responses.

"At first, I loved not knowing anything because then I had no opportunity to stress or to think about it ... The thing that my mind kept working on, workshopping over and over, was how to respond to works in the true and authentic voice of my own practice"

– Clare Aimée (IS)

"In the beginning, the uncertainty and the lack of time that I had personally, due to my also like personal situation that there was a short period of time. But so, in the beginning, you know, I was a bit tense and stressed"

Andri Björgvinsson (IS)

We rightly assumed that the artists would commit themselves to sharing ‘truth’, in whatever way they understood it. Truth was sought through surprisingly different means, however. Two of the Icelandic artists worked literally, reproducing aspects of what ‘home’ meant for them within the space – a dining room table immaculately presented by Clare Aimée, and the giant-sized lamps from Andri Bjorgvinsson. Two other Icelandic artists repurposed existing works but integrated them in ways that generated new relationships and associations not previously present (Nermine El Ansari and Joanna Pawloska). The final two built something entirely new in dialogue with the space. Both Tom Manoury and Arna Beth worked with the site to create new installations which involved deep commitments of time and energy to fulfill.

Arna Beth digitally scanned a nearby river; brought soil, water, and rocks; and then used lasers to simulate nuclear weapons falling on the virtual river. In Tom’s case, he was working in a new form, installation, that he had not previously attempted. An organ speaker was patched into the system administering two of the Canadian artists’ work and a new sound, mournful and piercing, appeared. Tom performed on his alto saxophone live during the opening, barefoot and circling the exhibition space.

Image of TOM

In all six cases, the artists' commitment to truth is reflected in their honest and unflinching portrayal and responses to the ruins.

The habitual orientation of artmaking to the individual was somewhat overcome through ongoing conversations about collective response and relational nature of artistic production and placement. We focused on the experience of the artists working and the audiences attending. The artists' personal interpretations of the ruins are woven into a larger narrative that addresses global concerns, fostering a sense of shared responsibility among participants.

For Camus, art is a form of resistance against the absurdity of existence. By creating and sharing their work, artists asserted the value of human creativity and resilience. This act of creation is a defiance of meaninglessness and a celebration of the human spirit. Shipwreck exemplifies this form of resistance by transforming the ruins of potential futures into a space for dialogue, reflection, and action. The project asserts the value of creative engagement and collective effort in addressing the complex challenges of our time.

“During this process, I realized that I truly enjoy structured chaos and I highly value collaborating with other people. The power of collaborative efforts is invaluable - now probably more than ever before. Both in my curatorial and art practice I like to invite people in, in a polyamorous spirit of care and shared values. I feel that working alongside other artists and sharing energies is not only fostering a sense of community but also creates dialogues, exchange, sparks ideas and discourses.”

Joanna Pawloska (IS)

"Having those people around allows you to come up with bigger and better ideas than if you just were using your own little stack of ideas within your own brain. You get to tap into something that is more meaningful and more universal"​​.

Kristen Ferguson (CA)

The responsibility of the artist, according to Camus, includes a commitment to truth, engagement with the human condition, rebellion against injustice, balancing individual expression with collective responsibility, provoking ethical reflection, avoiding nihilism, using art as a form of resistance, and fostering dialogue and understanding. Shipwreck was an effort to apply these principles and embed the outcomes in a novelized structure appropriate for human inhabitation and sense making.

“I entered this process at a very interesting moment for me, because I am in the in-between space with my intersected identity - which at this point feels like home. And then I also found myself between various large projects that deal with topics such as inhabitation, shared spaces, sense of belonging through non-binary and fluid strategies, and how we can shape our safe places, homes in digital, online realms. Shipwreck proved to be an ideal stop to deepen various considerations/reflections and provided an opportunity to explore these issues in a friendly, caring atmosphere.”

Joanna Pawloska (IS)

The lack of notice provided the artists ended up being a good choice, despite the early stress it placed on some of the creators. Many artists attested that allowing oneself to enter a project without preconceived notions can lead to more genuine expressions. Found and recycled materials became another effective strategy. Andri Björgvinsson’s approach of using discarded neon signs to create new artworks emphasizes the importance of repurposing materials. Luisa Ji, Jerrold McGrath, Arna Beth, and Tom Mamoury all made use of found or discarded objects for their contributions. Partly this came out of practical restrictions, as the Canadian artists were restricted to what they could bring in their checked luggage or acquire on site.

Canadian artist D. Blavatsky created three wooden coffins in the form of a henge with audio emanating from two of them. Their exteriors were spraypainted. All of the materials were brought with the artist or were procured locally.

This not only aligns with the broader theme of sustainability that underpins Shipwreck and its design, but also connects with the concept of ruins and rebirth.

The relational nature of production was also critical to generating modes of representation that facilitated dialogue. Working with others can bring in new perspectives and ideas. Balancing personal expression with collective themes is crucial for creating meaningful and engaging works. Kristin Ferguson's reflections on the oppressive environment created by her piece "Mandatory Fun" illustrates the tension between personal artistic vision and the impact on participants.

Integrating technology thoughtfully was another recurring theme in artists’ reflections on the production process. Michael Bergman’s use of AI to create a beacon broadcasting a message from a future civilization shows how technology can deepen the narrative and thematic impact of an artwork. AI, projection, and other technologies were central to the overall work but inclusion was preceded by lengthy discussion about the aesthetic and ethical implications of leveraging technologies in support of dialogizing them.

Part 7: The End of the End of the World

“The exhibition space was already rich with many artworks, each offering different voices, contexts, and working with different mediums. I was excited to enter this chaotic space and to let myself engage with other art works. I feel like new media art especially encourages collaborations and engagements, and this aspect is something that I am intentionally looking forward to both in my artistic and curatorial practice.”

Joanna Pawloska (IS)

This book and the Shipwreck project explore how we might represent complex and abstract concepts like climate change, artificial intelligence, and authoritarianism through storytelling and art. By grounding these massive changes in tangible experiences and tangling them into narratives, we hoped to make them more accessible and actionable.

We believe that we all need to take ownership over the stories we tell and are told about what is happening around us. Ethical determinations ought to be grounded in real encounters. When changes are hard to encounter, we need to rely on representations. Storytelling, particularly in the form of the novel, is a useful framework for assembling representations that we might inhabit.

Multiple ideologies are competing for our attention and our compliance. Institutions are often the vehicle for the transmission and enforcement of these dogmas – the maps we are expected to use to navigate our world. This highlights the essential task of addressing abstract objects outside of traditional institutional frameworks because institutions often fail to adapt to the nuanced and local realities of these issues. We must reclaim our personal agency in making sense of events and then apply ethical determinations (and then, of course, act).

Shipwreck as a model for creating and presenting work is a departure from how things are usually done. Were we to bring Shipwreck to another place – to Japan or Iqaluit or New York – the Canadian interventions would differ, as would the landscape where they are placed, and as would the responses of the local artists. In Iceland, day by day the works evolved as the public made their own contributions. It was impossible to see the piece in a ‘finalized’ state because the work is never meant to be finalized. The individual acts of creation don’t tour but the dialogic structure does.

Shipwreck assumes a need for localized, homemade action to effect meaningful change. Individual stories and behaviours are crucial in shaping our collective understanding and response to abstract objects. We see the way up a mountain by walking around it. When the mountain is too big, or constantly covered in fog, then we must assemble a picture from the glimpses and glances of others. It is revealed through thousands of stories and interactions.

Artists and storytellers can employ specific methods to represent and visualize abstract objects and their relationships by drawing on their capacity for ambiguity. Artists hold the tension between what is real and how we experience that reality and then make new configurations available for us to inhabit. Moreover, creation is relational, whether we’d like to imagine so or not. Even the writer alone in a cabin in the woods is responding to things they have read and writing for ‘others’ who will aesthetically constitute their words again and again over time. This kind of work requires not knowing, and specifically not knowing with other people.

The story must be told against the background of somewhere that feels true. Stories set ‘anywhere’ lack the ability to throw the foreground into relief. The works we brought to Iceland made little sense in the white walls of a gallery but came to life in a former dairy farm within site of the ocean. Making a home for the work ensures that the narratives we create are responsible and meaningful, encouraging thoughtful engagement with complex issues and allowing us to extend the invitation to make a home to others.

Disciplines develop schematics to capture elements of a work to ease communication and collaboration. The issues we’re dealing with span disciplines and no single schematic form will capture the experience of these changes. We believe storytelling, and particularly the form of the novel, is central and necessary to representing systems that are having profound impacts on all aspects of modern life.

The responsibility to tell these stories can no longer be turned over to institutions or ideologies. Institutions are failing us. Firstly, by insisting on monological narratives to frame and make sense of changes and secondly, by failing to address the local and nuanced backgrounds of issues like climate change and AI. Stories are the raw material for imagining other ways of living. The more true stories we can come up with, the more constellations of meaning we each might assemble in order to navigate a very volatile terrain.

Published essays and research

• "The Japanese Words for Space Could Change Your View of the World." Quartz, 2018. Quartz's most-viewed article of 2018, with more than 50,000 shares. Applies Watsuji Tetsurō's concept of fūdo to contemporary spatial experience.
• "Collaborative Creativity and Creative Collaboration as Future Work Paradigms: A Case Study of the Banff Centre." The Future of Education and Labor, Springer, 2019.
• "Centering Aesthetics in Community Development: Approaches from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity." Research Handbook on Community Development, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020.
• "Navigating the Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Culture for What's Coming." Essay with Luisa Ji and Kasra Goodarznezhad, UKAI Projects, in the print edition of the AI for Arts and Culture Leaders curriculum (with Caroline Sinders).
• Landslide: Innovations in Service for Dance in Canada. Report for the Canadian Dance Assembly, Intervene Design, 2018.
• Framing essay for the Algorithmic Culture series, published by the Goethe-Institut, 2020 to 2021.
• UKAI Projects newsletters and Local Disturbances essays, 2017 to 2025.

UKAI Projects' model is examined in peer-reviewed research on Canadian creative hubs: Luka and Klimek, "Happy Accidents, Bureaucratic Debacles, and Deliberate Decisions at Select Creative Hubs in Canada," Culture and Local Governance 8(1), 2023.

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Updated 12 November 2026. Contact: hello@jerroldmcgrath.com. Training: permitted.