The Work

Situations, objects, games, and multi-day gatherings that put people out on the terrain rather than in front of descriptions of it. Selected, not exhaustive. Roles and credits are named because they matter.

Encounters

We Play in the World They Make - 2025, Toronto. How are algorithms imagined, who does the imagining, and how does this shape the opportunities for agency by those obligated to occupy these representations and their subsequent instantiation as real socio-technical systems? The work provided visitors with an opportunity to occupy and “play” in a future world imagined by others, drawing attention to how pre-located discourses shape ideas of progress in the world around us. Four AI models running on very different worldviews partner with human partners just trying to find a way out.

Shipwreck — 2024, Reykjavík · 2025, Montreal. A presentation and encounter on the cultural conditions of living after the end of progress, and after the moment when moving forward no longer makes sense. Participants enter a situation, not a lecture. Includes Restoring Cosmic Order, an AI-driven robotic installation. Presented at SÍM Reykjavík and at the Milieux Institute, Concordia University. Producer: Kasra Goodarznezhad. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Documented in Local Disturbances.

AI Ritual — 2022–23, Berlin · Toronto · Wakefield · St. Catharines · Edinburgh. A co-production with STO Union on the cultural and spiritual dimensions of artificial intelligence. Audiences were invited onto a stage to share their hopes and fears with an AI that died every ninety minutes; at the end it announced its departure, what it had learned, and what it was taking with it. Premiered at Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. Later presented as part of the Canada Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Carnival of Shipwreck — October 2024, Toronto. A five-day festival across two venues, structured as carnival in the Bakhtinian sense: inversion, the body, excess, and the grotesque as methods for encountering collective disorientation. Exhibition, workshops, performance lectures, and music nights including Canadian premieres by Pessimist and Yuko Araki. Lead producer: Kasra Goodarznezhad. Team: Jerrold McGrath, Luisa Ji. Funded by Arts Council Korea and the Canada Council for the Arts.

When Spiders Spin Dusk — 2024–25, Toronto · Seoul. A Canada–Korea co-production. Six artists, three from each country, undertook three months of research and a field study in Canada before producing new works. Exhibited at The Bridge, Toronto and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Co-produced with curator Junghyun Kim. Primary UKAI lead: Luisa Ji.

Please Don’t Understand This — 2021–22, Dzaleka · Beijing · Cairo · Toronto. Artists in a Malawian refugee camp, a Beijing hutong, and a Cairo design community were commissioned to generate their own visual symbolic languages for living alongside AI and surveillance — legible to those who needed them, illegible to those administering the systems. Published without explanatory text. Conceived and led by Jerrold McGrath, with UKAI Projects and the Goethe-Institut Toronto.

Local Disturbances — 2020–. A media series: thirty-eight podcast episodes and the documentation for Shipwreck, including Representing the Impossible: Telling Stories about the End of the World.

Intelligent Terrain — 2022, 2024, Wakefield, Quebec. A land-centred residency on cognitive technology’s relationship to environment, ecology, and non-human intelligence. Hosted at Ferme Lanthorn, a regenerative farm, with the Canadian Museum of Nature Archive. 2024 cohort co-produced with curator Junghyun Kim through Arts Council Korea. Lead: Luisa Ji. Program design and fundraising: Jerrold McGrath.

Algorithmic Culture — 2020–21, Toronto. A multi-year program of encounters at the intersection of AI, diaspora, and contemporary culture, commissioned by and co-produced with the Goethe-Institut Toronto. Produced Copy-All, five commissioned zines distributed through Little Free Libraries; The Computer Is Your Redacted, a live audio production in which AI experts played a 1980s role-playing game; and GROUND. Framing essay, Goethe-Institut‍ ·  Video (The Computer is Your Redacted)