Agnes has wrapped up our offsite exhibition space in anticipation of Agnes Reimagined!
Agnes has wrapped up our offsite exhibition space in anticipation of Agnes Reimagined!
Tuesday 14 April
18°C and Overcast Clouds
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Speaker series on digital arts and culture
Portraits of Luisa Ji and Tristan Sauer. Courtesy of the artists.
Digital platforms and AI are rewiring how we understand our world. From algorithmic feeds to the rise of tech oligarchies, digital capitalism is reshaping how we pay attention, form relationships, and imagine the future. As more of our culture moves onto corporately controlled platforms, questions emerge about soft power, productivity, data privacy and the erosion of our social and emotional skills. How do we navigate —or undermine—these systems and technologies that are so deeply embedded within our society? What are the more ethical and community-oriented alternatives to what digital capitalism proposes?
In this conversation, artists and researchers Luisa Ji and Tristan Sauer discuss their work in relation to AI automation, resource extraction, labour precarity, and surveillance. Together, they examine digital technology’s expanding grip on our relationships and culture, while also providing speculations on the future of artistic practice and how they envision small acts of resistance in our everyday lives.
Agnes Bytes is an online speaker series featuring conversations between Canadian and international artists, media scholars, and software engineers across topics related to critical themes in digital art and culture. The series asks audiences to think across disciplines and alongside artists to imagine digital futurities that are liberatory, communally responsive and expansively inclusive.
Agnes Bytes offers an opportunity for each speaker to share about their practice and for a Q&A period with the audience. Each talk will be recorded and made available on Digital Agnes and will be accompanied by a collaboratively generated resource/activity sheet to further deepen engagement with the themes discussed.
This edition of Agnes Bytes is curated by Danuta Sierhuis, Digital Development Coordinator, with support from Jade Rawlin through a “POLS 598: Internship in Political Studies” placement.
Luisa Ji is a creative strategist and cultural producer working at the intersection of public imagination, digital transformation, and systems of care. With over a decade of global experience, she leads participatory programs that use storytelling, worldbuilding, and culturally-specific technological adaptations to help institutions navigate cultural and ecological volatility. From projects like Intelligent Terrain, Cultural Technologies Lab, and Goblin Market, Luisa Ji has turned abstract questions into embodied experiences that guide artists, cultural practitioners, and the public in their exploration of AI, technology’s ecological impact, cooperations under scarcity, and more. These projects are curious inquiries into how people engage with lived environments rather than making arbitrary distinctions between culture and nature. As the Studio Director at UKAI Projects, Luisa has delivered initiatives in Canada, South Korea, Iceland, Taiwan, the UK, and more, supporting artists and arts organizations in transforming their practices.
Tristan Sauer is a New Media Artist and Curator critically interested in the relationship between technology and capitalism. His work navigates the intersections between our digital and physical worlds, and what an inside-out look at our relationships with technology can reveal about the human condition. Working in multiple mediums but most closely with physical computing, sculpture, and extended-reality Sauer often explores these topics through an afro-futurist lens imagining and critiquing techno-capitalism’s impacts on our present and future realities.
Portrait of Tristan Sauer. Courtesy of the artist.
