HTMlles Festival features work by WhiteFeather and Sophia Borowska

Taking place in Montreal, The HTMlles is an international biennial festival that brings together local and international artists, scholars, and activists who are passionate about critical engagement with new technologies from a feminist perspective.

The theme of the 12th edition of the festival is “Terms of Privacy”, and will be hosted in Montreal from November 3rd to 6th 2016. The festival presents creative and critical projects exploring how the notion of privacy has been reformulated in the last decades in the realm of politics but also in the most intimate areas of daily life. The HTMlles take place in different galleries, artist-run centers and universities across the city.

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Data Excess
Sophia Borowska

Sophia’s project, Data Excess will be shown as part of the exhibition, Future Memories at ARTICULE:

Data Excess interprets, visualizes, and materializes digital waste as an expressive product of online culture. Through a research-creation methodology revolving around digitally assisted weaving, this project seeks links between digital and material processes, and practices, historical and contemporary. The 19th-century Jacquard loom, operating on a binary system, is widely considered to be the first computer; connections between weaving and the digital multiply from there.

Focusing on the body as point of contact between Internet culture and textiles, Sophie Borowska’s Data Excess focuses on “digital excesses” – pornographic spam e-mails and low-resolution screenshots – as sources for two weaving series.

Data Excess emphasizes the importance of embodied engagement with online space and with physical material, especially textile. Weaving relates to the digital not only as ancestor to code and software, but as a medium that links cultures and users. The project comprises an installation, a web project, and a publication.

Press: CBC

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Parent Folder
WhiteFeather Hunter

WhiteFeather’s project, Parent Folder, a combination of video, textile and performance (artifact) will be shown as part of the exhibition, CTRL + [SELF]: INTIMACY, EXTIMACY AND CONTROL IN THE AGE OF THE OVEREXPOSURE OF SELF, curated by Laura Baigorri at Studio XX:

Psychogeography is the “study of the laws of geographical space on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”(1). Described as “passional terrain”(2) by Guy Debord, psychogeography embodies the discovery of the elements and meaning of ‘place’.

‘Digital psychogeography’ could describe the phenomenon of parallel existence of plane: on earth, and its simultaneous spatial representation in cyberspace, twinning place and “no-place”.

The Parent Folder project stems from an interest in these considerations and how they have been considered aesthetically in an age of increasing digital intervention. In 2012, my estranged father gave me online passcode access to his property surveillance camera so that I was able to pan the landscape and become a voyeur of his daily life. Parent Folder applies principles David Lyon has described when referring to surveillance, in terms of technologies that mediate relationships that are not co-present, as well as surveillance as a replacement for “tokens of trust” where the body has disappeared from interactions (3). The twinned worlds in Parent Folder form an interface through which affective bonds are fostered without face-to-face interaction.

1. Debord, Guy. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (1955) in Situationist International anthology, trans. Knabb, Ken. 1981.  Berkeley, Calif: Bureau of Public Secrets, 8-12.

2. Debord, Guy. Theory of the Dérive (1958) in Situationist International anthology, trans. Knabb, Ken. 1981.  Berkeley, Calif: Bureau of Public Secrets, 62-67.

3. Lyon, David. “Everyday surveillance: personal data and social classifications” in The Surveillance Studies Reader (Hier, Sean P. and Josh Greenberg, eds.). England: Open University Press. 2007. pp. 136-7.

>> More info on the HTMlles Festival on the festival website, here.