An interplay of machines, monsters, medicine, riots and speculative fictions, Hypercity is a culmination of a Long Winter residency wherein emerging artists Cassraa, Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ, Malik McKoy, Vasuki Shanmuganathan and Shonee developed their artistic practice for the digital realm of Augmented Reality (AR). These projects are in conversation with commissioned works by hiba ali, Casey Koyczan, and Linda Zhang. Gesturing to the precarity and subversive nature of street art, the AR installations around Dundas West and other corners of the city invite participants to dream in Toronto’s fraught public space. 

As a part of the Long Winter residency, Ladan Siad led a workshop on tensions that arise while using digital tools like AR to create art on systemic violence and resistance. Ladan is an interdisciplinary storyteller and designer who explores the worlds that are possible when radical visionary change flourishes. The workshop discussions were an opening on how to — as Ruha Benjamin puts it — intervene with the deadly status quo. Hypercity curator Mitra and Ladan reconnected over Zoom to continue this (unending) conversation.

Mitra: As you know, the artists part of Hypercity were given a prompt to start their projects: "Who defines it, inherits it, wields it... who rents it, tills it, toils for it... who gets expelled from it?" This line from Ruha Benjamin’s Captivating Technology: Race, carceral technoscience and libertory imagination questions who is allowed into the category of human and who is excluded. More specifically, at the border, at work, at a checkpoint and beyond, subjugated people must petition again and again for admission into the category of “human” while applications are routinely denied. What comes to mind when you read this prompt? 

Ladan: The prompt makes me think of Jamaican scholar and theorist Sylvia Wynter’s essay "'No Humans Involved': An Open Letter to My Colleagues" from 1992. I often return to it when thinking about my responsibilities as someone who uses and works with technology in a critical way. In this essay, Wynter is calling out her colleagues for the ways that their work helps to uphold and disseminate problematic constructs of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other categories that continue to overdetermine our lived experience and justify or deny our humanity. So how does the artistic use of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI) or other surveillance system technologies fall into those same traps? 

A lot of aspects of my own work are based on conversations. Talking to people about their relationships to technological systems and how they maneuver them. Seeing how folks make systems work for them, systems that don’t otherwise constitute them. Sometimes it’s about not making objects or products. This is how I see refusal playing out in my work — that refusal is a part of getting at the question of how these technologies interweave with our artistic practices. It also takes the form of demystifying, experimentation and play. 

Mitra: Yes. I’m interested in how Wynter’s thinking can be applied to our relationships to our non-human kin such as plants, animals and pollinators. Shonee’s AR garden of weeds provides an example of this, offering a digital space for plants to “overgrow,” undomesticated and ungovernable by the utilitarian terms of colonialism. 

Mitra: Extending on this idea of being ungovernable, let’s talk about riots. Riots are used strategically to criminalize or delegitimize movements and demands. I say riots affectionately, I say riots with love. Referring to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Toni Morrison says, “What struck me most about those who rioted was how long they waited. The restraint they showed. Not the spontaneity, the restraint. They waited and waited for justice and it didn’t come. No one talks about that…” 

In Toronto, it sometimes feels like we live on the brink of a riot. Or that we should be rioting (or striking). The housing. The transit. The ever-diminishing healthcare. The housing, the housing, the housing. And the list goes on. A place ever at its brink, tipping point, boiling point, breaking point, point of no return?

Malik McCoy’s Hypercity AR filter engulfs us in a city he and many of us have been locked out of; a digital representation of, as Scarborough-based writer Amani Bin Shikhan puts it, “Toronto burying itself alive at home.” How do you conceptualise riots and, more broadly, resistance? In Toronto and/or beyond.

Ladan: When I first came across the work of the Practising Refusal Collective, I began to think about refusal differently. Formed in 2015 by theorists Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, Practicing Refusal Collective is an international Black feminist forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century. Drawing from their vision, “The ‘practice of refusal’ referenced in the group’s title names its rejection of this current status quo as liveable. It is a refusal to accept black precarity as inevitable, and a refusal to embrace the terms of diminished subjecthood through which black subjects are presented.”

Through this, I started trying to find artists and collectives that, through their own work, engage in what Tina Campt defines as “negation as generative and radically transformative”. Put differently, riots lead me back to refusal. 

Mitra: Yes, that makes sense. 

Mitra: Toronto is also a city where the pulse of international riots is alive, is felt. We are a city of refugees, a city of exiles, we will shut down your highway for an injustice happening 1000s of km away, it’s not 1000s of km away for all of us, we evade space and time.

This feels connected to a lot of your own work on diaspora and more specifically, how you beautifully put it: quilting together global Black genres into a visual and audio tapestry of home everywhere. Could you speak more to this?

Ladan: My work comes from the kaleidoscope of identities that I inhabit. I am a Black Muslim Queer Trans person even in that mouthful I have to manuever different geographies, systems and vernacular. Tinkering and making space for me to learn about myself through technologies (djing, filmmaking, designing, coding) has allowed me to question and learn about alternative and hidden archives. 

Mitra: I love this, especially the shout out to so many different mediums as sites for exploration and spaces for imagination...

Mitra: And finally, let’s talk about dreaming! Digital justice advocate Sarah Chander talks about the necessity to recognize that some concepts like AI have “no revolutionary or liberatory potential” insofar that they are inherently welded to infrastructures of domination, extraction and oppression. She talks about how a lot of tech policy work focuses on “transparency” and “accountability” while overlooking the way that technologies are woven into broader structures of oppression: colonialism, racial capitalism, border industrial complexes, queer and transphobia, the list goes on and we’ve talked about it. Sarah goes on to say that far from being unrealistic, dreaming is the essence of pragmatism; a proposal that “how things work doesn’t actually work at all (not for us anyways).”

It’s my belief that each of the projects in Hypercity is a dream; an artist’s query into what another world could like and a demand for something different. Collective dreams, deeply personal dreams and, in most cases, a bit of both. Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ quite literally takes up dreams in her collaborative Cree rendition of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. 

And of course, “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down” (h/t Robin D.G. Kelley). This is a veryyy long-winded way of asking, what do you dream about? 

Ladan: These days I have been dreaming…

Mitra is a Toronto-based curator interested in sanctuary and indebted to border abolition organizing. Mapping the legacies of colonial infrastructure and the resistance which has always followed ground and guide her work. She has exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada, the Art Gallery of Guelph, Xpace Cultural Centre, La Centrale galerie powerhouse and other galleries and artist-run-centres. In her spare time, she listens to music that emerges from Toronto; a since-always queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and diasporic city.