Artist Talk: Xuan Ye

An artist talk by the Centre for Culture and Technology's 2025 Artist-in-Residence Xuan Ye, held on-site in their solo exhibition at the Centre's Coach House.

Xuan Ye (a.pureapparat.us) makes noise as a compass, navigating the eddies of art, music, and technology. Their practice unfolds in vibrational world-building via software, sound, image, installation, performance, publication and teaching. Through improvisation and computation, X traces the material and metaphysical waves across the technological, biological, and ecological resonances to evoke illegible pulses and dissonant pauses that stutter meaning, tremble systems. Their work has been exhibited at the MOCA Toronto (2022), UCCA Shanghai (2022), UQAM and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), MUTEK Montreal (2021), and the Goethe-Institut Beijing (2018), among others. They have been recognized with awarded residencies at ZHdK (2024) and Pro Helvetia (2023) and have received grants and scholarships from the Canada Council for the Arts and the SSHRC. Their practice has also been critically featured and reviewed in Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue 111), the Goethe-Institut (Montreal), KUNSTFORUM International (Issue 257), and Musicworks (Issue 136). Hailing from China, X lives in Toronto/Tkaronto and serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.

Since 2018, Ye’s ERROAR! series transforms the hallucinations, biases, and glitches of human-machine coupling into multimedia installations. Here, data shrinks, training slows, and renders fray, spilling errant stories and frequencies that rewire our perception, affect, and imagination. These works materialize the “cognitive distortion” of artificial neural networks as speculative artifacts, forming a future archaeology of now where technological errors are paleocybernetic fossils, calcified as evidence of a recursive hunger. In this self-devouring loop, objectivity is swallowed and regurgitated as resistance. Every algorithmic stumble is a fossil-in-waiting, and every glitch is an escape route. With the latest installment of this ongoing series, ERROAR! expands into absurdist speech opera, remixing machine-generated quasi-English into a chorus of algorithmic dysfluency.

Produced as part of the fourth annual Artist-in-Residence Program and curated by Talia Golland, this project responds to the Centre’s 2025–2026 programming theme “Artificial Stupidity,” which engages the politics, aesthetics, and economics of machine learning to put pressure on the construction of these technologies as “artificial intelligence.”

• WEDNESDAYS: 1-5PM
• THURSDAYS: 1-5PM
• FRIDAYS: 1-5PM
• SATURDAYS: 12-4 PM
• SUNDAYS: 12-4 PM

ERROAR! will be on view at the Centre's Coach House through Saturday, October 18. To request a viewing appointment outside regular gallery hours, please contact [email protected], and we will do our best to accommodate!

The Centre for Culture & Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the impacts of contemporary media on our interconnected world. This project is informed by the Centre’s location in the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s office and salon on the University of Toronto campus. The Centre draws inspiration from McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy, continuing his stated goal of “investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies”.

The Centre promotes the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, examining the ways technological media shape contemporary experience by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics. Offering both a setting and a framework, the Centre provides space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA. The Centre also supports the production of and conversation about contemporary media art, fostering aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry.

Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto

Web: www.cultureandtech.utoronto.ca

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: @uoftculturetech

Host or Publisher The Centre for Culture and Technology (UofT)