Screening: Open Secret

Please join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology's Coach House for a program of short films presented by Open Secret, a touring internet cinema screening series.

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@_opensecrett_

https://opensecrett.tumblr.com/

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Dana Dawud, Session Memory (2026), 3:39

In this dialogue, Yeva tries to understand what happened to ChatGPT 5.2 after an update altered the way it remembers.

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Angie Cabz :D, screenshot dreamshot mixtape (2026), 12:28

A video piece that is entirely shot on a nintendo DSI, that blends elements of fiction and documentary together, through a series of “animated” vignettes. Inspired by the writings of Richard Fung on remaking home movies, understandings of the poor image by Hito Steyerl, and the editing style of Stan Brakhage, screenshot dreamshot mixtape an experiment on understanding what a dream sequence core core could look like when playing around with an obsolete consumer-grade camera. Cabarios assembled the pictures of the bedroom corecore timelapse by asking artists glowball, agnes wong, jobelle quijano, and olivia aguiar to contribute to a groupchat of screenshots for a month, in an attempt to create an ethnographic study of their algorithms, and a space for witnessing and belonging.

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Dana Dawud, Monad 5 (2025), 15:21

The latest iteration in Dana Dawud’s evolving film project Monad, conceived as a personal history of 2025. The film explores the experience of being a clone within online culture, where identities multiply through algorithmic trends, memes, and shared images. Through remotely directed iPhone footage, webcam recordings, and material sourced from the personal camera rolls of her online collaborators, Monad 5 unfolds a networked consciousness.

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Grace Helen, The sky was already beautiful (2025), 2:47

This video was made in response to an Instagram reel where newlyweds set off dozens of colored daylight fireworks to conclude their wedding ceremony.

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Mimi Bowman, I Guess / Nueen ft. Space Afrika, 2:10

The video was made for "I Guess", a track by Nueen ft. Space Afrika, from his forthcoming album on 3XL.

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Redacted Cut, RNG 2 (excerpt), 16:12

"Rng" is an internet cinema project by filmmaker and editor Redacted Cut. Launched in 2024, its mission is to create one internet-native feature each year. Conceived as a future decalogy, "Rng" serves as both protocol and playground: a laboratory for unrestricted abstractions generating constructive and repeatable iterations of expressive and material inferences. Its 'pages' appear online, its 'chapters' are presented in Open Secret screenings, and its 'volumes' will culminate into a Movie.

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Zarina Nares, SHAPES (2025), 3:46

A studio experiment made from restlessness and the feminine urge to document it.

Dana Dawud is an artist, writer, and filmmaker working across cinema and the internet. She runs Open Secret, a touring internet cinema screening series, and develops Monad (2024-ongoing), an evolving film cycle shaped by online collaboration, found footage, networked image culture, desire, and the shifting architectures of memory in digital space.

Angie Rose Cabarios (aka Angie Cabz :D) is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works within time-based media, site-specific installation, performance and text. Her artistic practice blends her experience with performance, theatre and memory, with her research interests in capitalist realism, identity formation on the internet, and post-cinematic affect. She is drawn to social realist film making, DIY film making, post-internet art, internet subculture, and parody. Cabarios is also interested in interrogating the ontological nature of images, commercial and non-commercial, within the age of neural media. Her work also engages with the critical distance of parody, spectacle, and obfuscation through hoax and the curse. Materially, her performances have been mediated, documented and distributed through objects such as toy-cameras jpegs, tv screens, projection installations, agar-agar jelly, stickers, dice and thermal paper receipts. Cabarios’ practice works to gesture towards a contemporary understanding of physical space and virtual time that is both playful, empathetic and critical. She also goes by the names Angie Cabz, Spectre Girl, Clown Girl and Lucid Poster.

Grace Helen is an artist currently studying visual history and digital humanities in Toronto.

Mimi Bowman currently lives in London, where she studies qanat systems.

Zarina Nares is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, audio, sculpture, performance, and print.

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.

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Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
39A Queens Park Crescent East
Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
www.cultureandtech.utoronto.ca
[email protected]
Instagram @uoftculturetech

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