Terms of Use

Dara Birnbaum, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Mara Eagle, Brendan Fernandes, Francisco González-Rosas, Ilana Yacine Harris-Babou, Helena Martin Franco, Nation to Nation, Skawennati, Shanie Tomassini, Wu Tsang, VahMirè (Ludmila Steckelberg), Quentin VerCetty, Nico Williams

Terms of Use brings together works that explore the impact of technologies on the definition, construction, and (re)framing of individual and collective selves, as we grapple with living simultaneously online and AFK (away from keyboard). At once celebratory and critical, the exhibition deals with the complex feelings generated by our daily interactions with technologies: between the opportunities to connect and to imagine other spaces, and the constant pressure to perform within and for these spaces.

Inspired by a range of texts, from Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology (1989) to the more recent Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell (2020), Terms of Use aims to challenge our entrenched notions of what technologies are, how we make use of them, and to what extent they are using us. The exhibition is anchored in an intergenerational dialogue between artists and authors, and considers the power dynamics involved in our complicated relationships with technology, highlighting both the pleasures and difficulties of having to mediate oneself in these hybridized and semi-virtual worlds. These endless mediations further evoke themes, such as the metaverse as a radical space for self-actualization and determination, as well as consumption and extractivism under “digital capitalism.”

Many of the works in Terms of Use are brand new, and the exhibition also includes the Canadian debut of Wu Tsang’s two-channel video installation The Looks (2015).