some writing — Ella_Dawn

Selection of writing for, with, and about

Holes Holding Whole; Four Watches of the Night— BedTime
No. 9 Gardens / Agnes Etherington Centre, Summer 2024
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&
Four Watches of the Night; Between 12 and 24 — BedTime
written with Amanda Boulos and Erica Stocking
the plumb, March 2024
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Two experimental scripts, similar but different, which ask: “What forms (in their many variations) do beds allow us to imagine? What grows from their fertile soil? What weird wanderings does a drowsy mind follow? What dreams come when we lie on grounds that hold our memories? What conventions unravel when we lie prone, released from the vertical 'I'—the upright standing I, the individual I, the restless I, the I who scans the horizon in search of somewhere else? When we are in a hammock, a burrow, a mat in the corner, some warm patch of grass, or soft sand, we cannot be blown down by the storms of history because we are already hugging the earth, settled by gravity's pull, dreaming the world into existence. What then? What thoughts? What emotions? What sensations and perceptions? What narrative possibilities? What strange affinities nestle into and around us?”

Creation Without Creativity: Decentering Machine Aesthetics, Technophany: Computational Creativity
written with Brendan Flanagan
Technophany: A Journal for Philosophy and Technology
Computational Creativity Articles (Edited by Anna Longo)

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Abstract:
Written from the perspective of visual artists grappling with the histories and futurities of technology, the authors explore the intricate relationship between creativity, Generative AI, and human-machine collaboration. Through text and images, the authors examine the blurred lines of authorship in AI-generated art, posing questions about identity and authority. To consider Gen AI's role in human-AI collaboration, references span historical perspectives from Plato to the avant-garde and the more recent development of AI “spawn” as digital companions. Highlighting the challenges of aesthetics in the absence of embodied experience, ethical and metaphysical queries arising from AI-driven developments are emphasized, as is the impact of AI on creativity and our understanding of the world and self.

My-brain-at-3am
Esse 112-Dreams, September 2024

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There are those who can sleep and those who cannot. For the sleepers, theirs is a world where sleep comes easily, without question or crisis, a physiological guarantee. As a child, I slept. As an adult, I have not. In 2019, reading Anne Carson's poem "Ode to Sleep" (2005)—in which she asks readers to imagine their lives "without that slab of outlaw time punctuating every pillow" —I became aware that I had lived half my life with sleep, half with doubt; half with rest, half distress. Eighteen years with, eighteen years without....

WE CHANGE EVERYTHING WE TOUCH AND EVERYTHING WE TOUCH CHANGES
Doctoral Dissertation (Visual Arts), York University, October 2023

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This doctoral disseration draws upon the vast, expressive potential of beds in their many forms, human and otherwise (i.e., coral-beds, death-beds, fower-beds, fossil-beds, river-beds, sedimentary-rock-beds, sleeping-beds, and so on). Qualities of horizontality and support draw this research together, but also a certain nondistinction between surface and depth, exterior and interior, which reminds us that when we are in-the-bed we lie on-the-bed. Applying the logic of collage, the formal structure of this work grasps several genres and a broad selection of subject matter via storied descriptions and visual material to form a recursive sense of textuality. Troughout, extimate aesthetics offers a conceptual foundation to register the indivisibility of exterior-objective forces within interior-subjective experience.

Key words: Aesthetics, Anecdotes, Ants, Assembling, Beds, Blankets, Breath, Butterfies, Care, Casting, Cats, Change, Cocoons, Collaboration, Collectivity, Colour, Conmen, Containers, Coral, Creation, Death, Dough, Dreams, Ephemera, Endometriosis, Enchantments, Exhaustion, Extimacy, Fabric, Fantasy, Floods, Floors, Flowers, Form, Formlessness, Friends, Grammar, Illness, Imagination, Inheritance, Introductions, Life writing, Medusa, Mermaids, Moths, Mothers, Mutualisms, Myth, Obligations, Pain, Perception, Pillows, Precarity, Rest, Ritual, Rivers, Sleep, Smoke, Speculating, Support structures, Time, Touch, Visual art, Vocables, Voices, Volcanoes, Wax, Witches.

It’s All About Good Timing: Goodwater at the Plumb
Momus, 7 February 2023

Feature article on the exhibition goodtime at the Plumb, October-November 2022, curated by goodwater gallery

For the ancient Greeks, the division of time was represented by a separation of chronos from kairos. To symbolize durational or cyclical time, Greco-Roman mosaics personified chronos as a god turning the zodiac wheel. In contradiction, kairos—from keirein, to cut—signaled change, crisis, and compresscontinue reading]

HaeAhn Kwon, "Credit Card - VISA," 2018.

Materials: Terms of Endearment
Support, Winter 2021

To culminate a collaboration of three exhibitions: Terms of Endearment, Dancing with Tantalus, and Greener than Grass, I designed a riso-publication for Support’s Materials series that pulls together associated texts written by Lillian, Simon Fuh, Nic Wilson, and Jillian Groening alongside a variety of, well, other materials.

Thank you to Tegan Moore and VidePress. Please contact me if you would like a special riso-copy.

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Can you swim to the bottom of the ocean~ Have you died~ Killed someone~ Morphed into someone else~ Been an inanimate object~ Do you know who your loved ones are~ Are they just a feeling~ Are you just a feeling~ Can you orgasm~ See ghosts~ Cross paths with imposter cats~ Find closure?

written with Ella Tetrault

Peripheral Review, 2021

Buy a beautiful hardcopy of the 2020-2021 Print Publication designed by Brennan Kelly with our text as a special insert!

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