Epic fails, or, ordinary failure just wasn’t enough

program by Kiera Boult

Artists: Cassie Packham, Dayna McLeod, Fox Maxy, Jake Starr, Marion Balac

Curator: Kiera Boult

The works in this program call on my inner internet child, left behind on early-2000s platforms like MySpace. Here, the digital plane becomes haunted by a familiar past. Ancient avatars, unruly subjects, and gaudy profile layouts, shaped by the internet’s early mess and excess, resisting contemporary pursuits of mastery and efficiency, surfacing early selves left behind for failing to be productive. These works subvert this language of mastery by using pixelated .gifs, 3D-modelled landscapes, and found footage to raise questions about the origins of our early selves and what remains of them in the hyper-optimized present. This self has been shaped by broken HTML code and self-built worlds that extractive data practices have since paved over. But the traces of our early internet selves persist. 

Across the program, these unfinished selves share a refusal of optimization. Through perseverance, they have survived decades of software updates, compression, and neglect, forming a swirling archive of early online exchange, chaotic and ungoverned by efficiency. What happened to our unusable contributions to the internet? Have they been drifting around as fragmented pixels, waiting to be regurgitated by future users?

These digital leftovers linger as material that dominant systems cannot absorb or render profitable. Instead, they spill into myths, trends, and ghosts within the algorithms of the next generation. Given a second life through contemporary appropriations of early Y2K aesthetics, fragments of our past selves, first born online in the early 2000s, are returned to us, but altered in the process. The next generation reworks and returns parts of ourselves that could liberate, while exorcising the outdated toxins that shaped their origins. Moving through popular culture and online subcultures, this program proposes an alternative lineage of the internet, one that can nurture and heal our inner internet child by reclaiming the mess and excess of our past and refusing the optimization of future.

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Bio (space/opal), Cassie Packham (2024). Video still.

Conceived in 2019 and rezzed in 2020, space/opal is an avatar that currently inhabits the grid of Second Life. As an artist and a shapeshifter, space/opal investigates the worlds inbetween the alien and the native

Cassie Packham is an Onyota’a:ka (Oneida) artist born and raised in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her work considers rearrangement, oscillation, transmission and reciprocity in manifestations of writing, video, sculpture, sound, installation, printed matter, drawing and performance. Enduring interests include personal narrative to interrupt dominant modes of understanding, representations of media and its effects/affects, natural movement, and the body as resistance. Cassie is based in London, Ontario and is pursuing their MFA at Western University.

Gathering Dust

Gathering Dust creates connections between water, intergenerational care, and encroaching urban development. Like the film’s layered visuals, numerous sources converge to create the film’s soundscape. The film contemplates lessons exchanged between elders and youth, and the differences between generations, friction vs. flow, and the layers underneath Los Angeles.

Fox Maxy is a film director based in San Diego. She is Payómkawichum and Iipay Kumeyaay, from the Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians. Her work explores themes of kinship, emotional well-being, nightlife, fashion, and environmental advocacy—using cinema as a lens to illuminate both intimate and collective experiences of contemporary life.

FoUBARthes: Death of an Author

Media performance artist Dayna McLeod asked ChatGPT to write an increasingly snarky and heated dialogue between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault about The Death of the Author, inspired by Barthes’ famous essay. This script is performed by AI actors of the theorists, with Dayna’s AI doppelgänger, DaynAI, acting as host to their debate.

Dayna McLeod is queer performance-based media artist. Her work uses humour, and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions using cabaret, duration, remix, video, and installation practices. Her interests of artistic and theoretical research are in media representations of sexuality, queer identity, and how bodies marked female are perceived as public property.

A Weak & Panicked Animal

Collating an archive of CCTV, police body-cam footage and local news reports documenting urban confrontations with wild deer, A Weak & Panicked Animal (2024) considers the precarious borders between human/non-human territories and our response to infringements upon such anthropocentric constructs.

Police bodycam footage and CCTV may evoke police and shooting violence, loud and uncomfortable noise scenes containing blood animals in distress.

Jake Starr is a research-based artist residing on ancient Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). Starr’s practice years across new media, sculpture, film and text, toward speculative post-human futures. Their work often operates within zones of friction or slippage, between embodied and disembodied, natural and synthetic, science and fantasy; creating webs of intimacy between seemingly disparate im/materialities which work to evoke imaginaries that exist beyond historical grand narratives and anthropocentric hegemony. Dogma (2024) A Weak & Panicked Animal (2024) Sweat Creek (2021)

Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, Canada.Their identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to their history of work as a sexual health educator and harm reduction worker. Mikiki’s creative themes often address safety and responsibility, disclosure and self-determination, community building and reckoning with trauma and loss.

How to excel at everything

In How to excel at everything, drawing inspiration from Flaubert’s unfinished novel “Bouvard and Pécuchet,” two Pokemon-like friends embark on a journey together to master every skill possible through online tutorials.

Marion Balac’s work explores the impulses and interactions between feelings and technology, approaching them through a variety of media to investigate the struggles and bonds between individual and mass behaviours. A globalized online tourist, she travels dynamic playgrounds and encounters new landscapes and fictionalized personas that she can study, within and outside the screen. Gathering structures such as touristic sites, theme parks, internet forums, user-generated content websites interest her as they duplicate traditional community interactions.