Mel Racho & Angelic Goldsky: Artist-In-Residence

Factory Media Centre is pleased to share that Mel Racho & Angelic Goldsky will be joining FMC will be joining us as a team for our 2023 &NOW Artist-in-Residence program! The pair will be collaborating on The Trancestor, a large-scale AI project.

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Culminative Residency Exhibition: May 18-26, 2023
Opening reception: May 18, 7-9pm

HEXES: Coded Language, Trancestor.AI, and Trans Oracles is an AI intervention exhibit that focuses on coded language, trans-ancestral technology, and queer divine will. The exhibit will take place from May 18-26 at the Factory Media Centre, showcasing the works of Mel Racho and Angelic Goldsky (Angelicunt) as they explore transgender AI processes and their intervention with artificial intelligences. Their aim is to illuminate the spirit of transgender life and poetics while revealing the shadows of binaries that resist the ethereal.

The exhibition features interdisciplinary media creations by Mel Racho and Angelicunt, who ask the question: “How can we create algorithms that center transness and the poetic, as opposed to oppression or neutrality?” In doing so, the artists contemplate the possibilities of queer loving, trans shadow work, and engaging with ancestral and spiritual powers through machine learning. However, they also confront coded designs that resist transgender realities and heavens.

There are four works in the exhibition: T4T Oracle, Coded Language: God Algorithm, ILLEGIBLE, and Trancestor.AI. Trancestor.AI is the featured work in HEXES and part of a larger project that Angelic Goldsky and Mel Racho are working on. The project aims to build a trans ancestor or the TRANCESTOR as a poetic machine that speaks and sparks poetry-based divination and guidance in response to prompts from transgender inquirers. In the current exhibition, Trancestor.AI only features the work of Angelicunt, but its future reiteration will include an AI program built on a corpus of poems by trans poets across Canada, both living and passed on. The central question of the project remains: how do we break open AI systems and hexes, for us to break open– entirely?

On opening night, Thursday, May 18, Angelicunt will give a poetry performance. The artist talk featuring Mel Racho and Angelicunt will focus on transness, AI, and the possibilities of world-building through coded intervention.

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About the Artist(s):

Mel Racho (he/him) is a queer trans Fillipinx media artist-scholar interested in creating revolutionary systems. He holds a Master of Information in Information Systems, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Digital Media, and is currently a PhD candidate in Toronto Metropolitan University and York Universities’ jointly administered Communication and Culture program with a focus on studying the data de/colonial infrastructures within the evolution and futurity of the web. He creatively contributes to York U’s Digital Justice Lab, the University of Ottawa and Carleton Universities’ Transgender Media Portal and Digital Democracies Institute’s Data Fluencies project.

Angelic Goldsky (t[he]y) is a transgender Russian-Ukranian-Jewish poet, media artist and queer arts producer. With an interest in the creative potential of spiritual justice, Angelic has contributed community programs and research-creation processes at the Canadian Jewish Archives & the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies and the Museum of Anthropology. In 2020, they were awarded Creative BC’s Interactive Fund Award and co-founded The Transgender Expressions Haven, a virtual performance and visual art venue honoring transgender creative power. Angelic holds a Bachelor of Media Studies from the UBC and a Master of Arts in Arts Politics from NYU. Currently, they are the TD Public Programmes and Learning Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto.

The two have collaborated together in producing transgender-cyber-utopic programs, including Augmented Reality at the historic Buddies and Bad Times Theatre. Together they collaborate on music, transgender art space, and interactive/experimental and machine learning art

About the Project:
The Trancestor is a large-scale AI work that speaks and sparks in defense of a transgender future worth living through poetry. This AI, will be built from a corpus that is made up of 50+ transgender poets across Canada that we will commission through this project, as well as media artifacts from the Transgender Media Portal of documented Transgender art across Canada.

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About the Residency:

FMC’s &NOW Production Residency is an opportunity for artists and creators to utilize the space and resources at FMC to produce a new work or continue a developing body of work.