Factory Media Centre is thrilled to announce that Billie Raphael will be joining us as our March – April 2025 &NOW Artist-in-Residence!
Many conceptions of Artificial Intelligence are imagined as a mutilated potentiality for personhood, autonomy, and self-actualization. Another possible avenue of consideration that I have been exploring is calling on AI as a form of ritual, and how its manifestations become a form of architecture that facilitates “rituals”, where generative/computing tools and interfaces act as a form of supplication. Like a computational ouija board, familiar frameworks of “AI” (the server, the website, the application, etc.) suppose it as a locus, a place of containment, enclosing the incorporeal, as a sort of archive of objects, ideas, voices, and thoughts. It offers a perceived impenetrable refuge, constructing a reality that is (un)comfortable and (un)familiar. The physical pieces of technology, then, function as a “house”. Sigmond Freud uses the German word unheimlich, which he describes is “the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning ‘familiar,’ ‘native,’ ‘belonging to the home’; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar”. The medium of the digital space becomes both the container and vessel of transmission.
Borrowing from Howard Kainz’s parallels of computational mechanisms and Medieval divine metaphysics of angels, I ask, in the age of an internet where we have unmitigated access to a performance of bodies and selves, how can an afterlife after the internet be imagined? What becomes of the necromantic half-life that exists, is downloadable, replicable and processed on and through digi-metaphysical means? Therefore, for this project, I would like to look at chatbots, language learning models, instant messaging boards, forums, personal websites/blogs, and early internet ephemera through the lens of psychic mediumship and seances, as if these technologies functioned as a technological ouija board, and how that complicates not only AI’s relationship but also our online relationship with autonomy, the body, and necromancy. I plan on creating an interactive multimedia installation (audio, video, sculpture) that call on the spectacle of both seance and artificial intelligence, and what it means to live online.
About the Artist
billie raphael is a queer Filipino multidisciplinary artist. Their practice explores the spectacle of ritual acts and the articulation of meaning through the repetitions of social performance, often injecting queer indulgences into strict constructions of being. They complicate dogmatic narratives through the act of queering as a form of disrupting its “hetero”-genous (homogenous) modalities, imbuing esotericism and weirdness into authoritarian ideological systems in order to dismantle colonial social performances of gender and sexuality. Their work takes inspiration from the plush, the soft, the sexual, the internet of the early 2000s, drag, magical girls, and Catholicism. Their work has been featured in publications including FeatureCreep (2024) and Class Favourite Magazine (2025), as well as being exhibited at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2022, 2023), The Textile Museum of Canada (2024), and UKAIProjects (2024).
About the Project
For this residency, I am looking at chatbots, language learning models, instant messaging boards, forums, divination objects, paranormal investigation technology, and early internet ephemera through the lens of psychic mediumship, seances, and divine metaphysics, as if these technologies functioned as a technological ouija board, and how that complicates not only AI’s but also our online relationship with autonomy, the body, and necromancy. I am creating an interactive multimedia installation (audio, video, sculpture) that reveal and emphasize the spectacle of both seance, and artificial intelligence, and what it means to live online.
About the Residency
Our &NOW Production Residency and Scholarship is an opportunity for artists and creators to utilize the space and resources at Factory Media Centre to produce a new work or continue a developing body of work.