Billie Raphael
April 7th – 14th, 2025
Factory Media Centre is thrilled to present ⁺‧₊˚‧ ა will you be with me in the afterlife? ໒ ‧˚₊‧⁺ , a culminating exhibition from our second 2025 &NOW Artist-in-Residence, Billie Raphael!
The computational system and its manifestations can be understood 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 “the computer” (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? Existing as remnants on defunct websites, instant messaging boards, forums, or archived posts, what becomes of the life online, and necromantic half-life that remains, is downloadable, replicable and processed on and through digi-metaphysical means?
⁺‧₊˚‧ References + Further Readings ˚₊‧⁺
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 &NOW Production Residency & Scholarship
Factory Media Centre annually hosts our &NOW Production Residency & Scholarship (PR&S) program each winter. This is a valuable 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. Selections are based on project originality, its potential for artistic growth, and the use and integration of FMC as a production location. Click here to learn more about our &NOW Residency Program.
About Factory Media Centre
Factory Media Centre is Hamilton’s not-for-profit artist-driven resource centre for film, video, new media, installation, sound art, and other multimedia art forms. Our mission is to develop and support a vibrant, sustainable, creative, and diverse community of Members and non-Members within Hamilton and its surrounding region.