The first was the locally beloved Sackville Film Society, which screens every Thursday evening at the Vogue theatre under the motto “Film should be experienced as a collective experience.” The film was Spectres of the Shortwave, a 2016 documentary directed by Amanda Dawn Christie that chronicled the history and eventual demise of the Radio Canada International transmission towers that took place on Sackville’s own Tantramar marshes. Now based in Montreal, Christie is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often takes up topics of radio transmission and analogue media, and they began the project while living in Sackville in 2009.

Spectres of the Shortwave presented a fully bilingual audio history of the people and phenomena of these radio towers. Accompanied by 35mm shots of the site and surroundings, the surround sound transmission shared the living histories of locals and soundscapes of the towers and marshes. The film was not just a compassionate piece of documentary but was imbued with the eerie soundtrack that the towers pulsed with global transmissions charged with massive amounts of electricity that echoed in radio waves through the marshes, quite literally playing out of people’s fridges or taps because the current was so strong.

The project had been a broad success upon its release at the 2016 Atlantic Film Festival and, having already been screened at the Vogue that same year, found no decrease in popularity seven years later when Thaddeus Holownia remarked to the crowd that this past Thursday’s screening was one of the best audience turnouts of the season. The Sackville Film Society has just two more screenings this season; information and schedules can be found on their Facebook page or the Vogue Cinema website.

The following night, students and community members alike gathered in a lecture hall in the Sir James Dunn building for Naila and the Uprising. The event was co-organized by the Women’s and Gender Studies and the Politics and International Relations Departments. The film tells the story of Naila Ayesh and Palestinian women’s roles in the First Intifada movement for Palestinian liberation from apartheid. Using a combination of classic documentary-style talking-head interviews and footage, director Julia Bacha illustrates Naila’s story using animated scenes to depict her time confined in a Jerusalem prison.

Naila and the Uprising provides a telling of Palestinian resistance leading up to the Oslo Accords that includes the crucial roles that women played in the First Intifada. A history that is overwhelmingly fronted by men, Bacha animates the histories of women’s groups that formed in the wake of many Palestinian men being deported or exiled for dissent. The film was accompanied by a post-screening discussion led by Dr. Lara Khattab and Dr. Krista Johnston, faculty of the Politics and International Relations Department and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department respectively. This screening was the first of a two-part series of documentaries put on by both departments; the second will be The Second Mother (Que Horas Ela Volta?) and will be shown in the R. P. Bell Theatre on Friday, March 31 from 7 to 9 p.m.

 To wrap up three nights of film, the Sackville Cinematheque put on their monthly screening, this time with Guy Maddin’s 2003 The Saddest Music in the World. The Cinematheque hosts monthly screenings of film favourites from throughout cinema history in a different location each time. Without a dedicated venue, the Cinematheque has taken up screenings at places such as the Owens Gallery, Struts & Faucet, and the Sackville Commons. Attendance is pay-what-you-can and always includes a brief introduction to the film by programmer Dino Koutras.

The Saddest Music in the World is an elaborate retro spectacle set in Depression-era Winnipeg, characteristic of Maddin and often considered his masterpiece. This is the first season that the Cinematheque is running and Koutras states that they are still testing the waters of which films and genres the community is interested in. As of now, he is programming a wide variety of classic, cult, or art films that often aren’t included in other screening schedules.

There is one final screening on the Sackville Cinematheque calendar for the month of April. Information can be found at @Cine_sack on Twitter or https://www.sackvillecinematheque.com/calendar.

Over the course of 2022, those of us on the internet saw in real time the public launch and subsequent popularity of deep learning (read AI) image generators like Dall-E or Midjourney. Quickly following these programs, repostable infographics and video essays alike began cropping up, attempting to catch up with the ethics, rights, and usage of this quickly evolving technology.

It’s not like this was the launch of brand-new technology; systems like these have been in development since the 1970s and accelerating for the past decade. Something about this development struck a particular nerve, causing the issue to metastasize across our digital forums. In the wake of the epic crashing and burning of the NFT crypto-market, we can fairly assume public wariness of technology and the art market was piqued. The assumed positions of artist versus tech bro were veterans returning to a discourse battle that, this time, would be even less effective for fixing the actual issues of exploitation in the tech.

Any person with a bit of art historical context under their belt is certainly aware that public outrage has been inherent to most developments of artistic style, media, or politics; especially for work that transgresses the enclosure of a gallery into the real world. It’s hard not to draw likenesses from events of art during the Industrial Revolution to now. For instance, when the camera was first made available, painters who had developed techniques of hyperrealistic painting were outraged that their work may become redundant with a photographer’s ability to produce an exact image much quicker. Not only did this not happen, but it also led to a dramatic style shift by forcing painters to produce work that a camera couldn’t.

You might notice this topic is mostly debated on an ambiguous global-ish scale, and this is because the whole turmoil becomes a bit redundant in contexts of Canadian art. Here, not so much is being bought and sold in the artist’s art world as it is being publicly funded, shown, and then stored in someone’s parents’ basement waiting for the next time there’s a call for sparse installations that use found trash as a device for “queering the outdoors.” And there are artists in this model who are using images generated by these sites to an actually engaging effect: the piece We’re all just doing our best (2023), which sold at Mount A’s own Sweetest Little Thing this past February, by Bridget Moser, a Toronto-based performance artist, was printed with the plasticky bubblegum image generated by an AI program. Hannah Epstein, Nova Scotian rug hooker and darling of most local BFA students, and her CritBot.AI have been making the digital rounds of the internet. This is a program that generates art criticism for any image input into the system, with levels of harshness from constructive to merciless.

The real debates of deep learning image-generators softwares that source from public images leads down many rabbit holes of fair-use gray areas, deepfakes, or source imagery being potentials for some pretty on-brand techno-capitalist evil. As with most topics of this brand, these issues boil down to faults in the capitalist system of art and technology that most complainants already suffer under.

The outright refusal of this technology being developed and made publicly available is a bit boring, and the alarmist narrative that AI will replace and make redundant people working and creating art is frankly insulting. For one, labour is valuable; the economic system we live in demands this. Realistic paintings are still highly valued and were not replaced by photos. To the optimist, human touch and thought will always add worth to art in ways that cannot be reproduced or, to the pessimist, capitalism requires that labour be valuable so that the working class can continue to be exploited. The roles and methods of an artist seem to be rigidly constructed with pillars of originality and skilled labour when in fact it is one of the time-honoured traditions of western art to copy and outsource labour. I think the main issue I take, both with critics and defenders of this technology, is that it isn’t being treated as a tool. There are limits to a machine that can only know (not think), but neural networks also contain more information than a person could dream of remembering. As an Artist: these networks seem like another method of generating images, a tool to use alongside other creative methods to produce artwork, and not something that threatens the work I already make.

Dall-E generated image from prompt “student writer produces an ai image to contextualize their article for this newspaper” 

A drag storytime event being hosted at the Moncton Library saw a turnout from both protesters and LGBTQ+ community counter-protesters after receiving online backlash leading up to the event. This marks another Canadian drag program disrupted by public outcry, but counter-protesters are hailing the event as a successful turnout to protect the safety of both attending young families and performers alike.

The Moncton Library storytime advertised stories centered around inclusivity and self-acceptance in both English and French, featuring Saint John-based drag king Justin Toodeep and Fredericton’s Barbra Wire. When both performers began receiving online harassment and threats leading up to the event, a group of local LGBTQ+ community members and allies began organizing a counter-protest in anticipation of protesters interrupting or intimidating families attending the storytime.

Mt. A. student Hannah Lucas was among as many as 100 counter-protesters and described the crowd as “cheerful, proud, and passionate.” As a queer performer, Lucas states that they felt compelled to attend in support: “I am able to go to work and do what I love in peace, and the drag performers are not.”  They were not the only supporter to travel in order to attend the counter-protest. Josh Vautour, President of Fierté Dieppe Pride, and a number of other drag artists reportedly cancelled their scheduled show in Fredericton to show up in support at the Moncton Library. Counter-protesters had cleared a wide berth for attending families and children and cheered when people passed by.

Lucas’ takeaway from the event was as much a sense of community as it was a personal revelation. “I work as a musical theatre performer in Moncton. Every day that I work, I get into costume: I put on a full face of makeup, a wig, an extreme push-up bra, a corset, a jumpsuit, and boots. I play a character, perform music, and dance,” they said. “We have had many shows where children have been in the audience. Not once have I been told that my performance was ‘unsafe’ for children, or that it was ‘tainting’ them.” Their point being, “when a drag performer pours their heart and soul into creating a persona and perfecting the look, and goes to do an innocent task that is fueling the future generation—reading them stories—it’s deemed as ‘unsafe’.”

Currently in the United States, anti-drag sentiment is being written into law and seriously threatens the safety and livelihoods of performers. While Canadian drag artists face no legislation that would criminalize their performances, public hate and threats still restrict their ability to perform safely. Especially with programming targeted at children or youth, risk increases, as online outrage takes particular issue when drag is situated outside of age-restricted venues. Vulnerable youth must then consider the risks of attending for fear of altercation, as we saw in February at the Calgary Public Library with one disruptor of a drag storytime facing harassment and hate-motivated charges.

Drag communities are built on years of resilience against adversity and discrimination and prevail still thanks to the advocacy and support of communities and allies. Counter protesters like those this past week in Moncton defend not just the individuals performing, but maintain safe spaces for families, youth, and community spaces to feature diversity and acceptance.

As well as establishing multiple entrance and merit-based scholarships, the 2021 Lassonde donation also provides yearly funds for a departmental residency, bringing established artists from across Canada to campus. Residencies like this program serve the dual purpose of supporting practicing artists in their careers as well as providing opportunities for students to work with and learn from artists working outside of Sackville.

As a first introduction to most students, Rewakowicz provided a broad overview of her extensive career in the grey area between art and science. The artist described how art can contribute to scientific research as much as it can draw inspiration from it and how issues as complex as climate change require multiple perspectives from many disciplines. For Rewakowicz, a residency in Sackville is a question of how to approach the topic of water scarcity in a place where that resource is so abundant.

This is Rewakowicz’s second residency at a university, her first being at l’École polytechnique in Paris, working in their hydrodynamic lab with researchers studying diminishing sources of fresh water and alternative methods of fog collection. This collaboration project resulted in the creation of a cloud machine (Nephelograph) that could produce clouds of mist in different programmed shapes. In collaboration with a neighbouring elementary school, this machine would spell out haikus that students had written in the form of letter-shaped clouds.

The Polytechnique residency research led to Rewakowicz completing a PhD at the same institution, graduating as an inaugural student for the art and science program. As an alumna of a forerunning interdisciplinary program and an artist who has built a practice out of combining disciplines, Rewakowicz believes that Mt. A students have a great opportunity at a small liberal arts school, saying this structure and proximity “allows [students] to communicate with people and between levels of organization.”

The Lassonde residency program also funds an internship program for students to gain experience working with artists. Rewakowicz plans to take on three students beginning March 6 and will be working collaboratively with them to develop a public workshop as part of her practice. She stresses the importance of this being a collaborative experience for students, saying “students [will] have just as much possibility for influence as for implementation of ideas.” Fourth-year fine arts student Shivanya Ra worked as an intern for last year’s Artist in Residence, Scarborough-based artist Tara Bursey, and had a positive and creative experience. They said, “we not only assisted in projects for Tara but were given the opportunity to create space with an artist in the field.”