Events

Please join us at the Coach House on Friday, September 13th, for the opening reception of our annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition! Drinks & refreshments will be provided, all are welcome.

Join us at the Coach House for a Monday Night Seminar led by CCT Director Scott Richmond. "Computing, Intimately" examines the Logo programming environment to trace a history of how computing became an intimate technology.

Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology for a game salon! Featuring discussion and critical play-alongs of a wide variety of single and multiplayer video games, old and new, the Game Salons will run semi-regularly on Mondays, 6–8pm. Hosted by PhD candidate and Centre Graduate Research Fellow Andy Lee, these events are drop-in based, open to the public, and aimed at connecting anyone and everyone interested in the critical and/or academic study and discussion of videogames.

Brooke Belisle (Stony Brook University) researches and teaches the comparative history and theory of media aesthetics. Her work focuses on the recurrent disruptions and possibilities of “new media”, exploring emergent formats and experimental practices that echo across different periods of technological and social transformation. Her book Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation (2023) uses phenomenological and media-archeological methods to relate A.I.-driven techniques of computational imaging to overlooked spatial strategies of early photography.

Brooke Belisle’s current book project Seeing Stars considers how the limits of the visible world have been repeatedly recast through changing techniques and aesthetics of astronomical imaging. In this Monday Night Seminar, she will present research on episodes from the early histories of astrophotography.

Extending our hands-on, low-stakes Playtime series from the last two years, the Centre will be running Playtime: Computer Club Edition this year. This year's Computer Club will be dedicated to the theme of Computing without "AI." Across approximately monthly meetings held on Monday evenings, members will explore, demo, experiment, tinker, design, and play with ways of disconnecting from the AI hype bubble. AI products are increasingly woven throughout our devices, operating systems, and software; we want none of it. We expect to work across modalities: software demo, case study, hands-on lessons, art-making, tech talks. Nerds of all stripes are welcome here; bring your laptop, your curiosity, and your pointed rejection of (or maybe just suspicious ambivalence about) Silicon Valley's vision for computing.

In This Machine Dreams of War: Operations Research, Videogames, and the American War in Vietnam, CCT graduate research fellow Andy Lee discusses the ways information theory and operations research influenced American military doctrine during the war in Vietnam, shaping everything from the chain of command to the conception of the battlefield as a space for warfare. Focused analysis on the military simulation (milsim) game ARMA III: S.O.G. Prairie Fire considers the ways that Vietnam as a space is simulated according to a militaristic way of seeing that subtends a variety of computational media today.

Andy Lee is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute and a graduate research fellow at the Centre for Culture and Technology. Her research focuses broadly on new media and the history of computation, with a theoretical focus on spatiality and embodiment in video games. Her dissertation investigates the relationship between the United States military and the video game industry, analyzing how military simulation games articulate logics of spatial simulation that are inherited from their origins as military training software.

Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology for a game salon! Featuring discussion and critical play-alongs of a wide variety of single and multiplayer video games, old and new, the Game Salons will run semi-regularly on Mondays, 6–8pm. Hosted by PhD candidate and Centre Graduate Research Fellow Andy Lee, these events are drop-in based, open to the public, and aimed at connecting anyone and everyone interested in the critical and/or academic study and discussion of videogames.

The Centre for Culture and Technology is delighted to host Observance, an exhibition of artwork by Jason Burton.

The exhibition will be on display at the Coach House from December 4th-14th. During gallery/open studio hours, the artist will be present and working in the space. All are welcome to drop in with their own art materials to work alongside each other!

Gallery / Open Studio Hours:

• Wednesday December 4th: 1:00-6:00PM
• Thursday December 5th: 1:00-6:00PM
• Friday December 6th: 5:00-8:00PM - Opening Reception
• Saturday December 7th: 1:00-6:00PM
• Tuesday December 10th - Saturday December 14th: 1:00-6:00PM

The Centre for Culture and Technology is delighted to host Observance, an exhibition of artwork by Jason Burton.

Please join us for an opening reception with refreshments from 5:00-8:00PM on Friday, December 6th. All are welcome, RSVP on Eventbrite is appreciated.

The exhibition will be on display at the Coach House from December 4th-14th. During gallery/open studio hours, the artist will be present and working in the space. All are welcome to drop in with their own art materials to work alongside each other!

Please join us at the Coach House from 6PM-8PM on Monday, January 20th, for a book launch of Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023, edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort (MIT Press, 2024).

Featuring co-editor Nick Montfort in conversation with multimedia artist Matt Nish-Lapidus, and readings from the book by Nick, Matt, and contributor Kavi Duvvoori, with a Q&A to follow. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

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Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology for a game salon! Featuring discussion and critical play-alongs of a wide variety of single and multiplayer video games, old and new, the Game Salons will run semi-regularly on Mondays, 6–8pm. Hosted by PhD candidate and Centre Graduate Research Fellow Andy Lee, these events are drop-in based, open to the public, and aimed at connecting anyone and everyone interested in the critical and/or academic study and discussion of videogames.

Join us at the Coach House for a Monday Night Seminar led by CCT graduate research fellow Cole Armitage:

"Indexing Dimensions: Animation and Performance in the Virtual YouTuber Media Mix"

Cole Armitage's research investigates the phenomenon of Virtual YouTubers, or “VTubers” – anime-style characters or personas that are brought to life through motion-tracking technology on livestreaming platforms like YouTube or Twitch. He explores VTubing as a form of mediated presence and performance emerging at livestreaming’s encounter with the Japanese anime media mix, and focuses on the way in which the technological, performative, and labour conditions in which VTubing occurs, from improvisation to unmuted microphones, unsettle and reshape the way that the IP-based personages populating the anime media ecology relate to the performing bodies which bring them to life.

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist Cory Doctorow presents the 2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture:

"With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It"

Held each year at Innis College's Town Hall, the Franklin Lecture features invited scholars who bring the critical study of science, media and politics to bear in their visions of new political futures. This is a collaborative venture cosponsored by the Centre for Culture and Technology, the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Department of Social Justice Education, Innis College's Writing and Rhetoric Program, and the Knowledge Media Design Institute.

Please note: The lecture will be viewable online via live-stream: https://vimeo.com/event/4945872

An all-day event (9AM-4:30PM) celebrating 25 years of the publication of Cyber-Marx (1999) by Nick Dyer-Witheford.

How to think about Cyber-Marx 25 years after its publication? What does cyber-Marxism look like today? In dialogue with the Witheford, +20 researchers will provide provocations and updates on cyber-Marxist concepts.

Copies of Witheford's latest book Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis (Verso, 2025), co-authored with Alessandra Mularoni, will also be available.

Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology for a game salon! Featuring discussion and critical play-alongs of a wide variety of single and multiplayer video games, old and new, the Game Salons will run semi-regularly on Mondays, 6–8pm. Hosted by PhD candidate and Centre Graduate Research Fellow Andy Lee, these events are drop-in based, open to the public, and aimed at connecting anyone and everyone interested in the critical and/or academic study and discussion of videogames.

Presented by the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (U of T Mississauga). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Dominic Gagnon.

Led by Lauren Cramer (U of T, Cinema Studies Institute):

We Outside! Plans for "Stolen Life"

Drawn largely from a personal experience of trying to write about black space during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, this talk acknowledges that there are ample reasons to stay Inside; still, it extends an invitation for listeners to join the black gatherings Outside. In dangerous times, black spatial practices often willfully reject the “safety” provided indoors—a simple search of the hashtag #WeOutside confirms as much. While subjects vary and are certainly closer than they appear, this phrase, used sometimes as an ad lib in rap songs or to caption social media posts, refers to the space where black sociality refuses a place in the overbuilt environment. Not to be confused with the outside that is free (a place we imagine as untouched by the concerns of property) Internet memes rightly caution, “Outside is expensive.” Facing the high cost of living Outside, particularly when compared to an alternative that offers to free us from the risks associated with spatial and aesthetic sensitivity, this talk draws from hip-hop visual culture, Internet humor, modes of black abstraction, and the lessons learned in times of crisis to draft plans for, what Fred Moten calls, “stolen life” Outside.

A book launch event for Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024). With filmmaker and author Chase Joynt, in conversation with artist and scholar æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil (U of T, Cinema Studies Institute).

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event - cash only, $20.

A book launch event for Geosonics: Listening Through Earth's Soundscapes (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Josh Dittrich (U of T, ICCIT). Featuring the author in conversation with artist and scholar Mitchell Akiyama (U of T, Daniels).

How do we listen to the earth? Working across sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Geosonics explores the material and metaphorical geology of the sonic environment. Listening does not take place in a pre-existing soundscape, but makes place as mutually constitutive sets of relations between listeners, media, and environments. Joining earth-scale sounds and everyday listening, Geosonics argues for the centrality of sound and listening in conceptualizing contemporary environmental crisis.

Led by CCT Faculty Fellow Patrick Keilty (U of T, Faculty of Information):

“Provenanced Aesthetics: Archival Contrivance in Dawson City: Frozen Time”

Archives are never simply a place where moving images are stored and preserved as a site for historical accumulation, material abeyance, and administrative power. Instead, through a close reading of sound and editing, this talk argues that 𝘋𝘢𝘸𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘺: 𝘍𝘳𝘰𝘻𝘦𝘯 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦 (Dir. Bill Morrison, 2016) reframes provenance as an aesthetic contrivance and an act of continuous creation that reminds us of history’s instability.

Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology for a game salon! Featuring discussion and critical play-alongs of a wide variety of single and multiplayer video games, old and new, the Game Salons will run semi-regularly on Mondays, 6–8pm. Hosted by PhD candidate and Centre Graduate Research Fellow Andy Lee, these events are drop-in based, open to the public, and aimed at connecting anyone and everyone interested in the critical and/or academic study and discussion of videogames.

The Centre for Culture and Technology presents its second annual Fellows Day conference. This conference convenes our 2024-25 Artist-in-Residence, Lucas LaRochelle, exhibition curator Talia Golland, and our Visiting Faculty Fellows: Kris Paulsen (Ohio State University), John-Thomas Tremblay (York University), and Hannah Zeavin (UC Berkeley).

Following talks by the artist and the curator reflecting on LaRochelle's solo exhibition Sometimes I forget what feeling felt like because I was never there when it happened at the Centre in fall 2024, the Fellows will present new scholarship engaging with the Centre's annual programming theme, "Absent Here, Present There", in conversation with the artwork.

Afterwards, come celebrate with food and drink at our closing reception on the patio of the U of T Faculty Club!

Following the Fellow's Day conference, please join us at the U of T Faculty Club (41 Willcocks St.) for a celebratory reception! Food & drink will be served. Come by between 6:30-8:30PM; no registration required.

A film screening of It's Not Brakhage (2024), a feature-length parafiction film by Toronto-based artist and filmmaker Miles Rufelds. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, moderated by CCT director Scott Richmond.

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Led by guest scholar Michael Richardson (UNSW Sydney), who will present a talk on his book Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data & Ecology after the End of the World (Duke, 2024). The book will be available for purchase at the event.

Dismantling the primacy of traditional human-based forms of witnessing is crucial if we are to reckon with an era of technoscientific war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture. Media and mediation are central to these intersecting crises—and to the human capacity to build new ways of knowing and being after the end of the world. In this talk, Michael Richardson shows how ecological, machinic, and algorithmic forms of witnessing can help u sbetter understand and respond. By shaking loose the human grip on witnessing, alternative and pluriversal communicative politics become possible. To illustrate this potential, this talk examines the mediations, affects, and communicative relations of nonhuman witnessing across an array of sites, from nuclear testing on First Nations land to autonomous drone warfare to algorithmic investigative tools.

*Please note that due to the holiday long weekend, this seminar will be held on a Tuesday.

Canada’s earliest born-digital artworks were long thought lost to contemporary audiences until they were recovered by a cross-country team of digital art archaeologists. On Friday, April 25, 2025, these artworks, made using the little-known Canadian technology Telidon, can be viewed as part of theonline exhibition Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story, presented by InterAccess. The exhibition was developed with funding from the Digital Museums Canada investment program and design leadership from Toronto-based agency, Tennis.

To mark its launch, The Centre for Culture and Technology is hosting a reception with InterAccess. The event will include a conversation hosted by Remember Tomorrow curator, Shauna Jean Doherty, with CCT director Scott Richmond and media artist Matt Nish-Lapidus, on the significance of Telidon on the wider telecommunications sector in Canada, with a screening of video interviews included in the online exhibition featuring artists, Douglas Porter, Nell Tenhaaf, and Paul Petro as well as librarian and Telidon art restorer John Durno.

This event will be in-person at the CCT's Coach House, and streamed on youtube:

LIVESTREAM LINK