About the exhibition

The Centre for Culture and Technology is delighted to present ERROAR!, a solo exhibition by 2025-2026 Artist-in-Residence Xuan Ye.

Since 2018, Ye’s ERROAR! series transforms the hallucinations, biases, and glitches of human-machine coupling into multimedia installations. Here, data shrinks, training slows, and renders fray, spilling errant stories and frequencies that rewire our perception, affect, and imagination. These works materialize the “cognitive distortion” of artificial neural networks as speculative artifacts, forming a future archaeology of now where technological errors are paleocybernetic fossils, calcified as evidence of a recursive hunger. In this self-devouring loop, objectivity is swallowed and regurgitated as resistance. Every algorithmic stumble is a fossil-in-waiting, and every glitch is an escape route. With the latest installment of this ongoing series, ERROAR! expands into absurdist speech opera, remixing machine-generated quasi-English into a chorus of algorithmic dysfluency.

Produced as part of the fourth annual Artist-in-Residence Program and curated by Talia Golland, this project responds to the Centre’s 2025–2026 programming theme “Artificial Stupidity", which engages the politics, aesthetics, and economics of machine learning to put pressure on the construction of these technologies as artificial intelligence.

About the artist

Xuan Ye makes noise as a compass, navigating the eddies of art, music, and technology. Their practice unfolds in vibrational world-building via software, sound, image, installation, performance, publication and teaching. Through improvisation and computation, X traces the material and metaphysical waves across the technological, biological, and ecological resonances to evoke illegible pulses and dissonant pauses that stutter meaning, tremble systems. Their work has been exhibited at the MOCA Toronto (2022), UCCA Shanghai (2022), UQAM and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), MUTEK Montreal (2021), and the Goethe-Institut Beijing (2018), among others. They have been recognized with awarded residencies at ZHdK (2024) and Pro Helvetia (2023) and have received grants and scholarships from the Canada Council for the Arts and the SSHRC. Their practice has also been critically featured and reviewed in Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue 111), the Goethe-Institut (Montreal), KUNSTFORUM International (Issue 257), and Musicworks (Issue 136). Hailing from China, X lives in Toronto/Tkaronto and serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.

Exhibition Documentation: