Sometimes I forget what feeling felt like
because I was never there when it happened

About the exhibition

The Centre for Culture and Technology is thrilled to present Sometimes I forget what feeling felt like because I was never there when it happened, a solo exhibition by 2024 Artist-in-Residence Lucas LaRochelle.

Featuring a speculative documentary film presented in a multimedia installation, Sometimes I forget what feeling felt like because I was never there when it happened is a continuation of LaRochelle’s ongoing project QT.bot, an artificial intelligence trained on the dataset of the community generated counter-mapping project Queering the Map: 700,000 text entries and the corresponding Google Street View panoramas of their tagged coordinates. The central video work and accompanying still images present a series of vignettes, chimeric fabrications of queer and trans narratives and the conjured locations and environments in which these scenes might unfold.

Sometimes I forget what feeling felt like because I was never there when it happened seeks the generative potential of dissociation – whether externally triggered or voluntarily induced. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, QT.bot fabulates on the absences of the archive through a methodology and aesthetic of dissociative worldmaking, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.

Produced as part of the third annual Artist-in-Residence Program and curated by Talia Golland, this project responds to the Centre’s 2024-2025 programming theme Absent Here, Present There, which engages questions of mediated presence and absence.

About the artist

CCT's 2024-2025 Artist-in-Residence Lucas LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.

LaRochelle has lectured, facilitated, and exhibited internationally, recently at the Guggenheim Museum (USA), Ars Electronica (Austria), Museum of Design Atlanta (USA), The PHI Center (Canada), Interaccess (Canada), Gallery Tata (Japan), ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (Australia), Digital Writer’s Festival (Australia), MUTEK (Canada), LINZ FMR Festival (Austria), Somerset House (UK), Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands), fanfare (Netherlands), OTHERWISE Festival (Zurich), Ada X (Canada), and SBC Gallery (Canada). They have presented research at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras School of Architecture, University of Cambridge and Stanford University, amongst other academic institutions.

Their project QT.bot was awarded an Honorary Mention for the 2023 Prix Ars Electronica in the Artificial Intelligence and Life Art category. Their project Queering The Map was awarded an Honorary Mention for the 2018 Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Communities category, nominated for the Lumen Prize for Digital Art and the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, and is included in the Library of Congress LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive.

Exhibition documentation