artist in residence 2025–26

The Centre for Culture and Technology is currently accepting applications for its fourth annual Artist in Residence Program, for the period of July 1 - October 15, 2025. At the culmination of the residency, the artist will mount an exhibition of their work at the Centre for Culture and Technology’s Coach House in September 2025. The residency will take place under the aegis of our 2025-2026 programming theme "Artificial Stupidity", and is open to artists working in media-based art, very broadly understood, whose work involves the critical deployment of machine-learning technologies or uses any medium to draw insights about contemporary media technologies and engage questions of smartness, intelligence, and/or stupidity.

Artificial Stupidity:

We mean this term evocatively, not strictly; there is no particular or specific thing we understand by the term artificial stupidity. Rather, we welcome art and scholarship, research and conversation, that puts pressure on construction of the machine learning revolution as artificial intelligence.

How have logic, thinking, or reasoning machines relieved us of the burden of thinking for ourselves? How have people had to impoverish their sense of human thinking to imagine that current technologies are (always almost) capable of such thinking How can we understand the present of "AI" technologies in light of past moments of boosterism, vapourware, unfulfilled promises What might we learn from past moments of technological critique and activism--from the Luddites' smashing of machines to the Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason, to 1960s and 1970s critiques of computer culture? What might we do with machine learning technologies that goes beyond--or departs in an entirely different direction from--Silicon Valley and Big Tech ideas about these technologies--what they are, might become, or ought to do? What kinds of intelligence, labour, and creativity must we bolster in the face of LLMs and image GANs? What kinds of stupidity might we need to cultivate to reckon with a tech industry insistent on making everything as "intelligent" as possible?

The Artist in Residence will:

• Collaborate with the Centre's director to apply for funding in April 2025
• Be in residence at the Centre starting July 1, or as early as June 1
• Develop and mount a show that opens on September 5
• Hold the Centre's first Monday Night Seminar in the second half of September 2025
• Participate in the Centre's annual Fellows' Retreat
• Be available for class visits by University of Toronto graduate and undergraduate classes in September 2025
• Write an extended Artist statement, to be delivered as a lecture at the Centre's annual Fellows' Day conference in April 2026
• Work with the Centre's director to revise the statement for publication in the book