Factory Media Centre is thrilled to present un|becoming, a virtual exhibition featuring research/creation projects by students enrolled in CMSTMM 727: Cultural Production and the Environment in the Communication and New Media MA and Communication, New Media & Cultural Studies PhD programs at McMaster University.
Featuring Jessica Avery, Saadet Serra Hasiloglu, C. M. Lilley, Nathan Powell, and Elsie Sheppard, un|becoming mediates on the interrelations between humanity and the wider world, considering interconnection, contamination, plasticity, and flesh. Click through the tabs below to view each artists work.
CMSTMM 727 examines the various threads of historical and contemporary discourse around the environment, ecology, materiality, and human/non-human interrelationships, culminating in the making of artwork informed by the theoretical component. For more information on the program, visit the Communication Studies and Media Arts department site here.
Silent Infiltrations, Photography.
Silent Infiltrations is a photography series that explores the blurring boundaries between human and nonhuman through an examination of microplastics within the body. At the core of this project is a deliberate deconstruction of plastic dolls through heat application, deliberate fragmentation, and environmental exposure.
The photographic journey begins with close-up images that capture the doll’s “decayed flesh” and tumor-like growths. What initially resembles human body parts is revealed to be synthetic and contaminated. This uncanny recognition transitions to botanical-synthetic collages which merge the doll fragments with organic materials like leaves and meat to visualize the entanglement of nature, humans, and matter. The suspended mutated figures that follow, hung with dental floss and/or walking around, pose silent questions about agency, responsibility, and the invisible forces impacting our contaminated existence. The series concludes by commenting on the ingestion of microplastics. The images document the gradual “infection” of natural food with synthetic materials, questioning cycles of consumption, waste, and bodily incorporation.
Through these visual progressions, Silent Infiltrations reveals how plastic has become wild and untameable, entering and altering our bodies in ways beyond our control or comprehension.
Jessica Avery is a graduate student currently studying at McMaster University. Her research focuses on the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the creative industries. Specifically, she focuses on how these technologies are reshaping conceptions of labor, agency, authorship, and self-actualization. Drawing on relational-materialist theory and knowledge management frameworks, her work explores how AI tools simultaneously empower and constrain creative professionals.
ebscure, Video (06:07) & Digital Collages.
ebscure is an experimental project that seeks to de-formalize the traditional Turkish water marbling practice of Ebru. The project portfolio includes a video featuring layered ebru print scans alongside audio recordings of the ebru-making process. Additionally, there are two series of digital collages that incorporate ebru print cutouts, flax seeds, and clear tape.
The video aims to evoke a visceral sense of chaos within the audience. I hope that the materials exert their unpredictable presences and absences through the rapid, constantly changing edits of images and the echoes of sound. Although the ebru practice is typically quite slow, this contrast creates an unconventional opportunity to witness ebru in a new light.
The first collage series includes pieces titled “collision,” “ec/static,” “nesting out,” and “rayseeds.” This series is presented in black and white and encourages the viewer to reflect on various forms and stages of life, exploring how life and non-life blur into one another. The second collage series, titled “The Grain,” speculates about working with, against, and in spite of the grain. It highlights the complex role of the flax seed as a thickening agent in my ebru practice. Central to this series is the dispersion of scanner light through clear tape, which holds together two sheets of transparency film containing moving flax seeds.
Entrapment Likely, Audio (Part One 7:40, Part Two 6:28)
A two-part audio walk series exploring human interconnection with – or entrapment within – the worlds of and beyond the Anthropocene, Entrapment Likely guides listeners through sites of nature within Hamilton, Ontario’s industrial sector. Part I considers Hamilton Beach, the lost and discarded things found along the shores of Lake Ontario, and the inaudible yet omnipresent electromagnetic radiation from the nearby hydro towers. Part II moves slightly west and across the busy QEW to Windermere East Park, exploring the depths of a sediment pond, rows of abandoned birdhouses, and a neighbouring recycling plant.
Each part features a collection of thought-objects, placed together in assemblage to highlight their shared and contradictory meanings. While these meanings are somewhat open to the listener’s interpretation, the artist owes a debt of inspiration to a number of thinkers for their initial conception and development: Donna Haraway’s discussions of Anthropos/the Anthropocene, compost, and the speculative; Alexis Shotwell’s framings of contamination, permeability, and practices of noticing; Jane Bennett’s theorizing around assemblage and the agency of things; and Stacy Alaimo’s thinking on dirt are all central to this work.
While Entrapment Likely was site-specific in its creation (using audio taken from each site, and text based on the artist’s experiences there) it can be listened to anywhere. Its two parts can also be experienced in any order – whichever part is chosen first will help to establish the framing of the second.
Entrapment Likely I
Entrapment Likely II
“But Wait, There’s More!”, Video (3:46)
The Ear Flower Hears, Video (0:40) & Photography.
Elsie Sheppard is a first-year PhD student at McMaster University in the Communications, New Media, and Cultural Studies program. Her research interests include critical data studies and data justice. Regarding creative interests, Elsie works mainly with crochet. She crochets flowers, clothes, blankets, and more.
About Factory Media Centre
Factory Media Centre is Hamilton’s not-for-profit artist-driven resource centre for film, video, new media, installation, sound art, and other multimedia art forms. Our mission is to develop and support a vibrant, sustainable, creative, and diverse community of Members and non-Members within Hamilton and its surrounding region.
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