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Introduction

What does it mean to live together in digitally mediated isolation? What You See is What You Mean considers the potential of the internet as a public space for community gathering, while widening our understanding of ‘community’. As communicative operations move online, the entrenchment of disciplinary capitalist politics within these spaces becomes increasingly apparent. This project considers the ways we can circumvent the individualizing, commodifying qualities of our online spaces to explore otherwise positive forms of relationality, intimacy and solidarity.

What You See is What You Mean is an online project consisting of projects by artists Oscar Alfonso, Simon Fuh, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Sophia Oppel and Hearth - a new artist-run space in Toronto, co-directed by Benjamin de Boer, Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi and Philip Leonard Ocampo.



Goose Cakes

by Rowan Lynch & Simon Fuh

Simon Fuh, in collaboration with Rowan Lynch, will deploy the digital as a site to explore the flora and fauna he is quarantined in proximity to in order to consider relationships with the non-human. This project will consist of a “goose cam” livestream broadcasting a section of Wascana Lake in Regina, a man made lake created by intentional flooding. The area hosts many Canadian geese, as well as an avian conservation centre.


hostility index

by Benjamin de Boer & Sophia Oppel

Sophia Oppel, in collaboration with Benjamin de Boer, will create a navigable webspace that examines online environments as sites of hostile architecture, manufacturing desire in the hyper-capitalization of online interfaces. hostility index seeks to create the equivalent of a digital public space in which to loiter and consider the politics of the background, and the supposedly transparent or invisible.


DOB / Fecha de Nacimiento

by Sameen Mahboubi & Oscar Alfonso

DOB / Fecha de Nacimiento involves reading to a small cluster of baby Avocado trees, using them as a proxy through which to inform Alfonso's relationship to parents, friends, and colleagues during a pandemic, particularly by drawing on the traditions of immigrant and diasporic relationships and oral history narratives (being told about who you are, about family, and about “somewhere” else).

Oscar Alfonso and Sameen Mahboubi will document the unfolding of Oscar’s relationship with his avocado trees by recording reading sessions with the plants. Teaching the trees about the world and sharing stories from their own networks and relationships, organized into three conceptual streams. The wiki format allows for each recorded ‘story session’ to live independently in a communally built inter-connected network, while teaching them about themselves/providing a sense of identity.


I'm Feeling Lucky

by Philip Leonard Ocampo & Matt Nish-Lapidus

Essay by Philip Leonard Ocampo

Accompanying Writing

Using an image recognition relations dataset as the basis for automated found image assemblage, I'm Feeling Lucky creates unique real-time image sets for each of the 15000+ in the dataset. The set of terms is laid out on a single page as links, flowing to fill the screen. Each link leads to a collage/assemblage of images found through using the phrase as an image search, and arranging the results.

Matt Nish-Lapidus, in collaboration with Philip Leonard Ocampo, addresses the human labour behind machine learning, specifically aggregated data-sets that quantify and itemize the different types of relationships between objects/subjects in images online. I'm Feeling Lucky considers (and unravels) the linguistic poetics of code, and address the implications of addressing the human on an in-human scale.