Overview of Experience and Concept
Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, Iain Soder, and Rea McNamara, text-based navigation for Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024, curated by Rea McNamara for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour introduced a new form of exhibition navigation to the DETAIL project.
Rather than using the standard video game-style keyboard controls, WASD, to navigate 2D or 3D space, the exhibition introduced a text-based navigation system that increased accessibility for audiences without gaming experience. This approach wove together storytelling and interaction, with carefully crafted character writing that enhanced the exhibition’s themes. The exhibition leveraged narrative design to facilitate interaction and audience onboarding while the character himself was drawn from one of the featured artworks. With a rebellious AI Chatbot character guiding the audiences, the exhibition made visible the missing datasets in our collective understanding of the labour that is mothering.
The exhibition was designed primarily for mobile browsers, with support for several desktop web browsers. Our platform choice was directly informed by the exhibition’s target audience profile: new parents. The curator, who had recently become a new parent, wanted to prioritize this highly accessible device for the exhibit.
For the first time in the DETAIL pilot project series, we released an early interactive “teaser,” featuring the narrative onboarding but none of the featured artwork. This gave us an opportunity to promote the exhibition webpage earlier than past exhibitions. It also enabled us to collect a wider range of audience feedback on the narrative navigation system and integrate changes before the final exhibition launch. The exhibition ran from May 9 to August 11, 2024, on the Gallery’s website.
Participating Artists and Artworks
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour featured the work of parents, caregivers, and educators. The artwork featuring in the exhibition included 3D environments, standard and 360-degree video, digital images, and net art, all of which had to be adapted to fit the format of the 2D narrative navigation system.
Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, Iain Soder, and Rea McNamara, text-based navigation for Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024, curated by Rea McNamara for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.
Audiences navigated to the artworks through interactions with Edgar, the narrator of Wake Windows and a character resurrected from Claudia Cornwall’s computer fiction book, Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer (Vancouver: Nerve Press, 1982). Each artwork had unique ways of existing withing the installation and as each one was loading, Edgar would give brief instructions for viewing and interacting with it. All artworks had their own individual Unity scenes, and audience members could return to the main navigation menu by prompting Edgar’s return (tapping/clicking the screen would prompt Edgar to appear in the top-left corner) and then selecting his image.
Edgar was featured throughout the exhibition as a narrator or docent figure, requiring close collaboration between narrative designer Iain Soder and curator Rea McNamara to maintain the character tone and exhibition themes. ASCII illustrations from Claudia Cornwall’s original book were also featured in the exhibit. These images were displayed with a simulated page-turning effect, with buttons on either side of the images used to turn the pages.
Alejandra Higuera and Magnolia Higuera, digital animation and GIF series, 2019–2024, as installed in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024, curated by Rea McNamara for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.
Alejandra Higeura and her daughter, Magnolia Higeura, collaborated on a series of digital animations (2018–2024) with accompanying audio. These were displayed vertically, reminiscent of the layouts of Tumblr and other image blogs. The audio automatically began playing when the scene was loaded. The videos were large enough that the mobile browser didn’t cooperate in playing them all synchronously. Instead, a single frame from each video was displayed and when clicked, the image would enlarge and play the whole animation.
Faith Holland in collaboration with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter, Peek & Play Magic Maker, 2024, as installed in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024, curated by Rea McNamara for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.
The installation of the net art project Peek & Play Magic Maker (2024), by Faith Holland in collaboration with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter, involved recreating it as a native Unity interactive scene. The project was originally planned to run in the web browser but, to fulfil exhibition timelines and reduce potential resulting conflict from nesting interactive web-embeds, we rebuilt it. The project involved mounting and connecting all the original audio and visual assets, adding a text-input system, and connecting the project to the artist’s server.
Wednesday Kim, Sleep Deprived Workers, 2019–2020, as installed in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024.
Wednesday Kim’s Sleep Deprived Workers (2019–2020) was a 3D spatial installation featuring 3D models, animated graphics, and a four-channel video installation. This artwork involved a substantial break from the narrative-based navigation within the rest of the exhibition, so we chose to create an on-rails automated navigation system. A series of waypoints were set to display the video series and key features of the 3D world. Buttons to the left and right of the screen enabled audiences to travel between the waypoints, with the waypoints set to loop infinitely.
Lauren Lee McCarthy, Surrogate, 2020–present, as installed in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024.
The installation of Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Surrogate (2020–present) was adapted from its larger body of work, specifically an interactive website. The original interactive website featured video and audio chapters that were prompted by audiences to play in succession. The website was not compatible with mobile browsers, which meant that we had to find another way to display it in our mobile-specific exhibition. Instead of dividing the unique video and audio pairings for recreating it as a Unity scene, the artist screen-recorded the website. We broke up that longer video into corresponding chapters and added the standard web media player controls (pause/play, timeline, and playhead) as well as buttons that allowed you to skip to the previous or next chapter.
Rory Scott, Impermanence | Lost Shelters, 2019, as installed in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024.
Rory Scott’s Impermanence | Lost Shelters (2019) is a VR/360-degree film that was installed as a video texture on the interior of a 3D sphere. The work also included a selection of scanned photographs that were used in the creation of the work. These photographs were custom programmed to slowly spawn in front of the 360-degree video and then float away from the audience, disappearing over time. To support viewing the entire video, the audience could click and drag their perspective around both horizontal and vertical axes.
Rodell Warner, Artificial Archive: The Wisest, Kindest, Most Beautiful Humans, 2024, as installed in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024.
The installation for Rodell Warner’s Artificial Archive: The Wisest, Kindest, Most Beautiful Humans (2024) image series was custom built, displaying the image series as multiple postcards together on one screen. Audiences clicked to draw any particular image into focus, clicked again to reveal the back side of the image through a rotation animation, and clicked a third time to dismiss it and return to the overall display.
Skawennati, She Falls for Ages, 2017, as installed in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, 2024.
Skawennati’s She Falls for Ages (2017) machinima was installed as a single-channel video with custom controls. These controls followed standard web media players, including a pause/play button and timeline with playhead. With the video running over twenty minutes, we wanted audiences to be able to watch it in its entirety over multiple sessions.
Back-End Structure
To create a smooth experience across multiple web browser software and phone hardware options, we were cautious about the size of the exhibition and its structure.
All artwork content was stored on external AWS servers, allowing the exhibition to run efficiently in mobile browsers. We worked with the Gallery’s web developers to ensure proper presentation of the exhibition within iframes across mobile and desktop devices. We also added multiple loading bars to the exhibition itself to keep visitors informed of their progress.
Our Approach to Challenges
Mobile web browser compatibility
The journey to mobile compatibility led us to upgrade to Unity 6 beta, which improved mobile support but created some unexpected challenges for audiences using the same web browser on desktop. We solved this by adding prompts on the exhibition website that guided visitors to compatible browsers when needed. We used an automated testing platform to test various combinations of phones and web browsers and kept a spreadsheet to track which combinations were the most consistent.
iOS video playback
On iOS devices, only the Safari browser consistently reduced video buffering/stuttering. We worked with the web developers to add code that detected which operating system, device, and browser the audience was using. If they were using a combination that we had found to be less reliable, it would encourage them to switch browsers on their device.
Managing browser memory
Web browsers have a predetermined amount of data they can load at any time. We previously experienced this challenge with the THERE IS NO CENTRE exhibition and worked with cloud hosting to compensate for the memory limitations. But mobile browsers are even more limiting, and each browser also has different limitations. To prevent browsers from becoming overwhelmed, we designed the system to load artwork only when visitors accessed it, then unload it when they returned to the menu.
Crafting a narrative-based navigation system
Inspired by text-based adventure games, we created a narrative-based navigation system in collaboration with narrative designer Iain Soder, curator Rea McNamara, and participating artist and author Claudia Cornwall. Together we resurrected the character Edgar, an artificial intelligence from her children’s book Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer (Vancouver: Nerve Press, 1982). Edgar was both the exhibition’s docent and a character with his own perspectives on the exhibition and its themes. The audience would navigate through the exhibition by selecting responses to dialogue from Edgar or the “curator/mom-friend” character who was a stand-in for the curator herself.
Developing the narrative involved inviting Claudia Cornwall to create a new monologue written from Edgar’s perspective and prompted by themes in the exhibition. The curator then established the narrative style of the “curator/mom-friend” character and made suggestions toward the directions both characters could take. This was done initially using the open-source tool, Twine. Early drafts using Twine were passed between the curator and narrative designer, and the narrative designer then expanded the narrative branches using Pixel Crusher’s Dialogue System for Unity.
Encouraging repeat visits
The narrative navigation system in Wake Windows included multiple narrative responses the audience could choose. The characters of Edgar and the curator/mom-friend would respond accordingly; some of these response options were limited to certain times of day, corresponding to the audience’s device location and the actual time. This strategy both emphasized curatorial concepts of the exhibition and encouraged repeat visits.
While the exhibition’s opening dialogue helped establish important themes and the navigation’s flow, we recognized that returning visitors might want to skip directly to the artwork. Our solution was to implement a cookie system in the browser that remembered if someone had visited before, offering them the choice to either experience the full narrative again or jump straight to the artwork collection. The cookie directly communicated with the Unity exhibition file that would prompt a different starting menu for repeat visitors.
Collecting and implementing feedback
With previous exhibitions, we tracked feedback from the artists and curators and any requested changes through standard checklists. Wake Windows required a more detailed solution as the unique combinations of hardware/software highlighted different bugs. We created a Google Form that was circulated with early versions of the exhibition, that requested information including:
- time accessed (automatically generated);
- web browser used;
- device and OS used;
- details on the issue or request;
- screenshots to illustrate.
The form populated a spreadsheet that we then used to keep track of bugs and our progress rectifying them.
Invited Response
by Jeanette Bisschops
The exhibition Wake Windows: The Witching Hour arrived in a world perpetually on fire, engulfed in enduring war, climate disaster, and technological advancements. We’re experiencing a deep nostalgia for a less technologically saturated world while simultaneously nursing an irresistible curiosity for the potential of more, more, more. And when I say “we,” I am especially thinking of the generations that (partially) grew up pre-internet, who are now finding themselves caring for their own offspring, aging family members, and other kin.
Humans can’t help but have their minds set on procreation and expansion—it’s ingrained in us. We are pulled towards creating new life, building new worlds. Historically, that materialized very close to home, by creating literal extensions of ourselves. But we also found more violent ways to expand outside, through battles, wars, and the colonization of lands and peoples. Venturing into outer space wasn’t enough either, and so we engineered digital life in cyberspace. Edgar, the narrator of Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, was resurrected by the curator from a computer fiction book and returns us to the utopian potential cyberspace was thought to have in the 1990s and early aughts, before it became just another battleground. Edgar doesn’t agree with the skepticism around artificial intelligence that he finds online, wondering why there are not more headlines like “WHY ARE HUMANS SO DANGEROUS” or “THE 15 BIGGEST RISKS OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE.” What fellow AI optimists might not want to acknowledge is that cyberspace’s precursor, ARPANET, was designed and coded by the US Department of Defense. And that AI was not just engineered by humans, it is nursed by a very skewed section of the human species (very white, very male). And while Christopher Wylie, the data analyst and Cambridge Analytica (and, by extension, Facebook) whistleblower, once compared machine learning to raising a baby, AI “babies” are not encased in a physical vessel, a body as we humans know it. If artificial intelligence can be thought to have a body, those bodies are data centres and power stations, which take up so much energy that Google announced, in October 2024, they’re backing the construction of seven small nuclear reactors to power them.
These new bodies and worlds are hosted far away from the reality of our unruly, unpredictable human bodies. Bodies we nevertheless try to control, increasingly so, but which house mysterious needs, wants, and feelings. Actual babies, especially in their “witching hour,” will definitely not let us forget about the mysteries of life’s fussiness. AI babies and toddlers, at the very least, run the risk of growing up with some major personality disorders, scarred by inevitable emotional and physical neglect of their parents caused by this physical remove.
The artists in Wake Windows: The Witching Hour engage with our ever-evolving relationship with AI, injecting it with proposals of care and mothering, and the complexity and messiness that comes with them. The varied ways this exhibition makes visible the missing datasets in our collective understanding of the invisible labour that is mothering, and thus offering a different way of understanding parenting and worldbuilding, reminded me of the matrixial borderspace theory by Bracha L. Ettinger. Ettinger, an artist and psychoanalyst, questions the established (phallic) construct of the world and worldbuilding, and suggests the matrixial as a supplementary perspective. We are, Ettinger says, all border-linked to the female body. In the matrixial field, the I and non-I (or the Other) simultaneously inhabit a shared borderspace, where neither absolute separation nor symbiotic assimilation is possible. In this field, we become a participant, a partial subject, because we now have to participate in continual re-attunements to the other. She highlights the importance of matrixial affects, primary compassion in particular. Compassion, as an acknowledgement that we might not know where we end and the other starts, and that we can’t feel what the other feels, but that we are able to at least comprehend the other. The mother role, here, acts as an action of transformation (m-other). In this dimension we can explore what it means to take care of someone else, to be present in the other’s becoming, and how we change in that process. We can learn from the mother-infant dyad, in which we are never entirely fused nor totally lost.
A majority of the artists in Wake Windows explore a type of shareable dimension, each in their own way, which makes me wonder if we can use theories such as these to reconceive not just what goes into these AI models, but also how we relate to them? To acknowledge that we’re one and the same, and enter a field where the affective bonds of digital and physical life can shape new creative development and expressions. AI, like people, can have a propensity for reformation and the shape of this reform is entirely dependent on the people who forge them.
Additional Programming
Live events
Virtual exhibition opening
Similar to the preceding pilot project exhibitions, Wake Windows: The Witching Hour opened with a virtual vernissage featuring the artists, curator, and MacKenzie staff. Introductions were given by the curator and MacKenzie staff. We saved the narrative for audiences to explore and instead highlighted each artwork while the participating artists spoke briefly about their work. Pre-recorded introductions were also played to represent the artists unable to attend the live vernissage.
IRL artists’ panel
Curator Rea McNamara secured additional funding to support the research and development behind the exhibition, including a live in-person event at the PIX Film Collective (Toronto). This panel included the artists and collaborators Alejandra and Magnolia Higuera, and Faith Holland and Hildegard Holland-Watters, as well as curator Rea McNamara and developer Cat Bluemke.
Asynchronous programs
Let’s play video
Curator Rea McNamara interviewed Alejandra Higuera and Faith Holland, two of the participating artists whose work involved collaborating with their young children. The video followed a “let’s play” format, with the artist-moms and their children navigating the exhibition, and Edgar’s responses to their choices, together.
Research resources
In preparation for the exhibition, curator Rea McNamara conducted studio visits with artists who are parents, caregivers, and educators, and interviewed early childhood educators and even anonymous moderators from online parenting forums. The interviews were edited, abridged, organized according to the exhibition’s thematics, and made available on the exhibition’s website. An extended bibliography was also provided as part of the exhibition.
Other Pilot Projects
THERE IS NO CENTRE
In this exhibition the visual language of gaming is adapted to explore how the presentation of an artwork in a digital environment shifts the viewer’s role as a player and challenges traditional exhibition-making norms.
Learn More
Echoes from the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals
The virtual exhibition was a first-person, multi-platform, multi-user experience supporting voice and audio for virtual reality headsets and desktop.
Learn MoreResources
Collaborator Biographies
The artists, designers, and technologists who contributed to DETAIL’s digital art exhibitions.
Acknowledgements
The individuals, organizations, and partners who supported and contributed to the DETAIL digital art exhibitions.