The Witching Hour
Led by a rebellious AI Chatbot, this interactive online exhibition makes visible the missing datasets in our collective understanding of the labour that is mothering. Featuring the work of parents, caregivers, and educators, artists include Claudia Cornwall, Alejandra Higuera with Magnolia Higuera, Faith Holland with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter, Wednesday Kim, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Rory Scott, Skawennati, and Rodell Warner.
This exhibit ran 9 May – 11 August 2024. Click the button below to launch documentation of the exhibition.
Wake Windows is an exhibition series exploring how the labour and care of young children can be generative for digital literacy and collaborative action. In referring to the periods in which babies and toddlers are awake before needing a nap or bedtime, Wake Windows tracks the artistic expressions possible amidst the lurking, making and imagining of reproductive futures and early childhood education.
Led by a rebellious AI Chatbot, this interactive online exhibition Wake Windows: The Witching Hour guides viewers through interactive and time-based art by artists who are parents, caregivers, or educators who engage with public databases and “living archives.”
In touching on maternal worldbuilding and our ever-evolving relationship with AI, Wake Windows: The Witching Hour intends to make visible the missing datasets in our collective understanding of the often invisible labour that is mothering. From animations to machinimas or virtual reality (VR) to interactive narratives, the digital exhibition traces how the artists’ creative outputs have shifted since taking on this care work.
Curated by Rea McNamara, participating artists and collaborators include Claudia Cornwall, Alejandra Higuera with Magnolia Higuera, Faith Holland with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter, Wednesday Kim, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Rory Scott, Skawennati, and Rodell Warner.
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour ran 9 May – 11 August 2024.
Rea McNamara is a writer and curator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her curatorial work has long been shaped by networked counterpublics’ participatory cultures, particularly the collaborative processes of transformative fandom, alongside a social practice shaped by organizing community-based art initiatives. In her research, she often focuses on the emergence of otherness and hybridity within digital identity formations, informing an on/offline curatorial approach that connects and capacity-builds.
McNamara has previously held curatorial and public programming positions with the Gardiner Museum and Drake Hotel, and been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She has curated and organized a range of exhibitions and public projects, including dis-ease (Vector Festival, 2021), Obsessive Pop Tendencies (Pleasure Dome, 2019), Community Arts Space (Gardiner Museum, 2016-2019), and Safe Space (Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2024). In 2011, she founded the art party series Sheroes, which engaged with female celebrity fandom through music, performance, installation, and internet-based art. Her work has been presented at The Art Gallery of Ontario and is in the Whitney Museum of American Art collection.
Additionally, McNamara has written about art, culture and the internet for frieze, Art in America, The Globe and Mail, and been commissioned to write exhibition texts for Trinity Square Video, the Remai Modern, and Daniel Faria Gallery. From 2020-2021, she was the Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellow for Curators with Hyperallergic. She also gives talks, moderates panels, and lead workshops on fandom, curatorial practice, and the labour of mothering for The Toronto Public Library, Toronto Metropolitan University, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and more.
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour is the third in a series of digital exhibitions created through the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s Digital Exhibitions Toolkit and Art Installation Launcher (DETAIL)—a newly developed resource championing the development of art exhibitions for digital platforms.
DETAIL provides institutions, curators, and artists with tools to help produce interactive digital art exhibitions. DETAIL incorporate solutions for mobile and desktop access to artworks created in virtual reality, augmented reality, exhibitions for video game consoles, in-person interactive experiences, and online browser-based exhibitions. The MacKenzie Art Gallery is hosting three digital exhibitions built with DETAIL between 2023-24 to demonstrate the toolkit’s capabilities. Funded by the Canada Council for the Art’s Digital Strategy Fund, DETAIL will be publicly launched in late 2024.
DETAIL is developed by Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll, Digital Exhibitions Consultants at the MacKenzie Art Gallery.
Maternal Worldbuilding
Alejandra Higuera and Magnolia Higuera
Alejandra Higuera and Magnolia Higuera
Agua_2, 2019
Digital animation, 6 sec
Agua, 2019
Digital animation, 15 sec
House With Slide, 2024
Digital animation, 9 sec
Chorro De Agua, 2024
Digital video, 2 sec
Drawing my feelings, 2023
Digital animation, 2 sec
While In Bacalar Lagoon, 2018
Animated GIF
While In Verona Lake, 2023
Animated GIF
Mamá and Magno, 2024
Digital animation, 5 sec
Nurturing Threads, 2024
Video, 2:24 min
Courtesy of the artists.
In these short digital animations and GIFs, the Colombian-born artist Alejandra Higuera weaves documented, everyday digital traces of her daughter Magnolia’s actions and gestures, encompassing her early years in collaborative mother-daughter artistic work. Some of these works, including the video Nurturing Threads, were created during a 2023 MOTHRA artist-parent residency at Toronto’s Artscape Gibraltar Point. By employing animation techniques, such as hand-drawn illustration and alpha channel masks, across a range of documentation and footage, Higuera moves towards her own definition of maternar. Otherwise known as the Spanish word for mothering, Higuera employs the term to encompass how she has crafted an affective bond with her daughter through co-learning, culminating in their shared creative growth and vision.
Alejandra Higuera (she/her) is a queer multidisciplinary, visual storyteller focusing on video, illustration, animation, embroidery, and projection. Her work focuses on themes of migration, feminism, memory, grief, and ritual. She is committed to creating spaces for dialogue about the complexities of our experiences that celebrate our differences. Further, as a mother/artist, she understands that she is learning from her child as much as she is teaching her. Higuera has received grants and residencies from the Ontario Arts Council, MOTHRA, and SummerWorks Lab. Her work has been presented by the Regent Park Film Festival, the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, the Latino Canadian Cultural Association, and TO Live.
Magnolia Higuera is a 7-year-old kid who loves adventures, nature, and being creative. Sometimes she dances, sometimes she draws, and sometimes she sings; above all she loves playing: making worlds with rocks, empty toilet paper rolls, or just with a marker and paper. Magnolia collaborates with her mamá Alejandra Higuera making videos, gifs, installations, songs, and rugs.
Rory Scott
Rory Scott
Impermanence | Lost Shelters, 2019
VR/360 film, 3:01 min, alongside a selection of scanned photographs
Courtesy of the artist.
Othermothers, a concept from social theorist Patricia Hill Collins, describes maternal-oriented care work—such as multigenerational households or care collectives—that provides care to a child, whether they are kin or not. Othermothers and mothering are both concepts that owe much to Black feminist thought. In this early VR work, Scott meticulously recreates her grandmother’s living room, cataloguing its influence of opulence and humility upon her cosmically inclined work. “Ornate picture frames and cut crystal candy dishes,” she divulges in intimate detail via voiceover, “Lucite with gold flakes, chandelier pendants hanging off lamps. So many things to look at that seem so old, so rich, so magical.” Accompanying the moving-image work is a curated selection of photographs Scott shot of the living room before her grandmother’s passing, along with archived family photos illuminating Scott’s process-making.
Rory Scott is a multidisciplinary artist whose work utilizes animation, extended-reality (AR & VR), and handcrafted means to create emotive environments and re-imagined life. Through both digital and handmade means, Scott explores the ideas of impermanence, the passage of time and the impacts of technology on the evolution of humanity, as well as the important role that patterns play in shaping our personal and collective lives. Her project Impermanence, which began in 2010, is an ongoing documentation of her life and struggle with accepting change and mortality. Through recorded thoughts, sounds and the use of retro sci-fi imagery, her work confronts and reconciles the passage of time by juxtaposing the old with the new.
Skawennati
Skawennati
She Falls for Ages, 2017
Machinima, 21:02 min
Courtesy of the artist and ELLEPHANT (Montréal).
Since 2005, AbTeC Island—short for Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace—has been a sovereign Indigenous environment in Second Life, the multiuser virtual world. It’s also where Skawennati creates her machinimas, essentially movies made by screen-capturing the action of customized avatars-as-actors in custom-built virtual environments. Maternal worldbuilding, then, operates two-fold for the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist. She Falls for Ages is an Indigenous sci-fi futurist re-telling of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) origin story. A pregnant astronaut bravely leaves her dying world above the sky, eventually giving birth to a new world. But in creating this work within the envisioned decolonized world that is AbTeC Island, Skawennati is shaping a future where a self-determined past can thrive.
Skawennati is a visual artist. Her machinimas, still images, textiles and sculptures have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others. Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a research-creation network based at Concordia University. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal.
Early Childhood Education
Rodell Warner
Rodell Warner
Artificial Archive: The Wisest, Kindest, Most Beautiful Humans, 2024
AI-generated images installed as 3D animated graphics
Courtesy of the artist.
During his son’s brief admission to a Jamaican children’s hospital, the Trinidadian artist reflected on the lack of accessible, peer-led support available to parents like him who are consumed but also isolated by caring for their young, sick child. Currently living in the United States with his family, Warner has been considering what it means for parents from the Caribbean and its diaspora to question their inheritance of authoritarian parenting.
These imagined postcard artifacts from his Artificial Archive series use a text-to-image AI generator to intervene in the traditional Caribbean photographic archive. Warner’s prompts resulted in fictional parent-and-child portraits, alongside postcard backsides with gentle parenting advice that deliberately circulate a past-future without authoritative historicism and generational trauma. “The project is where I conjure images that I would have liked to see included in the photographic archive,” explained Warner in a recent text about the series for the Caribbean online magazine PREE.
Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. His work often explores the intersections of race, nature and technology, drawing on personal and institutional archives to rethink the past, and on digital processes to index emancipatory futures. His digital animations using archival photography and archival illustration have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at Trinity Square Video. His digital animations using hand-drawn digital 3D renderings of plants he has encountered throughout his increasingly diasporic life have also been exhibited at the Perez Art Museum Miami. Rodell works between Port of Spain in Trinidad, Kingston in Jamaica, and Austin, Texas in the U.S.
Faith Holland in collaboration with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter
Faith Holland in collaboration with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter
Peek & Play Magic Maker, 2024
Net art
Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery (New York).
Hildegard Holland Watter is an emerging artist who has worked across performance, drawing, and installation. She is also the daughter of the artist and educator Faith Holland. In this mother-daughter collaboration with artist Ben Bogart, who has long worked with generational computational processes, hundreds of Holland Watter’s scanned toddler artworks became the training dataset for an AI model. In Peek & Play Magic Maker’s playful, electronic toy interface, pressing upon the brightly lit buttons results in featured prompts, such as mermaids or dinosaurs, that generate a toddler-like AI output. Through this interactive net art piece, the artists use caregiving practices to teach an AI model in order to gesture towards ethical AI “training” methods.
Additional Credits
Technical Support
Chris Collins, Cat Bluemke, and Jonathan Carroll
Illustrations
Tony Halmos
Sounds
Hildegard Holland Watter and Faith Holland
Special Thanks
Pratt STEAMplant and Microscope Gallery
Faith Holland is an artist, curator, critic, and educator whose multimedia practice focuses on gender, intimacy, and technology. She has exhibited at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and DAM Gallery (Berlin). Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times UK, Elephant, Hyperallergic, Broadly, and The Observer. She is the recipient of a 2021 New York State Council on the Arts grant. She has presented solo exhibitions with TRANSFER (New York/Miami), L’Unique (Caen, France), and in 2023 presented her first solo exhibition with Microscope Gallery (New York).
Ben Bogart (they/them) is a non-binary agender adisciplinary artist working for two decades with generative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision and machine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences in Canada, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Canadian Embassy at Transmediale in 2017 and the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018.
Hildegard Holland Watter is an emerging preschooler artist who works across performance, drawing, and installation. She performed as part of Faith Holland’s Hard/Soft installation at Spring/Break Art Show New York 2020 and produced a performance-video work for Vicarious Touching, the online version of the exhibition at TRANSFER. She has also exhibited her work at De:Formal Gallery online in Mozilla Hubs and at juniin in Guayas, Ecuador.
Claudia Cornwall
Claudia Cornwall
Various ASCII drawings from Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer (Vancouver: Nerve Press, 1982)
Courtesy of the author.
A mainframe computer goes on strike, writes poetry, imagines his own demise, and even fantasizes about the possible appearance of the programmer dad who abandoned him. These selected ASCII drawings, which illustrate the short stories featured in Claudia Cornwall’s 1982 children’s book, explore the evolving worldview of the computer, a then-nascent phenomenon due to early technological developments in personal computing. The Vancouver-based author created the drawings and edited the book by accessing a mainframe computer through a friend who worked in the University of British Columbia’s IT department. Self-published by her own imprint, Nerve Press, Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer went on to sell more that 4,000 copies in Canada and was even adapted into a Norwegian radio play.
Claudia Cornwall is the author of seven books in a variety of genres. Her 1982 children’s book, Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer, was one of the earliest computer fiction works in Canadian children’s literature. Since Print-Outs, Cornwall has written Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family’s Jewish Past, which won the 1996 B.C. Book Prize for non-fiction. At the World’s Edge: Curt Lang’s Vancouver, 1937-1998, was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2011. The American Library Association’s Booklist selected Catching Cancer: The Quest for its Viral & Bacterial Causes as one of the best books of 2013. Her most recent book, British Columbia in Flames: Stories from a Blazing Summer (Harbour Publishing, 2020), was a finalist for the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for historical writing. Cornwall teaches creative writing in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
Reproductive Futures
Wednesday Kim
Wednesday Kim
Sleep Deprived Workers, 2019–2020
Four-channel video, 6:52 min, 3D models and animated graphics within a spatial installation
Courtesy of the artist.
Drawn from the artist’s own experience with postpartum depression and the exhausting expectations of traditional mothering, Wednesday Kim’s Sleep Deprived Workers presents a graveyard of the maternal trials and tribulations not spoken of. This series of four digital animations—created in collaboration with local artist-mothers encountered during Kim’s 2019 residency with London’s Procreate Project, while she was caring for her then-toddler daughter—makes sense of what’s lost. Indeed, within a dire landscape filled with surrealist female-presenting figures with multiple appendages and intonements about “excessive positivity” set in a neo-gothic font, Sleep Deprived Workers at times reads like a mom influencer’s TikTok taken to its mad-as-hell-not-going-to-take-this-anymore limits.
The artist acknowledges the support of Create London and White House Dagenham.
Wednesday Kim is an interdisciplinary artist and a co-founder of De:Formal. She is from Seoul, South Korea and is currently based in California. Kim works with analog and digital media, including 3D animation, video, performance, installation, print, and sculpture, with a clusterfuck aesthetic. Her work is informed by personal experiences and human psychology. She derives imagery from nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and childhood trauma. Furthermore, she portrays the absurdity of information-saturated contemporary life in a surrealist fashion through wordplay, Wikipedia, voyeurism, and witticism.
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Surrogate, 2020–present
Interactive narrative, 24 min
Courtesy of the artist.
First mounted at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, this experimental web documentary—screened online alongside a hybrid on/offline site-specific performance of a “womb walk”—is a perplexing blend of reality and fiction. McCarthy, seen in Zoom conversations and street-shot documentarian interviews, initially begins with a simulation in line with her concerns for algorithmically inclined living: What would happen if she was a surrogate? But one who could be monitored 24/7 by the unborn child’s intended parents via a body-tracking surveillance app? This artistic inquiry, which began in 2019 as a Creative Capital-supported work in data visualization and performance, takes a turn during the pandemic. As McCarthy navigates sperm-donor databases and flashes prosthetic-womb selfies, it becomes, in the artist’s own words, a “life project.” A friend recruited for the interviews with potential parents then confesses she would actually be open to McCarthy being her surrogate. What follows, amidst our post-Roe v. Wade reality, is a deeply felt witnessing to bodily autonomy, surveillance, and the invisible reproductive labour that is commercial surrogacy.
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Barbican Centre, Ars Electronica, REDCAT, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Seoul Museum of Art. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour
by Rea McNamara
In the fall of 2021, my daughter was born. Soon after, I got an invitation from the MacKenzie to curate a digital exhibition for their Digital Exhibitions Toolkit and Art Installation Launcher (DETAIL) project.
Becoming a new parent during COVID-19 was, in hindsight, weird. I spent a lot of time on anonymous parenting forums, particularly on Reddit. I found solace (but also anxiety) within these “intimate mothering publics,” especially when it was 4 AM and I had an inconsolable newborn.1 The Omicron variant deepened my isolation due to the closure of in-person family spaces.
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour begins during the sleep-deprived blocks of time I was trying to get my baby to go down. The term “wake windows” refers to the periods when babies and toddlers are awake before needing a nap or bedtime; it can be, at times, a somewhat obsessive form of time tracking. The “witching hour” is even more harrowing: a day that ends with hours upon hours of a screaming newborn. Early on, the exhibition’s user profile became a meta-version of who I was then: a curator brainstorming a show and a new parent chest-feeding an inconsolable newborn back to sleep at 4 AM, scrolling on the phone in dark mode, lurking online.
As an interactive narrative, Wake Windows takes the form of a visual novel: a text-based choose-your-own-adventure. The MacKenzie’s DETAIL team, Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll, introduced me to the game form. Their encouragement to take on this video game concept as an exhibition-making framework coincided with a shared interest in digital literacy. I had been researching early representations of digital technology in books for young readers at the Toronto Public Library’s Osbourne Collection of Early Children’s Books. There, I discovered Claudia Cornwall’s Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer (1982), one of the earliest computer fiction books in Canadian children’s literature. Centred upon Edgar, a wry and unruly computer who goes on strike and eventually takes up poetry and art, Print-Outs was an intriguing analog artifact. On its cover is a dual portrait with one side showing a female-presenting figure proudly surveying a continuous feed of computer paper and the other, a mainframe computer screen flashing a terminal green ASCII happy face. The book’s edges had holes along its side, slyly mimicking the tractor holes of dot matrix printing. Inside, the collection of stories included ASCII illustrations that seemed painstakingly rendered with care. One featured Edgar’s imagining of being dismantled, with stick-like computer programmer figures taking away his components. “I don’t care. You can have my parts,” is typed out on his final feed of printouts. “Take them now. Screen and all.”
For whatever reason, I couldn’t let go of Edgar. As my daughter got older and became especially adept at squiring away my iPhone to take rapid-fire photos, Edgar became this apparition of soft computing, an iteration of the optimistic, techno-determinism I grew up with as a 1980s-born child. Today, it’s common to see a parent pushing their child on a playground swing with one hand while scrolling on their phone with the other, while also handwringing about said child’s screen time. Later, when I reached out to Claudia to learn more about how the book came to be, I was struck by her prescient motivation to understand the philosophical worldview of a computer, given the contemporary emergence of AI assistants and even companions.
Claudia was gracious enough to allow her character to be revived as a guide in this exhibition, eventually coming on board as a co-writer of its interactive narrative. (Additionally, a few scans of her book’s ASCII drawings are included in the show.) I was struck by the meta-ness of it all. Print-Outs ends with Edgar’s work published by a human author, Claudia, which functions as a self-insertion, like The Divine Comedy or the eponymous Y/N character in fanfiction. Wake Windows: The Witching Hour’s first-person narrative begins with the player (or user, or visitor—I’m not sure where I land with this just yet) tasked to review the exhibition files of a curator/mom-friend overwhelmed by the care of their newborn. For a show concerned with real-life content, databases, living archives, and the “missing datasets” in our collective understanding of mothering, it made sense to lean heavily on meta-ness. And, similar to how one typically experiences a visual novel, it is an exhibition intended to be re-read. Indeed, the narrative’s tongue-in-cheek tone is aligned with the clock of the user’s computer system, subtly shifting when accessed at different times of the day, bringing awareness to the user’s limited choices. Inevitably, the baby will wake up crying. The care work never ends.
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour embraces mothering, a Black feminist concept of caregiving, to examine how online maternal worldbuilding can cultivate vulnerability, non-judgement, and utopian potentialities. “The radical potential of the word mother comes after the ‘m,’” writes Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who elaborates upon the need for “mother” to be less about gendered identity and more about an action or transformation. “It is the space that ‘other’ takes in our mouths when we say it. We are something else.”2 In featuring time-based work by artists who are parents, caregivers, or educators, Wake Windows explores how their creative outputs have shifted since taking on this care work.
The artworks are organized within three thematics: reproductive futures, early childhood education, and maternal worldbuilding. At this point in the show, the user shifts from exchanging text messages with their curator/mom-friend and seeing the exhibition files on the curator/mom-friend’s laptop to entering an MS-DOS, black-screen terminal space where Edgar guides them through the exhibition’s themes and artworks.
Reproductive futures is a thematic informed by “reproductive identity,” an emerging adult development concept defined by Aurélie M. Athan. According to the psychologist, who specializes in reproductive health psychology, it’s a recognition of “‘if, when, and how’ people come to realize their fertility,”3 whether it be within parenthood or non-parenthood. Indeed, at one point in the interactive narrative, Edgar confesses that he too feels like a surrogate. The AI companion scans keywords from Athan’s research paper, saved in the curator/mom-friend’s exhibition files: “adult identity development, sexual and reproductive health education, reproductive justice, fertility awareness, self and identity.”4 The thematic tackles previously unspoken experiences tied to reproduction, like surrogacy (in Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Surrogate) and postpartum depression (in Wednesday Kim’s Sleep Deprived Workers).
Meanwhile, the thematic of early childhood education features AI-generated works by Faith Holland (in collaboration with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter) and Rodell Warner, each proposing prompts and training dataset approaches that incorporate caregiving practices. Whereas Warner utilizes text-to-image prompts to imagine a Caribbean archive free from the colonial gaze, Holland trained an AI with a dataset of more than one hundred scans of her daughter’s toddler drawings.
Lastly, maternal worldbuilding tackles matrilineal lineages, evident in the works of Alejandra Higuera in collaboration with her daughter, Magnolia, and Rory Scott, where the affective bonds between daughter and mother (or othermother) shape creative development and expressions. Skawennati takes this worldbuilding further, re-telling Haudenosaunee creation stories through machinimas created in the virtual world, Second Life.
The exhibition also includes a resources section, where visitors can peruse a selection of interviews I conducted with participating artists, educators, and even Reddit moderators during my research. Also included in the bibliography are academic texts by Carlina Rinaldi and Carol Anne Wien delving into pedagogical documentation, an early childhood education methodology that interprets the everyday digital traces of lived experience through “visible listening.” The labour of mothering that Wake Windows: The Witching Hour articulates is, in fact, a work-in-progress and will continue to develop through an in-person iteration more focused on what it means to collaborate and co-learn alongside young children.
The curator acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Special thanks to Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, Iain Soder, Claudia Cornwall, Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöft, Geoff Yuen and Lee Froese of The Hatchery, Crystal Mowry, Nicolle Nugent, Jayne Wilkinson, D’Arcy L.J. White, Lisa Karen Cox, Onika Powell, Sharn Peters, Natalie Haddad, Rosemary Heather, Linda Wilson, Tony Halmos, and Quincy Lou McNamara-Halmos.
1 Sophia Alice Johnson, “‘Intimate mothering publics’: comparing face-to-face support groups and Internet use for women seeking information and advice in the transition to first-time motherhood,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 17, no. 2 (January–February 2015): 237-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2014.968807.
2 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Keyword: Mothering,” Parapraxis Magazine 01 (December 2022), https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/mothering.
3 Aurélie M. Athan, “Reproductive Identity: An Emerging Concept,” American Psychologist 75, no. 4 (2020): 451. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000623.
4 Athan, 445.
Athan, Aurélie M. “Reproductive Identity: An Emerging Concept.” American Psychologist 75, no. 4 (2020): 445-456. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000623.
Cornwall, Claudia. Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer. Vancouver: Nerve Press, 1982.
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Boston: MIT, 2020.
Garbes, Angela. Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change. New York: HarperCollins, 2022.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Keyword: Mothering.” Parapraxis Magazine, Issue 01: The Family Problem, December 2022. https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/mothering.
Johnson, Sophia Alice. “‘Intimate mothering publics’: comparing face-to-face support groups and Internet use for women seeking information and advice in the transition to first-time motherhood.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 17, no. 2 (January—February 2015): 237-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2014.968807.
Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance. Edited by Sophia Hamacher and Jessica Hankey. Boston: MIT, 2023.
Rinaldi, Carlina. “The Relationship Between Documentation and Assessment.” Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Exchange 11, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 1-4. https://www.reggioalliance.org/downloads/relationship:rinaldi.pdf.
Wien, Carol Anne. “Making Learning Visible Through Pedagogical Documentation.” Think, Feel, Act: Lessons from Research about Young Children, edited by the Ministry of Education, 27-30. Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2013. https://files.ontario.ca/edu-think-feel-act-lessons-from-research-about-young-children-en-2021-01-29.pdf.
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour is an interactive digital exhibition that takes the form of a visual novel: essentially, a hypertext (choose-your-own-adventure) narrative. Audiences navigate through the exhibit by choosing text responses.
The exhibition features predominantly time-based media art where its duration is a dimension, and the artworks—video, audio or computer-based—unfold over time. Additionally, many artworks are interactive and depend on the user’s participation. We recommend using headphones, particularly for audio and video work.
Enabling full screen for the exhibition window is also suggested; on mobile, you will receive eventual instructions to rotate your device to landscape.
For the best desktop viewing experience, please use the latest version of Firefox web browser. Whereas the exhibition is fully compatible across all Android browsers, we strongly recommend that iPhone users use Safari.
Entering the exhibition
From the webpage at www.wakewindows.art select the “Launch Project” button to load the digital exhibition.
Navigate the exhibition by selecting text responses to different characters within the narrative. Your responses are listed onscreen as buttons and/or underlined text. Above is an image of the first interaction. To begin, select the “Let yourself in” button.
There are moments when you can choose between different responses. There are no wrong answers.
Interacting with Edgar
When you’ve entered your curator/mom-friend’s desktop, buttons will appear on the lower right side of the screen. Select the “Continue” button in the scene above to proceed.
Your conversation with the AI character Edgar will direct your journey through the exhibition. Continue selecting buttons on the lower right side of the screen to interact with Edgar.
Edgar asks your name and will refer you by that name if you enter one. Type in the empty box and click submit to enter a name. The exhibition is not tracking information and will not save this input.
Entering artwork installations
You can view the artworks grouped thematically by the curator or skip directly to individual artists’ specific works.
When you select an artist’s installation to enter, the loading percentage will be displayed in the bottom right corner. Information from the curator will appear on the left-hand side of the screen in an alternate colour text. Click through the “Continue” options to enter the artwork once it’s loaded. Edgar will provide brief instructions on how to interact with each artwork.
Returning from an artwork
All installations have an “Edgar” button on the upper left-hand corner of the screen. It will initially appear upon entering the installation and will disappear after a few moments. Tap/click the screen to bring up the button, and tap directly on the button to return to the Edgar screen. You must select “Leave this artwork” to return to the list of artworks.
Alejandra Higuera in collaboration with Magnolia Higuera
Use your mouse or finger to scroll up and down through the images. Click/tap an image to select it. This action will bring it into focus as a video or animation. Ensure your audio is on. Click/tap the video to dismiss it and return to the overall view.
Claudia Cornwall
Edgar is Claudia Cornwall’s original character from her 1982 book Print-Outs: the adventures of a rebel computer, and he appears throughout the exhibition as an interactive character. Interacting with Edgar leads to images from the book, a unique installation, unlike the other featured artworks in this exhibition.
Faith Holland in collaboration with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter
Create unique AI-generated images by typing in prompts and pressing the buttons you see on the screen. Selecting the flip button in the upper-right corner will reveal another side of the work with additional functions.
Lauren Lee McCarthy
This artwork is a video with sound. Click/tap on the “Play” button to begin playing the video. The buttons will disappear a few moments after they are selected. The work is divided into chapters. Click/tap on the screen again to pause the video, skip forward and back through chapters, or revisit the Edgar button.
Rodell Warner
Click/tap on a postcard image to bring it into focus. Click/tap on the selected postcard again to reveal its reverse image. Click/tap a third time to dismiss the postcard to its original location.
Rory Scott
This work is a 360 video with sound. Click/tap on the screen to move your perspective. While the video plays, images will float onscreen.
Skawennati
This work is a machinima video with sound. Click/tap on the “Play” button to begin playing the video. The buttons will disappear a few moments after they are selected. Click/tap on the screen again to pause the video, use the slider bar, or revisit the Edgar button.
Wednesday Kim
The artwork will load, automatically guiding your perspective through a 3D environment with video and audio. The movement will pause at each focal point, including at the videos. Turn on your audio, too. On the lower-right side of the screen is a “Next” button that will take you to the next focal point if selected. You will continue circling the environment in a loop until you prompt Edgar to bring you back to the previous screen.
Accessing the downloadable exhibition
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour is best experienced on mobile devices. If your mobile device or desktop browser is not compatible with the exhibit, you may experience the exhibit as a downloadable program for desktop or laptop computers. To access the downloadable exhibit, visit this link and select the “Download” button that corresponds to your operating system.
Installation guide for Mac computers
Select the Mac download file. Find the location of the downloaded file, and click to unzip the file. Right click the unzipped file, and select “Open” from the list of options.
You may receive a pop-up from your computer stating that Apple cannot check the file for malicious software. Dismiss this pop-up by selecting “OK”. You will need to right click the unzipped exhibit file again and select open.
The exhibition will automatically start, entering fullscreen mode. You will have the option to begin the exhibit from the beginning or skip through the introduction to the artwork list.
To exit the exhibit, press ⌘Q on your keyboard to close the program.
Installation guide for Windows
Select the appropriate download file for your operating system (32 or 64 bit). If you are uncertain which operating system you have, download both files and attempt to install both.
Unzip the file and double click to launch the program.
The exhibition will automatically start, entering fullscreen mode. You will have the option to begin the exhibit from the beginning or skip through the introduction to the artwork list.
To exit the exhibit, press COMMAND+Q on your keyboard to close the program.
The following text response does not load
Try clicking the screen again when the exhibition is loaded. If you have switched to another program or window, your internet browser will pause the exhibition.
The text loads too fast to read/is being cut off
Using your scroll wheel (on desktop) or swiping with your finger (mobile) will allow you to scroll up and down through blocks of text from the characters onscreen.
The Edgar button disappears in the artwork or does not appear when I click in the corner
Click/tap repeatedly in the upper-left corner to bring the Edgar button back into focus, then select it again once it has loaded with the text “Edgar” to return to the artwork list.
When I hit the escape button, it leaves the exhibition
The exhibit runs as a browser-based application, and using your escape button or pressing “back” in the browser interface will unload the exhibit. If you want to return to the list of artworks from any one artwork, you will need to use Edgar’s button in the top-left corner of the screen. If you leave the exhibition through the browser interface, returning to the exhibition will provide you with a shortcut to bypass the opening sequence and skip to the list of artists.
This section includes interviews by Rea McNamara as part of her preliminary curatorial research for the Wake Windows exhibition series.
During the spring and summer of 2023, she conducted studio visits with artists who are parents, caregivers, and educators, interviewed early childhood educators, and even anonymous online parenting forum moderators.
Her interaction with the EarlyON Child and Family Centres, a free Ontario-wide program that offers support services and programs for parents, caregivers, and children, proved to be the most enlightening. After visiting and interviewing staff at three Greater Toronto Area sites, she came to understand how the province’s Early Years pedagogy shapes the design and values of their play-based learning environments, influencing a forthcoming in-person iteration of the Wake Windows series.
The interviews are edited, abridged, and organized according to The Witching Hour ’s exhibition thematics. They will be released staggered during the online exhibition’s run.
Maternal Worldbuilding
Interviews with participating artists and collaborators:
Early Childhood Education
Interviews with participating artists:
Reproductive Futures
Anon Mom Subreddit Mod, a Texan moderator and mother who discusses the toxicity of Reddit culture, the challenges mothers and caregivers face in accessing \”non-judgemental\” online community spaces, and the digital literacy skills she is passing on to her two school-aged children.
Wednesday Kim, a Wake Windows: The Witching Hour participating artist whose work, Sleep Deprived Workers (2019-2020), is featured within the Reproductive Futures thematic. She discusses how the work evolved from her participation in The Procreate Project, a London-based organization that supports contemporary artists/mothers, and how she juggles her art with caring for her school-aged daughter.
Mike Crow, a moderator for Daddit, one of the largest online forums for fathers. He is also the father of two sons, ages 5 and 7. He discusses how the community practices non-toxic masculinity, the impact COVID-19 had on Daddit’s moderating processes, and anonymity’s role in creating safe online community spaces for parents.