Above: Erased Ai Weiwei Hard Drive ( Homage to Robert Rauschenberg ), F. Boleige 2024. Toshiba 1 TB SSD Drive, Private Collection
While it is perhaps a somewhat oumoded moniker, 'Media Art' remains a label for practices that follow a certain material and conceptual logic, and include at least some forms of film and video, virtual and augmented Reality work, and projects that are difficult to classify but include some kind of engagement with digital means of production and dissemination.
Tied to technological developments as it is, media art has remained an unstable category, driven by the desire to explore nascent forms of 'media' and/or a critical examination of their immanent power dynamics vis-a vis the image, its creation and dissemination ( a problematic term, we feel, at this point) and questions of access, distribution and monetization of content and form.
The very distinction between form and content is, of course, at the heart of some of the critical projects , and the institute has foregrounded works of this type since its inception ( British filmmaker Chris Welsby presented one of his works at the inaugural meeting in 2005 for example ), and continues to follow developments in media-based art forms closely. Among the projects that have recently come to our attention is a catalogue of 're-imagined' cinematic works by 20th century filmmakers, shot entirely on Gabriola using only pinhole optics but on digital camera. Among the works currently available
Media Art
Above: Opening Still frame of the Remake of Anderj Tarkovski's 'The Miracle, shot entirely on Gabriola by Pinhole lens on a Mirrorless Camera
[ Project 001.025.05.001 ]
Legacy Digital Arts:
Early Days in Neuronal Network Systems
The First Fully Autonomous Art Creation, Evaluation and Appreciation Module
Above: AI ( Artistic Intelligence) Autonomous Module, HIVE Gallery, Gabriola Studio Tour 2015
During the Gabriola Arts Council's 2015 Studio Tour under its banner 'Gabriola — Isle of the Arts' , The Gabriola Institute of Contemporary Art unveiled its first media art project: the AI (Artistic Intelligence) Neuronal Network-based Fully Autonomous Art Creation, Evaluation, and Appreciation Module — a prototype aimed to challenge long-held assumptions about authorship, aesthetic judgment, and the role of the human in contemporary art production.
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Autonomous Creation
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At its heart, the module utilized an early-stage neural network trained on a curated dataset of 20th- and 21st-century visual art—ranging from high modernism to rural outsider practices. Unlike basic generative software, the AI Module was designed not to imitate styles, but to generate original works based on internalized aesthetic logics. Its algorithm produced works of art in various emulated media based on its survey of current trends in contemporary art and rendered them as entirely digital artefacts.
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Internal Evaluation Loop
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Breaking with the model of human-validated generative output, the system included a recursive evaluation module. Trained on critical writing, curatorial statements, and social media engagement patterns, this subnetwork generated simulated internal “critiques” of its own outputs. These critiques were used to modulate the generative parameters in real time, creating a feedback loop where the system could “reject” its own work, store it, or destroy it.
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Emulated Appreciation
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A final layer—a sentiment-mapping module—evaluated the emotional resonance of the works as perceived through a predictive empathy model trained on biometric data from local GICA volunteers. It estimated human reactions using heart rate variability, gaze-tracking, and microexpression data, together with a logic module that evaluated the success of a given work based on its internal coherence, modes of implementation and novelty.
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While critics questioned the “authenticity” of the works produced, AI functioned primarily as a performance of speculation—blurring the line between critique, parody, and genuine research. It asked deeply uncomfortable questions:
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Can machines experience aesthetic judgment?
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Is the loop of art-creation without the human observer still art?
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What remains of authorship when taste is computed
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The project’s most radical move was not the generation of art, but the replacement of the human viewer. In doing so, the Gabriola Institute gestured toward a future where art is not only created by machines, but also consumed and valued by them.
As a pioneering work of conceptual techno-art, the AI Module remains one of the most challenging works in Gabriola’s artistic history—half serious, half satire, and entirely ahead of its time.
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The Module continues to operate on the institute's premises and is estimated to have generated, appreciated and archived more than 200,000 works of art to date. Please contact the institute for a viewing.
Domestic Garden Plot, Whalebone Area, Gabriola, ca. 2022
Neo-Rural Film Series
PERIMETER SYNDROME : Phaenomenologies of Enisled Perception
Video Project in one endless shot
The Endless Shot of the Endless Horizon
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Bounded/Unbounded is a video project that unfolds in a single, continuous shot of (virtually) endless duration—an unbroken gaze that circles the perimeter of island life. Filmed on and around an island in the Salish sea, the project is not a portrait of place, but a sustained meditation on the ontological paradox of boundedness: how an island, defined by its finite contour, is always haunted by the (virtually ) unbounded horizon that encircles it. Forming a loop within a loop, the video alludes to the vertiginous quality of phenomena that point to infinities.
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The island becomes a sign, in Saussurean terms, not through its inherent form but through its differential relationship to the sea, the mainland, and the myth of elsewhere. It is containment marked by exposure—complete only in its incompleteness. The horizon, initially a symbol of possibility, drifts into the realm of simulation (Baudrillard): not a passage out, but a mirror surface reflecting the island back to itself through drones, satellites, and endless observation.
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As the camera loops ceaselessly, it mimics this logic of circular surveillance. No beginning, no climax, no escape—only repetition. In Deleuzian terms, the image becomes reterritorialized in each frame, the horizon re-encoded as both line of flight and enclosure. Desire is suspended, movement folds back into itself, and meaning is deferred. This, then, is not a narrative, but a durational ontology. By resisting the cut, the work rejects resolution. It replaces action with attention, arc with drift. The endlessness of the shot becomes its own argument: that the island condition is not merely spatial, but psychic and semiotic—a condition of being seen, enclosed, and drawn toward a promise that never arrives.
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Bounded/Unbounded is an attempt to inhabit this loop—not to break free of it, but to feel its texture. To dwell inside the sign of the island, and to witness what remains when the horizon no longer means beyond.
New Media Series, November 2025 :
Into The Aperture : A Mini-Festival of Pinhole Films
On Brevity, Stillness and the Threshold of Cinema
A Viewing of a Viewing, Still Image from the Film Festival
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This mini-festival of Expanded Cinema invites viewers to enter the narrow space between stillness and motion—between the photograph and the film. Featuring an international selection of pinhole films, each work explores the extremes of brevity and minimal gesture, pushing against the very definition of cinema. How short can a film be before it ceases to be film? When does a still image, subjected to time, begin to breathe?
Pinhole filmmaking, by its nature, resists spectacle. There is no lens to impose clarity, no focus to obey narrative, no shutter to capture the decisive moment. What remains is time itself—diffuse, unbounded, soft around the edges. These films, many under 30 seconds, are not fragments of larger works but complete in their quietude. They suggest that to be cinematic is not to be loud or long, but to frame duration as an event.
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Curated around the theme of the laconic, this program celebrates hesitation, economy, and the aesthetic of minimal transformation. Each piece lives near the vanishing point of motion, where film threatens to collapse into image—and, paradoxically, finds its voice. The pinhole camera’s slow, embodied process becomes a counterpoint to digital immediacy, asking us to watch differently: patiently, attentively, even reverently.
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In this aperture—this slim, flickering moment—we find a cinema that is not expansive but implosive. A cinema that doesn't unfold, but hovers. A cinema that triumphs in saying almost nothing, and in doing so, says everything.
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Three Part Screening Series, Seven Films per night,
Coming in late October 2025, Gabriola Film Collective
[Re] Mediating the Rural
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