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VISUAL ARTS
Artwork by Alessa Orsini
@ALESSAORSINI
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ALICE BOULIANNE Visual Arts Editor
Artwork by Elliott Trembecka
@MAYBEELLIOTT
A Tribute to Nelly Arcan or How Femininity Inexorably Stabs You in the Guts
SIMONE BÉLANGER Arts & Culture Editor
TW: Mentions of suicide, sex work, and other sensitive topics.
I am oddly on time, for once. Seated within the left flank of the theater’s mass of chairs, I wait, docilely, for the play to commence. La fureur de ce que je pense. I don’t believe there exists a way to properly prepare yourself to face such devastating passion, something I could have grasped onto in order to save myself from what I was about to witness. “Please turn off your cellphones,” requests a suave, although computerized voice, as the lights get dimmed until darkness envelops the elderly crowd. On stage, nine cubic compartments revealed by showcase windows stand brazenly, an ironic reflection of the public’s reluctant gaze. But suddenly, the stage gets ignited.
Inside those nine cubicles stand six women, evolving within their own, distinct settings. The impression of invading the actresses’ privacy is disconcerting. I cannot move. I can only subjugate myself to the immensity, to the poetry, to the mesmerizing yet terrifying intelligence resonating through every single word written by Nelly Arcan; a woman too smart for her own good, too smart to avoid the never-ending torment of those who understand that all is doomed.
Arcan was stuck in a multiplicity of societal spirals that kept her entrapped and agonizing. Not only did becoming a sex worker (in order to pay for her literature studies) partially consumed her vitality, self-esteem, and perception of femininity, but suffering from the cycle of events that moulded her soul became so inextricably cruel that it was only a question of time until suicidal thoughts would pervade her mind. Saturated with constant guilt fused to the yearning to be desired at all costs, Nelly Arcan’s thoughts are prognostic of the hopelessness behind finding any genuine fulfillment in our postmodern era.
La fureur de ce que je pense, a gut-wrenching mosaic of Arcans’s texts, addresses issues that are foisted on nearly all women and femme-presenting people on a regular basis. An inexplicable yet terrifying dread regarding aging and the relentless course of time. The desperate wish to be the true owner of your sexual life, combined to the growing disgust for every time you whispered “yes” when your brain kept screaming “NO.” The archaic fear of being a sinner, of partaking in either lust, envy, or any other imaginable debauchery for which one may be condemned. The glorification of suicide. Of any self-destructive tendency, any noxious drug, any toxic relationship. All those constituents of a decadent femininity lie at the very core of this cataclysmic, brutal play. Nelly Arcan was never wanted as a child. She was the plan B, the second option as her older sister died not so long after being birthed. Arcan even went as far as using her dead sister’s name for her stage persona. What a distasteful homage to a dead sibling, some may say. But that was never relevant. For the author, sex was a relief that lasted for a few minutes in the midst of a tormented existence, in the same way dancing was. Dance, this trance that possesses sweating bodies until the ultimate salvation.
Through dilated pupils, through music that emerges from within the body’s nucleus, from the bottom of one’s stomach like a climbing orgasm, as the crowd, if ever watched from above, would become a single pulsating organ; yes, this trance was the only conceivable redemption. Although the play illustrates Arcan’s overflowing and exuberant sexuality, it ultimately depicts the loathing and fear of it. She writes how she always wished to be a man, to have the ability to spawn an erection, to dictate her desires instead of undergoing the cravings of others. Arcan expresses this swelling tiredness through a frightening blur of anxiety and substance abuse that keeps begging the question: Am I broken, or is it a universal collapse that cornered me into thinking this way? Nevertheless, sexuality is far from being the sole theme tackled by the impressive work of the six involved actresses and production. The recurrent, persistent mentions of suicide, the detailed, methodical plan that was to be followed, the prayers for Arcan’s dad to believe she was good and pure, even after death… According to the writer, her very existence was defined by its obsolescence, by the fact that it had no concrete purpose. Although this is not explicitly stated in the play, Nelly Arcan eventually killed herself on September 24th, 2009, in Montreal. I pray for the afterlife to offer her this longed-for peace of mind, as Arcan’s sufferings were truly beyond any form of comprehension. When my hands start clapping by themselves and I finally inhale my first legitimate breath of fresh air, I understand that the 100 uninterrupted minutes of performance have passed by. As I arise on the gloomy, voracious street (Saint-Laurent Boulevard), I light a cigarette and look around. I feel like I am descending from another realm, another universe. At that instant, I wish to scream that society is fucked, that my only aspiration is to love, to love unconditionally. I pray for this feeling to never fade. But it inevitably does, and I am once again the bystander I so desperately wanted to punch. p p
Robot Picasso Takes Over the Art Industry
Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence and its potential impact on artists
SANAD HAMDOUNA Staff Writer
The creative field was always assumed to be something too inherently human to be threatened by automation. However, recent developments in Artificial Intelligence – or “AI”– have forced many to re-evaluate this assumption. Indeed, the development of AI systems capable of mimicking man-made artwork has accelerated exponentially in the last few years. It has come a long way since the beginning of its development in the late 1960s. In January 2021, AI art generator DALL-E published the first high-quality series of AI-generated artworks. Even then, many of them could pass as regular artwork or photos. In May 2022, Microsoft and Google announced their AI art generator projects.
In August 2022, AI art software, Stable Diffusion, was released to the public, making the new technology much more accessible. But none of this was seen as a threat until late August 2022, when a game designer entered the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition with 3 AI-generated images. He won First place and a $300 prize for his AI-generated images. This win has since sparked a wave of debate around AI art’s place in society, especially in the creative industry.
An important component in this debate revolves around copyright law. Copyright is important because it legally protects individual authors’ work against corporations or other individuals who may attempt to use it for their own profit without permission. There are two major questions under the copyright umbrella, the first being: who holds the copyright to AI-produced art? Carys Craig, an Associate Law Professor at York University who has published extensive research on intellectual property and authorship, says that works created by AI cannot be copyrighted under Canadian Law because it is not a “human-authored” work and, therefore, not recognized as “original work of expression.”
The law in the US started by taking a similar approach. The US Copyright Office rejected numerous copyright requests for AI-generated artworks until September 2022, when it granted copyright registration to a graphic novel using artwork generated by Midjourney AI. According to Benj Edwards, a seasoned tech and tech-history writer who now reports on AI and machine learning for Ars Technica, “The US copyright office has not ruled against copyright on AI artworks. Instead, it ruled out copyright registered to an AI as the author instead of a human.” This means that as long as there is also a human author, an AI-generated artwork may also be granted copyright registration. The second question surrounding Copyright Law and AI art is whether or not AI art generators are trained to use copyrighted artworks to generate images. According to Ars Technica, many AI art generators – including Google’s Imagen AI and Stable Diffusion – are trained with data from an online dataset called LAION-5B. This dataset includes over 5 Billion uncurated images assembled through bots scouring billions of websites, including highly popular art-sharing platforms such as Deviant Art, Pinterest, and Artstation. This means that many copyrighted artworks and personal photos are a crucial part of the development of these AI art generators. Naturally, this is done without the consent of any artists, photographers, or anyone depicted in any photo on the internet. This fact may not seem pertinent considering the scale of the database, but due to the text data tied to each image, a user can still prompt an AI to generate something resembling a specific person or person’s art style.
This has caused much concern over the possibility of generating deepfake imagery using these AI generators and generating artwork in the unique styles of living artists, potentially using their life’s work for profit without ever even having to consult them. Adam Duff, or “Lucidpixul,” an illustrator and YouTuber based in Montreal, even compared AI art generated in the style of living artists to identity theft. In a recent YouTube video on AI art, he stated: “The act of just copying somebody, or copying someone’s style [...] You are pretending to be somebody else, that’s identity theft. That steals a person’s humanity, steals a person’s existence, and profits from it. And when it comes to AI art, that’s the problem.” Despite the grim portrait these concerns may paint for the future of workers in the art industry, this technology is still extremely recent, and only time will show its true impact. p
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