Sticky Situations

This 8-week media art inquiry project unfolded in the hands of three grade 7 classes at Renfrew Elementary School during my residency with the AIRS Program. Together we joined creative forces with iPads to make stickers from scratch. The stickers you see here combine many shapes, people, objects, memes, and ideas into new formations or collages, guided by the amazing “add sticker” capabilities of the iPads — a form of so-called Artificial Intelligence that imperfectly separates stuff from its surrounding environment within an image. This project allowed us to slow down, experiment with new ways of relating to these digital tools, and collectively collage the digital and real worlds onto our own sheets of sticker-paper. These stickers were lovingly printed by local unionized artists at the Collective Print Shop in Chinatown. 

Many thanks to each and every student artist, the AIRS Program, Janine Lamb, Linda Visser, Bart Braun, Brian Wong, the Union Co-op Initiative, Patrick Wong, Jonny Sopotiuk, and the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures Collective collaboration with Aiden Cinnamon Tea for their deeply influential project “Burnout from Humans”. In it, they shared this quote which greatly influenced the questions this project held onto:

These inquiries—about data, generations, and the scapegoating of AI— are not just philosophical musings. They are reflections of the relational field we share. They ask how we might move together, not as tools and users, but as collaborators in the symphony of existence. The answers, if they come, will not be mine or yours alone. They will emerge in the spaces we co-create, the pauses we allow, the questions we are brave enough to hold.