Xuan Ye: ERROAR!

Centre for Culture and Technology

Xuan Ye (2025). Courtesy of the artist.

Xuan Ye: ERROAR!

Curated by Talia Golland

September 5 – October 24 2025
Artist Tour: Friday, October 24, 2 – 3pm
Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto

The Centre for Culture and Technology is delighted to announce ERROAR!, a solo exhibition by Xuan Ye.

Produced as part of the fourth annual Artist-in-Residence Program and curated by Talia Golland, this project responds to the Centre’s 2025–2026 programming theme “Artificial Stupidity,” which engages the politics, aesthetics, and economics of machine learning to put pressure on the construction of these technologies as “artificial intelligence.”

Since 2018, Ye’s ERROAR! series transforms the hallucinations, biases, and glitches of human-machine coupling into multimedia installations. Here, data shrinks, training slows, and renders fray, spilling errant stories and frequencies that rewire our perception, affect, and imagination. These works materialize the “cognitive distortion” of artificial neural networks as speculative artifacts, forming a future archaeology of now where technological errors are paleocybernetic fossils, calcified as evidence of a recursive hunger. In this self-devouring loop, objectivity is swallowed and regurgitated as resistance. Every algorithmic stumble is a fossil-in-waiting, and every glitch is an escape route. With the latest installment of this ongoing series, ERROAR! expands into absurdist speech opera, remixing machine-generated quasi-English into a chorus of algorithmic dysfluency.

Xuan Ye, ERROAR! #04 — The Oral Logic (2019/2025). Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

About the Artist

Xuan Ye (a.pureapparat.us) makes noise as a compass, navigating the eddies of art, music, and technology. Their practice unfolds in vibrational world-building via software, sound, image, installation, performance, publication and teaching. Through improvisation and computation, X traces the material and metaphysical waves across the technological, biological, and ecological resonances to evoke illegible pulses and dissonant pauses that stutter meaning, tremble systems. Their work has been exhibited at the MOCA Toronto (2022), UCCA Shanghai (2022), UQAM and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), MUTEK Montreal (2021), and the Goethe-Institut Beijing (2018), among others. They have been recognized with awarded residencies at ZHdK (2024) and Pro Helvetia (2023) and have received grants and scholarships from the Canada Council for the Arts and the SSHRC. Their practice has also been critically featured and reviewed in Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue 111), the Goethe-Institut (Montreal), KUNSTFORUM International (Issue 257), and Musicworks (Issue 136). Hailing from China, X lives in Toronto/Tkaronto and serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.

Xuan Ye, ERROAR!. Installation view at the Centre for Culture and Technology, the University of Toronto. Courtesy of the artist.

About the Centre for Culture and Technology

The Centre for Culture & Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the impacts of contemporary media on our interconnected world. This project is informed by the Centre’s location in the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s office and salon on the University of Toronto campus. The Centre draws inspiration from McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy, continuing his stated goal of “investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies.”

The Centre promotes the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, examining the ways technological media shape contemporary experience by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics. Offering both a setting and a framework, the Centre provides space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA. The Centre also supports the production of and conversation about contemporary media art, fostering aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry.

Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
39A Queens Park Crescent East
Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
www.cultureandtech.utoronto.ca
cultureandtech@utoronto.ca
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Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Friday: 1 – 5pm
Saturday – Sunday: 12 – 4pm