Exhibition Announcement
Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch
29 October - 29 November 2025
InterAccess, Toronto, Canada
We live with a restless discomfort just under the skin—an itch that keeps the thumb scrolling, the eye refreshing, the body performing. Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch frames that feeling as the trace of a system built upon the attention economy, exploiting our attention by promising relief it cannot deliver. Anchored by Byung-Chul Han’s “aesthetic of the smooth” and Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”, the exhibition reads today’s digital feeds—mukbangs, thirst traps, frictionless shorts—as surfaces engineered for instant legibility and circulation. Smoothness gratifies on contact but withholds depth; optimism binds us to visibility and arrival that platforms continually defer. Six new media artists offer tactics that edge rather than scratch: veiling vision with abstraction, slowing information exchange, staging conditional performance, challenging reward loops, misusing technical tools, and stretching AI’s generative flatness into durational inquiry. Almost counterintuitive to our consumer habit, 2025 IA Current Curator Lingxiang Wu invites us to interrupt fast consumption by sitting with these artworks and with ourselves. Click here for more information.
2025 AI Current Closing Performance
11am-6pm, 6 December 2025 (Sat)
InterAccess, Toronto, Canada
To edge is to leave the itching body behind In this performance, no phones are permitted. No watches. Performers do not talk to each other. With every feeling of an hour passing, JeeMin begins her labour, which prompts Sheung-King to write. At the end of his writing, he leaves a prompt for the audience to respond to. Between each feeling of an hour, performers rest. Viewers are invited to attend the performance at any time throughout the 7-hour runtime. Movement occurs roughly once every hour, roughly on the hour. Between these times, viewers are invited to participate in the live writing prompt or the act of waiting. This performance is presented as part of the 24th Annual IA Current Exhibition, Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch, curated by Lingxiang Wu, and alongside "Narratives to Contextualize Feelings", a conversation with the performers held at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy on December 3 from 2 – 4PM. Click here fo register.
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