When A Film Lab Cancels an AI Show, Who Gets to Define a Cultural Commons?

Works by the artist Rick Valicenti from the exhibit Playbot Companions.

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Jason Wang, to Critics at Large.

In the first week of October, Toronto hosted a small but telling cultural collision. On Oct. 1, artist and designer Rick Valicenti opened Playbot Companions at 99 Frames Parliament Street: a two-week presentation of framed, AI-generated hairstyles linked by QR code to tiny “playbot” faces and backstories. The conceit is simple and unnerving — show the hair, hide the face, and force the viewer to complete the “playbot” as a person. But the sharper question is: what happens when intimacy becomes a design choice and companionship a consumable commodity?

Two days later, across town, Graination on Spadina Avenue mounted Valicenti’s Episodic Mirror, an eight-episode series of four-image sequences that blended generative AI with lens-based photography. Printed on archival Hahnemühle metallic paper and scheduled to update weekly through Nov. 27, the project offered a whispered account of a post-midlife man alternately enthralled and exhausted by companion bots. After opening night, however, Graination cancelled the exhibition. Regular customers had objected, arguing that a space devoted to analogue craft should not display AI work.

Works by Valicenti from Episodic Mirror.

This was more than an aesthetic spat. It exposed competing visions of what a place means to the community that sustains it.

The philosophy of Czech-born Brazilian thinker Vilém Flusser offers a useful lens. For Flusser, images are outputs of “apparatuses” — machines together with their programs that channel human creativity into particular forms. A darkroom teaches a certain literacy: finite frames, chemical temperament, the embodied choreography of enlarger and tweezers. A generative model runs on a different program altogether: training data, prompt grammar, and server-side opacity. Each apparatus shapes what creators can imagine and what audiences expect.

So the analogue devotees’ sense of betrayal was not merely nostalgia. A film lab is more than a service counter; it is social infrastructure where skills, gossip, mentorship and slow time coexist. Hosting AI work in that context can feel like allowing a foreign cultural program to overwrite the code that makes the place habitable. Their anger functioned as stewardship for a fragile craft economy — understandable, and in many ways necessary.

Graination’s statement — “Our intention was to support an individual and their work by offering a space to exhibit it. However, we now recognize that this conflicted with Graination’s role as a film lab serving a broader community of photographers and artists” — acknowledged those stakes. But reflexive cancellation is unsatisfying in its own way. Shuttering an exhibition to avoid testing a community’s boundaries forecloses the very encounter that would make those boundaries legible.

If apparatuses define gestures, a lab’s mini-gallery is precisely the site to show how different programs produce different relationships to labour, authorship and materiality. Now based in Toronto, Valicenti is not a parachuting outsider. Trained as a photographer and long associated with the Chicago-based design collaborative Thirst (1988–2019), he brings a practised analogue sensibility to experimental design. His work complicates the facile label “AI artist,” which flattens the intersections of craft and computation at stake in his practice.

A middle path was possible — and still is. Graination could have framed Episodic Mirror as conversation rather than a fait accompli: side-by-side displays of contact sheets and AI-laced prints; clear labelling that distinguishes lens-based from algorithmic images; darkroom demos paired with public panels on dataset provenance and the invisible labour that powers generative models; skill-shares where analogue practitioners teach printing and digital practitioners explain promptcraft. Such programming won’t erase anxiety, but it centres and interrogates it — turning outrage into a public syllabus.

Cultural spaces survive when they both protect defining practices and curate encounters that render the unfamiliar legible. Outrage is a signal: sometimes a warning, sometimes a plea. A reflexive cancellation mutes both. A film lab need not be a museum of purity; it can be a laboratory in the truest sense — a place where different apparatuses are deliberately brought into friction so their programs can be examined, debated and understood.

Valicenti’s Toronto shows pose a vital question for the city’s art and cultural scene: can a place devoted to slow, material making host speculative technological work without betraying its community? If we take Flusser seriously, the answer is yes — but only if the encounter is staged with transparency, respect and pedagogy. That is how craft is sharpened, not surrendered; how difference becomes conversation, not cancellation.

– Jason Wang is a writer and cultural critic based in Toronto. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge) and has contributed to Toronto Life, The Conversation, and the Literary Review of Canada. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University.