Welcome back to our CLCF profile series, where each month we interview a CLCF researcher to hear more about their projects (check out our previous profiles here). As the winter term stampedes to a close and spring slowly but surely approaches, we’re connecting with Dr. Camille Intson about her research and teaching approaches in the age of GenAI. Camille is an award-winning Esto-Canadian artist and researcher whose practice spans writing, performance, new and computational media, music, and installation. She is also Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream, CLTA) in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where she teaches master’s level courses on critical information infrastructures, queer G.L.A.M., and culture and technology studio practice.

Rafael: In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?

Camille: First of all: Rafael, ME, and Daphne, thank you for featuring me! At my core, I’m a multidisciplinary artist and performance and technology scholar. That means I’m interested in how contemporary performance practices—like live theatre, dance, music, performance art, and so on—transform how we understand and use digital technologies.

In the last couple years, I’ve been undertaking performance-based experiments with a variety of digital technologies, including virtual/mixed reality, 3D scanning, projection design, motion capture, and generative artificial intelligence. These experiments are heavily informed by queer, feminist, and anticolonial approaches to science and technology studies. I always begin my research by asking: What are the philosophies, the industries, and the powers that activate  the digital tools I’m engaging, or would like to engage? How are they implicated in ongoing social control, labour regulation, and state violence? And finally: What would it mean to transform them in ways that are creative and not extractivist? If such a transformation is possible, how might I (or ‘we,’ speaking communally) navigate it critically, responsibly, and accountably?

I come to this work as an artist, researcher, and educator. I see these practices of mine as irrevocably entangled. As a result of that, my post-PhD work is aimed at demystifying these digital technologies (for students, faculty, and independent researchers alike), redistributing gatekept resources and knowledge, and promoting digital technoliteracies. My next project will be about using these experiments for community-engaged knowledge production. It’s all very immediate and exciting!

M.E.: Can you tell us a bit about how you approach teaching in the age of GenAI? What’s your pedagogical approach and how are you (re)thinking your policies, assignments, and/or materials in this context?

Camille: For sure. My pedagogy is grounded in creativity, play, and asking my students to think of themselves as autonomous critics and cultural producers. As a reflection of that, my courses integrate site visits, small and large group discussions, interviews, presentations and-or performances, and hands-on creative assignments or activities. These are all deliverables that ask students to be present, active participants in the classroom—something GenAI can’t help with! Furthermore, instead of summarizing and regurgitating course content, I ask my students to critically reflect (orally and in writing) on experiences they’re having inside or outside of class. That could involve visiting an exhibit, interviewing a professional in their field, and-or doing a hands-on creative project that reflects their embeddedness within the course content. I’ve found that, in this “post” pandemic university landscape, students are responding well to this kind of dynamic learning. They’re energized and refreshed by it. I’m always amazed by the work they turn in, especially when I have a Creative Project option as a final deliverable. I’ve had students make board games, visual art pieces, zines, works of embroidery, collages, dioramas, interactive fictions, screenplays, books of poetry, comic strips, and so on and so forth, instead of (or in addition to) writing essays. I want to stress that these Creative Project assignments are not about demonstrating artistic skills… they’re about care, intention, professionalism, and critical engagement with course themes. I’m always invigorated by how inspired students get when they’re asked to demonstrate their knowledge in a non-traditional way. I love their surprise, their passion, their joy. That’s one of the best things about teaching.

Daphne: You recently co-hosted the amazing two-day symposium GLITCH / STITCH / RESIST: A Research-Creation Salon. Can you share your pathway into Research-Creation and tell us about some of your current projects?

Camille: Thanks Daphne! So I’ve been a performance artist for over a decade. My foray into research-creation—or should I say, practice-as-research (PaR) more broadly—began when I did my Master’s in Performance Practice as Research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. I learned a lot about the precarious confluence of art and research; it equally frustrated and fascinated me. I wasn’t sure if I’d do it again. But when I started my PhD in Information, all I could think of was how performance—and art, more generally—was informing everything I learned about technoscience. So even though there was zero infrastructure for research-creation projects at the iSchool, I worked hard to justify my methods and garner support both within and outside of the university. And it worked! I always joke about being the “Patient Zero” of research-creation in Information, but it’s awesome. There are so many fabulous practitioners in and beyond the faculty now. That’s what inspired me to create GLITCH / STITCH / RESIST.

Right now, I have three ongoing projects. There’s ‘Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries,’ a virtual reality-based exhibit featuring 3D scans of queer-coded ephemera I accrued from my childhood, adolescent, and adult bedrooms. That project is all about rejecting the positioning of virtual reality as an “empathy machine” and proposing a queer VR design practice informed by partiality, hybridity, possibility, and play. You’ll be able to read about that project in a forthcoming article I wrote for Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. A prototype of that work is now live via Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures.

Then there’s the Trans-Feminist-Queer Transformer (T.F.Q.T.), a GPT-2 model that I fine-tuned on queer-feminist lyrical poetry for live performance experimentation. I’m a folk musician, and I wondered what would happen if I asked an artificially intelligent model to write songs like I would write them. Then I would try to perform them. That project is all about entertaining the dual possibilities and limitations of engaging algorithmic models in creative collaborations. I created the T.F.Q.T. with the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI. I have an article about that project undergoing peer-review right now.

Finally, there’s JANE, an intermedial theatre piece about college students embroiled in a virtual reality deepfake pornography scandal. I’ve been developing that show through my queer-feminist performance and new media collective, Pantheon Projects, for a few years now. We were in residence at Tarragon Theatre for a while, had a design workshop at The Theatre Centre, and are now gearing up for a premiere. Stay tuned!

Rafael: What is your star sign?

Camille: I’m looking this up as I go. I’m an Aquarius sun, which means I’m creative and weird and resistant to authority. That’s very true. Then I’m a Virgo rising, which means I’m meticulous and detail-oriented. Honestly, that’s also true. Finally, I’m a Sagittarius moon, which means I’m fiery, adventurous, and open-minded. I guess that’s all pretty true. Maybe I should get more into astrology.

Follow Camille’s work with CLCF here.