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This Cookout Session invites the broader public and those interested in contributing to the Chantier AI publication drive to engage in workshops and conversations around practices for enlarging how we encounter AI within a feminist archival practice.

Leading up to the event, participants will engage in Walking Together events on rue Saint-Hubert North, a former textiles hub that now contains a high concentration of storefront salons, fabric and decor shops, restaurants and store vacancies. The commercial strip is being groomed as part of an urban revitalization project to become Montreal’s first rue “ecocirculaire,” a project aiming to support a local and eco-responsible economy.

In this context, AI-generated computational artifacts are a lure to engage a diversity of critical media practices, including textile and material making, feminist film archives and AR sound recording. The speculative wager of this proposition is that walking together amidst the sensuous exuberance of Saint-Hubert, alongside the similarly exuberant and non-ontological abstractions of machine-generated images, will recentre a feminist sociability that resists and reimagines the terms of AI encounter. This aesthetic socio-temporality is taken as an invitation to destabilize the increasing sway of AI technoliberalism on the cultural imaginary by insisting on inclusive, situated postures that cannot be solved or replaced by automation.

As a research-creation intervention, the question of the archive takes on central importance. In what ways might the relationality of archive creation give rise to emergent practices and terms of engagement, becoming a proposition for ecocircular sociability?

This activity is part of Nicole de Brabandere’s research residency at Hexagram‑UQAM and is presented within the framework of the 2026 Interdisciplinary Encounters.

How to participate?

If you would like to schedule a preliminary walk or would like to attend the Cookout Session, please email nicole.debrabandere@gmail.com.

Updated on May 7, 2026

Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)