Residency | UKAI Projects + World Creation Studio
About the residency
This untitled residency, an initiative by UKAI Projects in partnership with World Creation Studio, asks how artists can work with current paradigms and technical systems without sacrificing creative autonomy. Rather than forcing artists to choose between polarized, fragmented options (or none), the program invites participants to experiment with lighter ways of making, sharing, and sustaining the networks that underpin their creative practice—approaches that reduce technical, material, or infrastructural overhead while keeping artists situated in what’s unfolding. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the residency is designed for creatives curious about what it means to build and work more intentionally: staying nimble and retaining agency over the tools and systems that shape creative work, from ecological metaphors to technological infrastructure.
Unfolding in parallel with a final encounter in which residents from the two streams come into alignment, we anticipate unexpected collaborations emerging at the branching of a new network.
About World Creation Studio
World Creation Studio is an artist-run nonprofit based in Tiohtià:ke Montréal supporting experimental and process-driven practices across sound, digital media, and interdisciplinary art. Founded in 2020, the organization has supported a growing network of artists through residencies, workshops, and shared infrastructure for work across emerging technologies and contemporary media practices. Its programming is developed through artist-led initiatives, including core programs such as CO/CREATE, OPEN/WORLD, and Common Process, alongside a public program of workshops, talks, concerts, and exhibitions, supporting artistic development while fostering collaboration and exchange across disciplines.
World Creation Studio (interior)
Logistics
We will select residents through a combination of peer nominations and open applications.
4 seats open in the research stream: 4 weekly discussions (starting September 3, 3 online, 1 in-person at World Creation Studio) + collaboration with the technical stream (Sept 21–25)
4 seats open in the technical stream: in-person intensive at World Creation Studio + collaboration with the research stream (Sept 21–25)
The two residency streams are designed to foster new knowledge generation and network-building. There are no requirements regarding the types of projects that may emerge from the programs.
All residents will be able to access the World Creation Studio space for co-working, introductory technical workshops (pending seat availability), and project development in September. Montreal-based residents will be prioritized for this program to best make use of the resources provided by WCS.
Timeline:
Aug 1 | applications and nominations open
name
email
letter of intent (up to 300 words)
residency stream
up to 3 relevant past works/web portfolio
Aug 15 | last day to apply/nominate (23:59 EDT)
Aug 20 | selected participants and back-up selections will be contacted via email
September 2 | program orientation for both streams (online, 17:00–18:00 EDT)
Funding:
We thank the Canada Council for the Arts and individuals who have chosen to support UKAI’s work for making this program free of cost to residents, which would otherwise be $950 per resident, including studio time, facilitators, program development, and the showcase.
Honorarium:
You will be paid a $300 honorarium for developing and sharing new knowledge through your contribution to a collective toolkit, and a $100 materials budget for your end-of-program showcase.
Application Form
Residency Streams
Research StreamIntelligent Terrain: Rot
In the negotiation over how algorithms run our lives, we are navigating a particular kind of dead end: not the kind where you hit the wall—the precise moment when your phone turns into a brick yet your fingers can’t help but scroll out of muscle memory. The compulsion that looks like momentum from the outside and feels like possession from the inside. The blame-praise cycle of who caused this and who will save us from it renders failure structurally illegible. The new technologies running alongside us are extraordinarily good at producing the outputs of human experience while making the conditions for that experience harder to sustain—the spiking cost of compute eventually makes computing unaffordable for people who consume its outputs. Then what?
This residency stream anchors itself in what escapes the predetermined categories of the dataset. The immeasurable details: space, time, material... The frantic handwriting that OCR is still learning to read. The coordination of senses when you steep a perfect cup of tea. These are also a form of knowing.
We are asking what it means to have a body in space and time—when automation runs in parallel with what becomes second nature, and when the default state risks becoming its own enclosure. We must burst it open—like rot, like fermentation.
Who are you: A creative and cultural producer with a material, spatial, and temporal practice that begins with writing or archiving as meaning-making. You are curious about AI and its impact on culture. You are comfortable working with an ambiguous, open-ended process. The willingness to place your work next to questions it wasn't designed to answer is strongly recommended.
What is this program about:
Through the month of September, we will work collaboratively in response to not being allowed to fail, the extraction of every last bit, and the compulsory participation in a failing system that can't stop.
Technical StreamDigital Bridges
Every connection you make passes through a building you will never see. A file sent to someone sitting across the room from you travels to a data centre in another province and comes back. A light you switch on in your own apartment asks permission from a server. This gets described as the nature of the internet, as though it were weather. It is a business model, and it was assembled by people making choices, most of which can be unmade.
What disappears in that arrangement is the sense that infrastructure is something you could touch. The network becomes a service you subscribe to rather than a thing you build. Artists inherit this as a set of assumptions about what is possible: that collaboration at a distance requires a platform, that anything shared must first be uploaded, that the tools you work with are the tools you were given. None of this is true. It is just expensive to find out otherwise, and nobody is paid to teach you.
This program anchors itself in the smallest possible counter-example. Two laptops. A network you configured yourself. A signal passing between them that touches no hardware but your own. It is not much. It is enough to make the larger claim of inevitability difficult to believe.
Who are you:
A creative and cultural producer with a practice that already brushes against technology, whether or not you would describe yourself as technical. You bring a tolerance for setup, troubleshooting, and the parts of the process that resist being interesting. You are willing to be a beginner in public. You have some appetite for collaboration that is not fully specified in advance, since a good portion of this week is two cohorts finding out what their questions have to do with each other. No prior networking experience is expected. A laptop is enough.
What is this program about:
Across five days, we build small networks between our own machines and make work that lives across more than one computer. Peer-to-peer networking is the technical subject and also the social form the week takes. You will leave with a working relationship with a set of tools, a collaboration that would not have happened otherwise, and a contribution to a shared toolkit that outlasts the program.
