We are delighted to announce that the 2026-27 Artist in Residence at the Jackman Humanities Institute will be Clint Enns, in partnership with the Department of Visual Studies at University of Toronto Mississauga. He will participate in the Circle of Fellows during our annual theme, Doubles, Doppelgangers.
Clint Enns is a visual artist, writer, and curator living in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. He has a PhD in cinema and media studies from York University and has edited several collections including Truth and Soul: A Robert Downey, Sr. Reader (2025, with Kier-La Janisse), Scrapbook: From the Archive of Dave Barber (2025, with Andrew Burke) and Mike Hoolboom: Work (2025).
Since DALL·E mini was released, Enns has been experimenting with AI text-to-image generation. He has exhibited his AI-generated work at Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba as part of “Cartographies of Emotion” curated by Irene Campolmi and Linda Lamignan and at Guelman & Unbekannt Gallery in Berlin as part of as part of “Rivals: Promptography vs. Photography,” curated by Boris Eldagsen in collaboration with Photo Edition Berlin.
Fellowship Project: From Punctum to Promptum: Instructions that Feel Human
The machine doesn’t see like we do—it scrapes, indexes, compresses. Humans are flattened into data, and this data becomes extractive infrastructure. A resource to be mined, rendered, sold back to us as an advertisement catered to our exact desires or predictive entertainment or synthetic wisdom. They scan our libraries siphoning centuries of thought, form, and feeling. Every book, image, film, and fragment becomes raw material—input for an algorithmic remix that promises originality while mutating the past beyond recognition.
And yet, no one seems to question the imperial logic of Google scanning every book in existence. After all, isn’t it just the Internet? No riots over the annexation of our creative commons. But when artists engage these tools—when they repurpose, critique, or even touch them—they are met with suspicion or apprehension. Art, once the terrain of the provocative, usually made by the precarious, is now policed in the name of authenticity, originality, property. Still, we engage. Not to endorse, but to expose. To deconstruct. To inhabit the machine’s field of vision and force it to reveal its hallucinations. To induce the promptum, a pierce that took root in the uncanny valley and that inhabits the space between our body and our soul.
Is it possible to see the world as the machine sees it? To look through its eyes and to understand how it was taught to see? Is it possible to find a glitch, a crack in the code, a red pill that allows us to see the simulation's true nature?