AI Mentorship Residency:
Breaking the System
VP is proud to collaborate with Harbour Collective to present the AI Mentorship Residency: Breaking the System, a groundbreaking initiative exploring the creative and critical potential of AI in the arts.
Aderemilekun “Oluuji” Olusoga and Kris Snowbird have been chosen to participate in the residency.
Breaking the System RESEARCH
Oluuji’s practice combines analog feedback synthesis with generative AI, positioning him as a mediator between these distinct systems. He feeds AI-generated imagery into analog video mixers, where organic distortions and artifacts emerge through recursive feedback loops, reshaping the digital. In turn, he reintroduces these manipulated analog outputs into AI models, prompting the system to reinterpret and evolve its own altered forms. This cyclical exchange between old and new technologies creates a hybrid aesthetic that blurs the lines between machine precision and analog unpredictability.
During this residency, Oluuji will expand on his previous explorations by venturing into real-time AI feedback synthesis through an interconnected network of inputs. In this new body of work, he will delve into themes of AI and surveillance, exploring how both systems—analog and digital—capture, distort, and reinterpret the world around us. By designing a system where these two technologies continuously inform each other, Oluuji seeks to uncover emergent patterns that highlight the tensions between technological observation and human intervention. Ultimately, he aims to challenge ideas of control, authorship, and the broader implications of surveillance in the digital age.
Artist Biography
Aderemilekun “Oluuji” Olusoga
Aderemilekun “Oluuji” Olusoga is a self-taught Nigerian visual artist currently living in Canada, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from The University of Winnipeg in 2022. His affinity for philosophy, religion, and science deeply informs his multidisciplinary approach, which he uses to explore complex, existential themes. Oluuji’s work invites viewers to reflect on the human condition through a dualistic, existentialist lens, examining concepts of identity, community and time, with a particular fascination for zeitgeist.
Artist Biography
Kris Snowbird
Kris Snowbird is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist working in visual and performance art, photography and filmmaking. She is from Pine Creek First Nation and of Cree and Ojibwe descent. In 2015, she participated in the Foundation Mentorship Program at Mentoring Women for Women’s Art (MAWA), working one on one with curator, Natalia Lebedinskaia. Snowbird created her first short film SWEAT in 2016, which was funded by the Winnipeg Film Group’s Mosaic Women's Film Fund. Since 2016, SWEAT has been presented on the digital media art platform, VUCAVU and toured around the world at film festivals. The list of festivals includes: in 2016, Gimli Film Festival (Gimli, MB), Native Spirit Film Festival (London, England); in 2017, VIMAF (Vancouver, BC), Hot Docs, (Toronto, ON), Asinabka Film & Media Arts Festival (Ottawa, ON), St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival (St. John’s, NL), ReFrame Film Festival (Peterborough, ON), Grande rencontre des arts médiatiques en Gaspésie (Percé, QC); and in 2019 Cinéma Oblò, (Lausanne, Switzerland), Cinéma Spoutnik, (Geneva, Switzerland) and the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa, ON). Snowbird has performed with her collaborator and partner, Theo Pelmus, at each of the 2015, 2016, and 2017 Winnipeg Nuit Blanche events, as well as the 2017 LIVE Biennale of Performance Art (Vancouver, BC).
Stay tuned for updates on the residency and the artists' exciting discoveries.
Breaking the System RESEARCH
During the AI mentorship residency I would like to work with my language Saulteaux. My mothers language is Saulteaux and growing up I had always heard her speak with my grandma and relatives. My grandma never spoke english so I was more fluent in the language when I was a child. I am hoping while working with AI it will help me remember to speak and translate the language. I want to add to resources for the language because it is so limited compared to other languages. I want to create a voiceover for the language because some of the pronunciations are hard to learn.
Ai technology has been perceived so far as a tool that can have a negative and positive impact in our understanding of truth. I belief the negative approach of Ai is the result of the western understanding and fear of new and unknown. Therefore taps in the ongoing understating of the “Other’ through the lens of colonial approach. Ai negative aspect can be flipped upside down and become actually a tool of creating a realm that allow to re-invent history as we know it. Using Ai as a tool that will help with a personal aspect of my identity, such as the language that once we/I knew fluently and defined us as what we are, I am trying to find how accurate a translation can be of a language that already existed before modern technology existed. We are a nation that embrace new ways of building, living and understanding our surroundings and is what makes us a resilient nation. In our culture new and old technology intertwine. I hope through the residency I will be able to create a Ai vocabulary that can translate the our best way of living and being on this land, and create a more accurate image of ourselves for the gaze of the western world.
