Soft Internet Theory
Tristan Sauer
The dead internet theory proposes that the internet—once a cornerstone of human connection, supplanting the town square, secret meeting spots, back alleys, and bars—is now void of life. Gone is the space for unfiltered dialogue and the collective voices of the masses, replaced by the white noise of bots and AI-generated content. At the height of the digital age, the forefront of the AI revolution, and in the depths of fake news awareness, this theory now feels more incisive than ever. Spearheaded by tech oligarchs with more unelected power than any humans in history, the long funeral of the internet has begun.
But deep within the cracks, pulsing through electrically charged fibre optics and held together by scavenged HTML and CSS, lives the heartbeat of the internet: the part it was born of; the part whose very existence is a radical act. These soft fibres are the human touch and the handmade, the soft part of software, and the softer parts of hardware. In this exhibition, artists Devlin Macpherson, Shihab Mian, Laura Moore, Marisa Müsing, and Matt Nish Lapidus embrace the soft internet theory—creating works that humanize technology, seek empathy in the digital, and write poetry into the command line. Through practices that span net art, interactive sculpture, installation, video, and textile, Soft Internet Theory invites audiences to consider a gentler, more human digital future.
Image detail: Marisa Müsing, Stuck in the Motherboard, 2023, single-channel video, 07:38 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
About the curator
Tristan Sauer
Tristan Sauer is a New Media Artist and Curator critically interested in technology and capitalism, viewing their relationship as a potential modern-day Pandora’s box. His work explores the intersections between our digital and physical worlds, and how an inside-out look at internet culture and our response to “capitalist horrors within our comprehension” can reveal more about the human condition. Working with mediums such as wearable technology, electronic sculpture, and net-art, Sauer explores these topics through an afro-futurist lens, imagining and critiquing the outcomes of our relationships with technology on our future.
A graduate of the New Media program at Toronto Metropolitan University, Sauer has presented locally at the Plumb, Meridian Art Centre, Gallery 1313, Whippersnapper Gallery, Lansdowne Station, with The Artist Project, and Nuit Blanche. He has curated for Long Winter, Symbicocene Gallery, REEL Asian Film Festival, Xpace Cultural Centre, Ed Video Media Arts Centre, and C Magazine.
About the artists
Devlin Macpherson
Devlin Macpherson is a Toronto-based new media artist interested in physical computing and the empathy that can emerge from it. Working across interactive installation, drawing machines, and kinetic art, Macpherson uses playful code and tactile systems to provoke emotional resonance and reflective engagement. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in New Media from Toronto Metropolitan University.
Shihab Mian
Shihab Mian is a computer tinkerer who works primarily with visual media and creative coding. He is intrigued by the impact of technology on emotion and human relationships in our ever-evolving world. He seeks to deconstruct the way we look at the relationships between technology and humanity, and the ways in which these relationships have been disfigured and transmuted by the rapid pace of technological advancement within a capitalistic society. He looks to gain a deeper understanding of the emotional spaces we occupy as communities and how creativity works in creating stronger tethers between groups of people. He has exhibited his work locally at InterAccess, Gallery 1313, and Northern Contemporary Gallery, as well as internationally at DEMO Festival in the Netherlands. He has also performed live A/V works at InterAccess, The Garrison, and Cinecycle.
Marisa Müsing
Marisa Müsing (she/they) is a queer, mixed-Asian artist, designer, and cybernymph from Toronto, Canada, currently based in London, UK. Her work focuses on concepts of body and identity, expressing ethereal feminist ideals through digital and sculptural media. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Architectural Research at the Royal College of Art that reinvestigates Pompeiian frescoes through a queer cyberfeminist lens. Marisa has presented works at Royal Academy of Arts London, Salone del Mobile Milan, New York Design Week, Filet Space Gallery London, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Softer Digital Copenhagen, and Maison et Objet Paris. She has been featured in Glitch Magazine, Hypebae, WGSN, Dezeen, Vogue, and The New York Times. Marisa runs two collaborative studios, müsing-sellés, a globally-recognised design and teaching studio engaged in the transformation of object and spatial design through architecture; and MamuMifi, a multidisciplinary collective that explores building stories around identity through objects from mixed-Asian female perspectives.
Laura Moore
Laura Moore is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in sculpture. Moore works primarily in stone, although her practice extends into drawing, wood, mould-making, and textiles. Notable exhibitions and outdoor public installations include Memories of the Future, a mid-career retrospective solo exhibition at McIntosh Gallery, London, ON (2025), Picture Stones in Bergen, Norway (2024), Love Languages at Art Windsor Essex, Windsor (2024), Erratic Behaviour at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Kitchener, Canada (2024), Memory Bathing at OpenArt Biennale, Örbero Sweden (2022), Memory Sticks at Baneheia & Odderøya, Kristiansand, Norway (2022), Replika/Replica at Babel Visningsrom for Kunst, Norway (2017), and Sculpture by the Sea in Aarhus, Denmark (2015). The artist is a transient member of Studio Pescarella in Pietrasanta, Italy and recently attended the USF Verftet residency in Bergen, Norway in 2024. She received an MFA from York University and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her work is in the collections of the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montreal, TD Bank, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, RIMOWA, Bell Canada, The Body Shop, and numerous private collections.
Matt Nish-Lapidus
Matt Nish-Lapidus is an artist and musician based in Tkaronto/Toronto. His varied practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture, its histories, and its impacts on society, people, and his own life. Matt’s work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. He has performed and exhibited locally and internationally including MOCA (Toronto), The Power Plant (Toronto), INDEX Biennial (Braga), ACUD Macht Neu (Berlin), Electric Eclectics (Meaford), InterAccess (Toronto), ZKM (Karlsruhe), and more, including many DIY community spaces. He holds an H.BFA in New Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Visual Studies in Studio Art from the University of Toronto. You can find Matt online and away-from-keyboard under various aliases and collaborations including emenel, New Tendencies, and .
View More Exhibitions
exhibition
May 22.2025 / August 29.2025
Fuzzy Thinking explores how textiles’ softness and tactility challenge boundaries between art and craft, weaving together historical and contemporary works rooted in material and cultural complexity.
exhibition
May 22.2025 / August 29.2025
Curated through an open call, artists from across Guelph were invited to share their work in a collective reflection of the city’s creative landscape.
exhibition
May 3.2025 / May 8.2025
exhibition
April 24.2025 / April 29.2025
Through photography, Bahar Enshaeian unravels the intricate layers of memory, identity, and belonging. Rooted in personal experience, her work speaks to the complexities of migration, displacement, and the search for home.
exhibition
April 10.2025 / April 15.2025
What utility can we find in vestiges of the past? This question shapes Hal Fortin’s interdisciplinary practice and its distinct sculptural language, punctuated by humour, dream logic, and the rhythms of domestic labour.
exhibition
April 2.2025 / April 6.2025
At the heart of Stephanie Fortin’s practice is an ethical inquiry: is it necessary—or responsible—to aestheticize waste in the context of global exploitation and climate change?
exhibition
Contemporary Indigenous Artists at AGG
January 16.2025 / May 4.2025
exhibition
September 12.2024 / January 5.2025
Eternal Transcendent highlights a selection of photographic works by Robert Flack that convey his reverence for the more-than-corporeal and a yearning for healing in light of the AIDS epidemic.
