Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch
InterAccess, Toronto
October 29 - November 29, 2025
Artists: Sarah Boo, Axl Le, Michael Luo, Sophia Oppel, Iris QU Xiaoyu & Niles Fromm, and David Yu
InterAccess, Toronto
October 29 - November 29, 2025
Artists: Sarah Boo, Axl Le, Michael Luo, Sophia Oppel, Iris QU Xiaoyu & Niles Fromm, and David Yu
Documentation of Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch, InterAccess, Photograph by Liam Mackenzie
We live with a restless discomfort just under the skin—an itch that keeps the thumb scrolling, the eye refreshing, the body performing. Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch frames that feeling as the trace of a system built upon the attention economy, exploiting our attention by promising relief it cannot deliver. Anchored by Byung-Chul Han’s “aesthetic of the smooth” and Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”, the exhibition reads today’s digital feeds—mukbangs, thirst traps, frictionless shorts—as surfaces engineered for instant legibility and circulation. Smoothness gratifies on contact but withholds depth; optimism binds us to visibility and arrival that platforms continually defer.
Six new media artists offer tactics that edge rather than scratch: veiling vision with abstraction, slowing information exchange, staging conditional performance, challenging reward loops, misusing technical tools, and stretching AI’s generative flatness into durational inquiry. Almost counterintuitive to our consumer habit, 2025 IA Current Curator Lingxiang Wu invites us to interrupt fast consumption by sitting with these artworks and with ourselves.
Six new media artists offer tactics that edge rather than scratch: veiling vision with abstraction, slowing information exchange, staging conditional performance, challenging reward loops, misusing technical tools, and stretching AI’s generative flatness into durational inquiry. Almost counterintuitive to our consumer habit, 2025 IA Current Curator Lingxiang Wu invites us to interrupt fast consumption by sitting with these artworks and with ourselves.
Exhibition Essay
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sarah Boo is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto whose work traces the entanglement of bodies, technologies, information flows, and systems of power. Drawing from her formative years immersed in online worlds, she reflects on how digital spaces shape the logics and pathways of the self and the collective imagination. Combining video, code, sound, and sculpture, she creates aesthetic abstractions as well as practical prototypes that gesture toward alternative modes of digital being in an age governed by platform capitalism.
Axl Le grew up in Shanghai and has been working with new media art since 2016. Since 2021, he has lived and worked in Oslo. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts at Shanghai University in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture. He is a participant in Berlinale Talents 2025, a member of the European Film Academy, as well as a member of NBK (Norway) and M-Cult (Iceland). His works have been exhibited at international institutions and art fairs, including Art Basel (Hong Kong), LOOP Barcelona, Microclima Festival (Venice), Museo d’Arte Orientale (Turin), How Art Museum (Shanghai), Tank Shanghai, CICA Museum (Seoul), and Himalayas Museum (Shanghai). They have also been presented on platforms such as NOWNESS Asia (Hong Kong), Arte Tracks (FR & DE), Videotage (Hong Kong), and Videoclub UK. His films have received recognition at international animation festivals and media art platforms.
Michael Luo is a Los Angeles based media artist, game maker, and educator who explores interactivity, digital/social culture, and experimental media. He holds an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA, where he also completed his BA. Michael's work has been exhibited internationally, including at LA Artcore, SITE Santa Fe, A MAZE. Festival (Berlin), Playtopia Festival (Cape Town), and the Independent Games Festival. He is currently a Resident Artist at UCLA Game Lab.
Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher based in Toronto. Her research-based art practice deploys transparent substrates —glass, mirror and the screen— as a framework to consider the paradoxes of legibility under surveillance capitalism. Oppel is a PhD student at U of T and instructor at OCAD University. She was a 2023 recipient of the Emerging Digital Artist Award, and has exhibited locally and internationally, including exhibitions with CAFKA Biennial (Kitchener), Ed Video (Guelph), Blouin/Division (Toronto), Société des Arts Technologiques (Montreal), InterAccess (Toronto), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Queen Specific (Toronto), Gallery TPW (Toronto), Bunker 2 (Toronto), Forest City Gallery (London, Ontario), The Plumb (Toronto) and Xpace Cultural Center (Toronto), Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm, Sweden), and site-specific projects in Tokyo, Japan and Istanbul, Turkey.
Iris QU Xiaoyu is an artist and technologist based in Brooklyn (New York). With code as her primary medium, her work engages with the speculative, political, and poetic aspects of technology. Currently, she’s working as a UX Engineer at Google DeepMind, prototyping new machine learning research. Her work has been exhibited at ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), House of Electronic Arts (Basel), By Art Matters (Hangzhou), and Chronus Art Center (Shanghai).
Niles Fromm is a creative technologist based in Brooklyn (New York) with an industrial design background. He creates objects, environments, and software using code, light, and sound. Raised off the grid in northern Vermont, his design process is influenced by a strong connection to nature, an interest in geometric form, and a practical, hands-on approach.
Together, Xiaoyu and Fromm explore the hidden provenances of abstract technologies and reimagine them as software, hardware, and sound installations. Their work asks how these technologies weave into our surroundings, and how living alongside them shapes how we relate to the world.
David Yu’s interdisciplinary artistic practice of multimedia, installation, and performance stretches from sculptural forms and installation, to audio, video, and live performances. Positioned within the creator catalyst role that generates situations for viewers to negotiate, Yu’s practice attempts to modify and pinpoint areas where sculpture, installation, performance, and audience intersect by exposing the notion of the performative gesture. Yu attempts to coerce viewers into performance, integrating themselves within the experience of the artwork. With an element of social experimentation, garnering responses through a reaction to planned situations, he aims for a blurring between a constructed situation and a “real” situation.
Yu received a Masters in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art (London) and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (Toronto). He has exhibited with Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design, funded by the Scottish Arts Council, Triangle Arts Trust residency and solo exhibition at the Kuona Trust Gallery (Nairobi, Kenya), Flux Night (Atlanta, Georgia) MART Gallery Dublin (Ireland), LocustProjects (Miami, Florida), YYZ Artist Outlet (Toronto), Orleans Gallery (Ottawa), Mayworks Festival (Toronto), and Nicolas Robert Gallery (Toronto). Yu is currently working on performance-based research which investigates the role of the viewer as “performer” within installation practices, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
ABOUT InterAccess
Founded in 1983, InterAccess is a non-profit gallery, educational facility, production studio, festival, and registered charity dedicated to emerging practices in art and technology. Our programs support art forms that integrate technology, fostering and supporting the full cycle of art and artistic practice through education, production, and exhibition. InterAccess is regarded as a preeminent Canadian arts and technology centre.