I live and work in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, and the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. These lands are covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the land.

Studio Practice

I am an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator working across embroidery, animation, coding, and artificial intelligence. Throughout my practice, I work closely with archival and literary sources, with a growing interest in the visualization and interpretation of data and information. My current research examines what happens when artistic practice moves between embodied forms of making and computational systems, and how those encounters make otherwise invisible processes perceptible.

My recent project, creaturely, developed through an extended collaboration with a large language model (LLM) and grew into a series of animated code poems, hand-embroidered works, and an interactive website introducing the underlying computational processes of AI systems. Conceptually, the project draws on theories of play in psychoanalysis, the phenomenology of film, research in critical AI studies on the interface, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Poems composed by the machine in the form of Python scripts, prompted by quotes from the creature’s own narrative and earliest memories of consciousness, were developed into actual Python animations. The animations draw on the form of the calligram, seeking to bring the poems to life through colour, movement, and image. Based on the imagery in each animation, I hand-embroidered a collar. I was drawn to the collar as an object of adornment, but also to the symbolic meanings contained within it, as a form that encircles and yokes. It also occupies a place between the head and the body, alluding to the threshold between language and the senses. Finally, as a medium, embroidery holds light and creates its own sense of movement and tactility, extending the digital surfaces of the animations into a material counterpart.

This research now extends into the development of small transformer models, with particular attention to the curation and representation of the training data. I am especially interested in the use of visualization and sound to create an aesthetic experience that invites the possibility of seeing how LLMs work, while revealing unexpected relationships between different kinds of information. Cordyceps Septet is a study that drew upon fungal electrical activity as recorded by scientist Andrew Adamatzky. The work is composed of seven voices expressed through sound and light, alongside a small open-source transformer trained on the same data to show what it has learned to attend to.

Biography

Alexandra Emberley is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, researcher, and educator based in Toronto.

Her solo exhibition for D: becoming a tree was presented at Gallery 505 in Calgary (2023–24). Recent group exhibitions include the RISD Textile Triennial (2024), New Contemporaries 2023 at Gelman Gallery, RISD, Inherent Vice: Hidden Narratives at the RISD Museum (2022–23), and A Moment That Lasts Beyond Now at Sol Koffler Gallery (2022). Earlier exhibitions include Drawn at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati (2014), the Biennale internationale d'estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivières (2013), Cosmopolitan Animals at Senate House, London (2012), UpArt! at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto (2011), and Testimony of Echo at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax (2010).

As Graduate Fellow in the Department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum, Alexandra co-curated Sensing Fashion (2023) with Department Head and Curator Kate Irvin. Her study of surface design and the garment includes professional embroidery training at École Lesage in Paris and bespoke tailoring at the Tailoring Academy in Macclesfield, UK.

Her work has been supported by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, and the Halifax Regional Municipality. She has held residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation at cSPACE, and Klosters Bentlage in Germany. Her graduate studies were supported by a RISD Graduate Fellowship, the Rosanne Somerson Scholarship, the Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship, and the AFA Graduate Award in Art and Design.

Alexandra holds an Honours BA in Cinema Studies and Philosophy, with a minor in Art History, from the University of Toronto; an MFA in Film and Video (1998) and a PhD in Language, Culture, and Teaching from York University (2013), an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta (2014), and an MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (2023).

She has taught at the post-secondary level for more than twenty years across studio art, visual culture, art history, film studies, and curatorial studies. She held a permanent appointment as an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at the Alberta University of the Arts, where she also served for three years as Chair of the School of Craft + Emerging Media and as Program Advisor for the institution’s first MFA. She currently teaches at OCAD University.

Contact: aemberley2025@gmail.com