, I joined the Red Moon Collective
As an artist in Toronto in 2010, I joined the Red Moon Collective, which was a get-together. They had parties, one another, mostly musically based. I was a photographer and poet, so it wasn’t the main focus of the group, but I still hung out with them. People sang, collaborated, built friendships out of repetition and proximity and late nights that didn’t really end so much as dissolve into the next day. Fast forward fifteen or sixteen years and something has changed shape. I’ve been around artists in Toronto recently and they seem more isolated, more self-contained, like they are orbiting their own work rather than each other. The instinct to build things together is still there in theory, but in practice it feels thinner, harder to activate. Apps like Vampr show up as the new meeting point, like Tinder did for people, but something about that kind of matching system doesn’t seem to produce a shared world. It produces contact without continuity. And contact without continuity do...