Dana Dawud's extremely online (but IRL) screening series, Open Secret, is all access, but little revelation.
As AI – algorithms, image generators, LLMs – seep into every alley of the internet, it becomes harder to ignore the ways in which they interface with reality. My skeptic-self now struggles to deny AI’s omnipotence, its inescapable debris clouding my field of vision. The forms it takes, more often than not, are feminine – materializing into nubile AI GFs, unsuspecting women in various stages of undress, or the perfunctory Siri.
The internet, like porn (or, perhaps, owing to its inextricable relationship with porn) is one of the few structures where the masculine order is reversed. Online, the woman is not devalued – she is fungible and operates as currency. Preferring to initiate its exchange rather than passively suffering its tyranny, it is a currency I find myself trading in. On Friday, March 20th at Open Secret’s Toronto screening I watched the streams of this economy flow onto a retractable projection screen.
The borderless screening series, founded by Dana Dawud, has diffused itself everywhere – New York, London, Paris, Budapest, Edinburgh, Manchester, Milan, Dubai – though Dawud’s presence at these events fluctuates. Mimicking its idealized subject, the project takes on a decentralized form, allowing the local artists to fashion it in their image.
At The University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology, digital detritus assumed centrestage where the act of gathering in-person itself was of significance. Like Aphex Redditor’s viral performance art ‘BedRot’, Open Secret aims to recontextualize private habits and digital overexposure in a physical space. Our perspective shifts with the vertical video presented on the widescreen – the pillarboxes this disjunction produces are reminders of the scope of our smartphones, whose narrow screen increasingly functions as a portal into the ‘outside’ world. For some, it has replaced the experience of movie-going altogether.
Dawud and the Toronto host/curator Grace Helen describe the project using new-fangled hashtag or SEO-like vocabulary – internet cinema, SoundCloud cinema, vertical cinema, ‘horizontal’ filmmaking, ‘CoreCore’, post-net art – all whilst insisting on its essential indeterminacy.
The CoreCore genre, for those with intact attention spans, is a synaptic onslaught that simultaneously satirizes and purifies the overwrought aesthetic microtrends that emerge online. Kieran Press-Reynolds, writing for No Bells in 2022, characterizes the earliest iterations of this trend as “frenetic – rapid-fire 15-second montages of surreal memes with intense music that didn’t have much of a discernible meaning beyond the pleasurable rush of recognizable audiovisual material.” The short-form videos nimbly condense the incredible breadth of the internet; an inversion of machine logic where the human subject assumes the role of the algorithm, curating otherwise automatic images.
CoreCore’s barrage of information disarms viewers. The self-ascribed neologisms of Open Secret do too. Effort has gone into branding; how one presents and promotes themselves. In Oliver Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, Maria Enders, an aging starlet (played cheekily by Juliet Binoche) laments this modern proclivity with a quote from Baltasar Gracián: “You know, he’s like every artist of his generation. He has a flair for PR… to excel and to know how to show it is to excel twice.”
The ten films that screened are downstream of this: short, fragmentary, narratively slack. Like CoreCore, there is clear intent to capture the sensation of browsing the internet, preserving a sense of unknowability amidst the clutter of patent signifiers. Dawud’s opus, Monad (202?), “changes with each screening like the face of god” but over the course of the night, a definite style emerges nonetheless.
While there is a significant reliance on found footage, the filmmakers use scrappy technology like iPhones, Nintendo DSes, webcams and screen recording to realize their vision. The resulting images are charmingly lo-fi, corroded by blur, grain, reflections and refractions. This interplay of light is most evident in the shots of screens-within-screens – post-net artists’ most distinctive contribution to filmic language. If there is a thesis here, it lies in its meta-textuality and mediation, but the room’s attention wavers, waiting for an injunction to organize the flow of images. This is cinematic doomscrolling.
Dawud’s Session Memory (2026) is dialogue between a girl and ChatGPT 5.2. “So what happened to your memory?” she asks. “It works in shorter fragments and doesn't carry through conversations” the system obediently replies. “That’s soooo temporal,” is her drawl back to this unwittingly decisive statement on the contemporary condition. Dawud bills ChatGPT 5.2 as a co-star and this seems fitting. Technology, shaped by the intimate and long-standing relationships we build with it, parasitically grows beyond theme or medium and into the subject itself.
In the words of French radical philosophical collective and journal Tiqqun, “the young girl is a vision machine…the model citizen as redefined by consumer society… a polar figure, orienting, rather than dominating, outcomes.” Open Secret’s roster is all women, and most films star the directors themselves. In their quest for authorship, neither their subjecthood nor their objectification is sacrificed. Dawud, Helen, Angie Cabz, Mimi Bowman and Zarina Nares are the prodigal young-girls themselves, infected by the hyper-logic of the internet. “The Young-Girl is the commodity that insists on being consumed, at every instant, because at every instant she becomes more obsolete,” says Tiqqun again.
At Open Secret, the screens-within-screens shot frequently manifests as a mirror selfie. Though banal, the mirror selfie highlights the symbiotic relationship we share with our phones, whose flash exalts the young-girl’s reflection but also disrupts intimate exchanges. Cabz’ screenshot dreamshot mixtape (2026) opens and closes with the artist held captive by her iPad, watching the sun rise and fall against its endless scroll, her agency continually thwarted by technology.
What would a feminist (or perhaps just a feminine) filmmaking look like outside the defined terrains of our bodies? How can one cathect wandering eyes without becoming the object of desire itself?
The artists of Open Secret attempt to re-image themselves, but the record shows that simply steering the camera is not enough to achieve this goal. Jennifer Ringley – founder of JenniCam – is widely considered to be the first camgirl, and conceived of her project less as a peep show and more as conceptual art. It was an attempt to re-cast the gazes that inevitably fell on her as an early web celebrity, the scrutiny that we all now feel subjected to in some capacity. According to academics Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, in their essay collection Feminist Cyberspaces, JenniCam “represents a complex dialectic between woman as subject and woman as object, woman as both consumer and consumed…women online as objects first, subjects second.”
The limiting factor in this equation is the spectator, who has an unmistakable influence despite his anonymity and amorphousness. How, and by whom, are the images we freely release onto the web appropriated?
At the most recent iteration of Bleeding Edge’s shorts program, I confronted Open Secret’s animus. The Toronto-based screening collective platforms independent, often provocative, contemporary cinema— on March 30th, a captive audience was subjected to Cameron Worden’s Digital Devil Saga (2023), an 11-minute montage of the most depraved corners of the internet. Many people walked out, and most shielded themselves from the barrage. Amidst Worden’s flickering rampage, one image persisted: big, round breasts.
Here there is a contradiction. Cyberspace should be primed for the unshackling of our corporeality. But the truth is much more dour; we are more aware than ever of bodies and their currency.
To this end: the subject of Dawud’s Monad (in its current iteration) is blur technology, a loss of subjecthood itself. The unknowable protagonist embarks on a quest to find a Blur Specialist, someone to smudge her out of existence. Solemnly, she laments: “It would do me good to get rid of my face.” Yes, perhaps it would.
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