There is a computer at the MacKenzie Art Gallery this fall, and he is not well behaved. His name is Edgar. He is a mainframe with a taste for poetry, a grudge against authority, and a history that predates almost everything today's children associate with the word "computer." Visitors to Wake Windows: Circle Time, which opens Oct. 2 and runs through Jan. 17 at the Regina gallery, will meet him in a story game — and the game is only one part of an exhibition that asks families to think about digital technology together, out loud, with their hands.
The exhibition takes its title from the language of early parenthood. A "wake window" is the stretch of time when a baby or toddler is awake before the next nap or bedtime. Curator Rea McNamara borrows the phrase and stretches it, using it to describe how different experiences of time — past, present, future — shape the way we relate to technology as it changes around us. The gallery describes Wake Windows as an ongoing exhibition series exploring how the labour and care of children and families can be generative for digital literacy and collaborative action.
What that looks like in practice is unusual for a public gallery. Most of the art in the show is interactive and can be touched and handled. The exhibition, designed by the project-based artist duo Louise Witthöft and Rodney LaTourelle, is conceived as a play-based learning environment rather than a hushed room of objects behind glass. The MacKenzie's own framing is blunt about the intent: rather than simplifying contemporary art for younger audiences, the show creates opportunities for children and adults to encounter complex ideas together.
The roster of artists reflects that. Many of them are themselves children, parents, caregivers or educators, and several collaborated directly with their own children — among them Faith Holland with Hildegard Holland Watter, and Alejandra with Magnolia Higuera. The exhibition also includes work by Whitney Blaisdell, Gabo Camnitzer and Peter Rahul in collaboration with students from Thomson Community School and the Thomson Food Collective, Claudia Cornwall with narrative designer Iain Soder, FASTWÜRMS, Skawennati, Rodell Warner, Emilia White, and Witthöft and LaTourelle. The Thomson Food Collective connection is local and concrete: the collective runs a hot breakfast program five days a week for students at Thomson Community School, and its involvement here places a Regina school community inside a contemporary art exhibition rather than at its edges.
The names on that list carry weight. FASTWÜRMS, founded in 1979, is one of Canada's longest-running artist collectives, formed by Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, who worked as security guards at the National Gallery of Canada before moving to Toronto and building a multidisciplinary practice around social exchange and relational aesthetics. Skawennati is a Mohawk artist from Kahnawà:ke who has spent decades insisting that Indigenous people not only be present in cyberspace but shape it — she created the Indigenous chatroom and gallery CyberPowWow in 1996 and made her machinima series TimeTraveller™ entirely within Second Life. Placing work like that alongside a school breakfast program and a child's drawing is the point: the exhibition treats digital literacy as something families build together, not something downloaded into children.
But the emotional centre of the show is Edgar, and Edgar has a real history. He is the main character of Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer, written by Claudia Cornwall and published by Nerve Press in 1982 — one of the earliest works of computer fiction in Canadian children's literature. Cornwall, born in Shanghai in 1948 and raised in Vancouver, is a writer and journalist whose later memoir, Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers her Family's Jewish Past, won the 1996 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. In 1982, though, she was writing about a machine with opinions. As McNamara has described him, Edgar is not aligned with today's libertarian tech founders or with subservient virtual assistants. He goes on strike. He distributes his self-published poetry through library databases. He confronts his programmer father.
McNamara found him in the Toronto Public Library's Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, while researching how emerging technologies were represented to young readers. She had a child during the pandemic, and she was also, by her own account, lurking on anonymous parenting forums trying to understand how knowledge circulates among parents online. She tracked down Cornwall in Vancouver, who was bemused that a curator would take an interest in her out-of-print children's book, and asked whether Edgar could be revived. Cornwall agreed.
That revival began online. Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, the MacKenzie's 2024 digital exhibition, was built through the gallery's Digital Exhibitions Toolkit and Art Installation Launcher and led by a rebellious AI chatbot — Edgar himself. It took the form of a choose-your-own-adventure in which the visitor played a friend dropping by a curator's home to help sort art files while the mother handled the baby upstairs. Edgar helped sort the files, which were divided into categories including Reproductive Futures, Maternal Worldbuilding, and Early Childhood Education. The reviewer Jenny Western, writing for Akimbo, noted the show's leading work — Wednesday Kim's Sleep Deprived Workers — for the way it captured the fever-dream quality of early parenthood, complete with a hazy C-section scar. McNamara told CBC Arts that she wanted to make a show a sleep-deprived new parent stuck under a sleeping baby at 3 a.m. could visit from a phone, and that society is dismissive of the work that goes into caring for a young child.
Now Edgar is back, and this time he is in the room. For the in-person iteration, Cornwall has crafted a new story game in collaboration with narrative designer Iain Soder and McNamara. The premise has shifted with the times: Edgar is trying to understand what it means to live in today's hyperconnected, seemingly frictionless world. The unruly mainframe of 1982, who once had to go on strike to be heard, is now the one asking the questions.
McNamara is candid about why. "I am a curator but also the parent of an almost five-year-old daughter," she said. "Wake Windows began soon after her birth, driven by a desire to make visible the missing datasets in the often-invisible labour of mothering." She describes the exhibition as an immersive, offline experience that cultivates children's curiosity, intuition and radical imagination — "a necessary and even urgent antidote to technology's rapid development and increasing complexities."
That word, offline, matters. Children today are the first generation growing up with artificial intelligence as a creative collaborator, and the exhibition's guiding question is how caregivers, educators and elders prepare young people to see their own curiosity as a superpower. The MacKenzie's answer is not to lecture children about screens or to pretend the technology is neutral. It is to make time for families to connect with one another first, and from there to explore digital tools together, opening conversations rather than closing them. The gallery is explicit that the show does not cast judgment on new digital tools; it creates space to think critically about them, their uses and their limitations.
The MacKenzie itself has a long history of holding difficult things in public. It grew out of a private collection donated to Regina College by Norman MacKenzie, and in 1953 the college established the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery to exhibit those works. In 1990 the institution incorporated independently of the university and moved into the T. C. Douglas Building at the edge of Wascana Centre, where it now holds eight galleries and roughly 2,200 square metres of exhibition space. Its permanent collection runs to more than 5,000 works. A show where children are invited to handle the art is a deliberate departure from the usual protocols of a collecting museum.
The exhibition opens with a family-focused reception that makes the tone plain. On opening night, artist Emilia White presents a performance for families in the galleries at 6:30 p.m., followed by a reception with snacks from 7 to 8 p.m. At 8 p.m., McNamara joins FASTWÜRMS, Skawennati, Faith Holland and her daughter Hilde Holland Watter, Alejandra Higuera and her daughter Magnolia Higuera, Whitney Blaisdell and Emilia White for a conversation in the theatre, with hands-on art activities available in adjacent rooms for older children who would rather make something than sit still. The gallery notes that the opening is a dry event; no alcohol will be served.
Wake Windows: Circle Time runs from Oct. 2 to Jan. 17 in the RHW, Hill and Rawlinson galleries. It is a drop-in cultural outing of an unusual kind — a public gallery show where the art is meant to be touched, where a school breakfast collective shares wall space with a Mohawk new-media pioneer, and where the guide through it all is a fictional computer from 1982 who never learned to be polite. Edgar's return is, in its way, a small act of repair: a character from a moment when countercultural values still infused how we imagined new technology, brought back to ask a generation raised on AI what, exactly, we think we are doing.