Preliminary Visions of a Girl-Online

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 30^th, 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.