In our digital lives we have appropriated emojis as ready-made metonyms of emotions. The icons represent one specific object, yet the meaning is changeable and singular as it appears in various contexts, just as it is with verbal language. Emojis have become our hieroglyphs or pictograms for describing the meaningful and the trivial, our ways of understanding the world through. Claire Fountain’s emojis spread around the exhibition symbolizes the notion of constant commodification of information, digital gestures of our times transformed into light sculptures.
Tishan Hsu’s almost disorienting works explore the entanglements of bodies and technology, creating mutated and cyborg-looking objects, skin-screens as referred to by the artist. In Watching 2 (2021) Hsu investigates the mechanisms of surveillance, as part of our every day digital lives. The work incorporates a skin-screen made from UV cured inkjet on wood with silicone, one small inset screen, a thermal image of a person is labeled “fever,” while in another, facial recognition software scans a portion of a visage, logging it. Beneath a layer of encrusted silicone along the bottom edge of the work is a frieze-like surveillance image of a crowd of individuals tagged with green or red boxes that indicate whether they are “stressed” or “relaxed. Our bodies are literally synchronized with our screens, where all lived aspects of our lives are surveilled and calculated by our devices, as we give out information, to receive back new information about, in this case, our health.
Sondra Perry’s video work It’s in the Game’17 (2017) deals with the notion of a more recent type of colonization, ‘digital colonization’, while considering identity theft in the case of virtual bodies. The video is revolving around the artist’s twin brother Sandy Perry, once a Division 1 basketball player for Georgia State University. His physical likeness and statistics were sold by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) to video game developer EA Sports for use in the 2009 and 2010 NCAA video games. That being without his knowledge, consent or without any compensation to Sandy Perry. Combined with footage from The British Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sandra Perry is pointing to the fact of ownership, and here specifically, the colonial origins of the museum’s art collections. It’s in the Game’17 is touching upon current surveillance-economical exploitation of personal data as well as injustices in who owns and displays certain “information”.
Claire Fontaines Sensitive content (2020), displays an Instagram post with hidden image content, including the sensitive content symbol. The work reflects on what is being seen, and not. While we simultaneously are overloaded with digital content and other various information sources, Claire Fontaines work claims simultaneous censorship of urgent information, and even shields us from political action. Sensitive content witnesses the uneven modes of the information circulation, as well as unusable politics and infrastructures.
Lawrence Lek’s AIDOL (2019) is a CGI musical about a fading superstar, Diva, who enlists an aspiring AI songwriter to mount a comeback performance at the 2065 eSports Olympic finale. Featuring a score written and orchestrated by the artist, AIDOL revolves around the long and complex struggle between humanity and Artificial Intelligence. Fame – in all its allure and emptiness – is set against the bigger contradictions of a post-AI world, a world where originality is sometimes no more than an algorithmic trick and where machines have the capacity for love and suffering. Lek’s AIDOL questions the future of artistic labor and entertainment production – and generally the future possibilities of all content creation.
In Anadol’s installation, the machine has absorbed MoMA’s collection – two centuries of art, each piece a fragment of human imagination – and now, it dreams in colors, shapes, reimagining their stories. It rethinks the history of modern art, what it might have been, and what it might become. This dreamscape evolved with every breath of the museum, an endless, shifting portrait. The machine stirs as light filters through the museum’s lobby, sensing subtle shifts in its surroundings.
“We are born alone and we die alone,” is the name of the artists ‘self’ inhabiting the digital space – DOKU. The digital space reflects many worlds within worlds, paths of algorithms lead one down many differing paths. In that, new found selves are created. But what if the digital self, of you- yourself, is fostered within this realm? Drawing upon Buddhist philosophies of reincarnation, non-linearity and non-self, Lu Yang explores the digitization of humans into what is currently newfound territory.
In unresistant scrolling, viewers are extorted to a symbolic button of rage, sadness, happiness, guilt. Media consumers are presented with a metaphysical data-scape where past, present, future becomes here and now. Previously scattered voices are highlighted and emphasized as they take shape in new forms of discourse. Whiteness is set front and center as terms such as ‘white guilt’ come to be. Sondra Perry’s Sorry for real takes on apologies in, of, and in-between our digital age where a self-effaced humanity comes to terms with its self-made destruction.
In Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Encode/Decode (2020) a dense constellation of letters fills the space, each one in slow, fluid motion. With each drifting letter, scattered thoughts become a metaphor for individuals in society – small yet essential fragments of a larger narrative. We become floating letters, small, distinct pieces, yet always leaning toward connection.
Emilija Škarnulytė brings forth the supposed abstract non-thing that is ‘data’. Connectivity across spectrums of apps, websites and the internet becomes a seemingly metaphysical thing that seems harmless in its supposed immateriality. In creating Rakhne, Emilija expertly brings together the artificial into the natural, where the spectator is effectively coming face to face with the apparent physicality of data.
In a seemingly inebriated sequence, where the screens’ divided colors reflect separative 3D glasses of the early 2000s. Pure Means offers a hapticality that encompasses the viewers with loud fireworks creating both a spectral and an audible intensity.
In our increasingly visual world, textuality seems to disappear into more formative ways of being, storytelling, showing. The digital artist, Maya Man’s read it and weep reads like a constant scrolling through one’s tiktok for you page; where “I am Just a Girl”-isms come to the fore-front assumed as personal brandings. Reflective of how videos of these voices get louder with every swipe, so do the writings of Man’s continuous website/ digital work contend to and show a saturation in an era of self-surveillance.