Digital Culture, Surveillance, and the Afterlife
About the works
Eulogy, Susan Silas. Susan Silas is a visual artist working primarily in digital media, video, sculpture and photography. Looking at the arc of her career over the past two decades, whether at a large scale project like Helmbrechts walk, or her series of works found birds (depicting death and decay), the exploration of the three hour life span of the mayfly on the Tisza River in Hungary, or her ongoing self-portraiture and series love in the ruins; sex over 50, to her more recent works in post-photography, digital sculpture and motion capture; all of her work examines the meaning of embodiment, the index in representation, and the evolution of our understanding of the self over time. She is interested in the aging body, in gender roles, and in the potential outcomes of the creation of idealized selves through modern technologies and artificial intelligence.
Deep Touch, Faith Holland. Deep Touch is a performative video using a Soft Computing sculpture. The piece is inspired by the oft-cited Matt Mahurin image made for a 1995 Time Magazine cover story on cyberporn, in which a man hugs a glowing computer. This simple gesture--embracing the device one spends so much time with--is cast in a sinister light, a deviation from normal desire. Twenty-five years hence, in a time when we touch and caress our devices all day long, heightened even further by quarantine, the desire to embrace our technologies seems normal and obvious.
Jack, Faiyaz Jafri. Produced by Hyper-Unrealism All rights reserved © 2019 by Faiyaz Jafri / Hyper-Unrealism." Jack is naked. Jack is pretending to play guitar. Jack looks silly and vulnerable? This piece is inspired by the notion that the exposure of Jesus' penis was to prove his humanity and vulnerability. Penis = Vulnerability. Penis + Air Guitar = Super Vulnerability.
nothing_fucking_matters_II: cuter on the internet.mp4 by shawné michaelain holloway Digital intimacy is about exchange, but what is it that it is made of and how are we exchanging it? A PERSONAL PROJECT is a series of online artifacts ranging from videos and erotic stories to photos and snapchats created to expose power dynamics in online, browser-mediated affairs. Who or what controls who's arousal? Who gets paid? Are there different kinds of currency used for pay-outs? Who gets what kind of currency-- is it all equal? Guilt and shame are explored as a possible substance that can be communicated through interface obfuscated online interaction. This project was exhibited in an account on XTUBE until 2019, an amateur porn site. nothing_fucking_matters_II: cuter on the internet.mp4 (2014) is an artifact from that XTUBE channel.
Hereafter Institute, Gabriel Barcia-Colombo. What happens to your digital presence after you die? What becomes of our personal data, memories and history? The Hereafter Institute has a number of technological solutions for the preservation of your digital soul. The Hereafter Institute is an immersive art installation created by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo as part of a grant funded by the Art + Technology lab at LACMA. Specialists lead tours about multiple methods of digital preservation including 3D body scanning, wearable memorialization and the embedding of personal data into everyday objects. Our goal is to help you to honor, recognize and celebrate your digital presence and consider the future of rituals and memorials surrounding an abundance of personal data.
365 perfect _ 3 by Rosa Menkman. 365 perfect “the best FREE virtual makeup app, period. It’s like having a glam squad in your pocket!”
The options in the app include virtual photo make-up, which has filters such as ‘delete blemishes’, or ‘brighten and soften skin’. It can also deepen the smile, put lipstick or even lip tattoos, enlarge the eyes and make the face slimmer, lift the cheeks, enhance the nose, or resize the lips. And lets not forget to whiten the teeth, add eyelashes, eye liner and eyebrows and finally change the hairstyle.
I used the app to make myself perfect. Not once, not twice, but hundreds of times over, more perfection one year along. If everyday I could get just one shade lighter, slimmer cheeks or bigger eyes... how beautiful would I become?
Mood Board: Home Essentials & Basic Concepts, Laura Gillmore. In Mood Board: Home Essentials & Basic Concepts, a virtual mood board serves as an embodiment of order, organization, and consistency. Overlaying the vlogger’s teeth whitening demo, self-talk and motivational speaking resounds. These affirmations of control, containment, and predictability bear a stark contrast to “lifestyle” in 2020.
so much for self control, Martina Menegon “so much for self control” is a limited edition GIF commissioned by based Vienna for the exhibition "Animated_currency_01.gif". In a perpetual loop, torture clones of the artist’s 3D-scanned body try to escape an algorithm that forces them to dance.
What does it mean - excerpt from FATAL ERROR: artificial creative intelligence (ACI), Mark Amerika. Computer-generated algorithmic art has undergone significant developments since its emergence in the 1960s. With further integration of art and technology in the 21st century, artists continue to respond, take risks and challenge the ways computers can be thought of as a creative medium. The FATAL ERROR art project specifically addresses speculative forms of artificial intelligence particularly the possibilities for creative collaboration between human and machine-generated embodiments of poetic expression. The Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI) is a fictional AI Poet whose spoken word poetry signals the horizon of a new type of authorship that questions the philosophical, artistic and legal implications of artificial intelligence. Amerika’s in-progress 3D video animation features the ACI [artificial creative intelligence], a digital avatar of the avant-garde whose infinite and generative spoken word poetry performance and philosophical musings takes on many of the critical issues that define our current technological, social, and political moment.
Let's Chat Like This, Noth (Qinyuan) Liu. Let's Chat Like This is an interactive installation that allows two people to observe each others’ moods through interacting with a shared interactively generated image, which changes according to their facial expressions. Let’s Chat Like This shows a visualization of the complexity of human emotion and boosts people’s emotional communication. When experiencing this artwork, people’s emotions are bound together with the same moving image they see. They will be aware of their current mood as well as the other’s, the intimacy and empathy between them will be increased. This is not only a “social distancing” art installation that helps us connect emotionally during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also my hypothesis of what future emotional communication will be like. Without any contexts, people would not be initiated to chat or communicate emotionally. Online chatting platforms like Zoom are perfect places that provide this kind of context. Additionally, after the outbreak of COVID-19, most people have already got used to the social life on Zoom. To some extent, showing artworks on Zoom is like showing them in a virtual gallery where anyone can get easy access. Connecting this interactive system to Zoom also allows lots of people seeing it and experiencing it. In all, I hope this artwork can evoke deep thinking and maybe cheer people up in this challenging time. Let’s Chat Like This hasn’t been shown in a public space physically. I believe once I get the chance, it can be an inspiring piece and I’d love to see what it can become.
Petting Zoo by Lorna Mills. Petting Zoo: Noble Orphans is part of a series of found animated gif collages that captures ‘petting’ in all its manifestations: sometimes light, sometimes heavy, sometimes soothing, sometimes frenzied.
The Ruins (3 min excerpt), Claudia Hart. The Ruins is an audiovisual animation tracking through a claustrophobic game world from which there is no escape. As the three-channel maze unravels, Hart introduces her newest interpretation of still lifes—low polygon models. These models, hearkening to the idea of a poor copy or image popularized by Hito Steryl, are computer-made replications of copyright-protected paintings. Taken from works by Matisse and Picasso, patriarchs of the Modernist canon, these forms cover The Ruins in flirtatious copyright infringement. Copyright marks the beginning of Modernism as a response to the emerging technology of photography. Music composed by Edmund Campion furthers the ethos of modernism through the tactical mixing of failed Utopian ideologies: Thomas Jefferson On American Liberty; The Bauhaus Manifesto by Walter Gropius; Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s failed suburban rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest; and Jim Jones’s sermon, The Open Door. Campion has processed and mixed each recording read by the artist, using Hart’s voice as an instrument that serves as the soundtrack to both the animation and the exhibition itself.
Life Scenes, Caroline Sinders
Connoisseur, Mark Klink. "Connoisseur" is a brief, non-rational meditation on treasures, fakes, the hazy line between the two, and the human impulse to preserve what we imagine to be valuable.
Enigmatic_v.001, Sherie Weldon. My new work focuses on the internal and external feelings of exposure to the stress of this year’s events. The imagery of 3D scanned humans from diverse backgrounds visualizes the the physical stress of the dual pandemics, systemic racism, and biological infection affecting the planet. Using the cartography locations from tragic events, imbedded the dem spatial data into the models. I further bring forth the discourse of the emotional effect on our bodies. The spatiality in the body object transforms in the space of inner and external terrain bring forth a subtle texture. My models float in a 3D environment as their alternative 2D connects them to the plane. This work also challenges the codes of a society that ties us all together, biologically and politically.