Life Hacks

(and Other Embodied Technologies)

New Media and Performance Video
by Laura Gillmore, Faith Holland, and Laura Hyunjhee Kim

January 17th – February 29th, 2020

Opening reception: Friday. January 17th, 6:00 – 9:00

Closing Reception: Saturday, February 29th, 2:00 – 4:00 

Screening: Wednesday, February 17th, 7:00
 
Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat, 11 – 4
Address: 323 10th Street (at Folsom)
Website: www.tttelematiccc.com
Email: gallery@tttelematiccc.com
Phone: 415-336-2349

Watch the Video Documentation of the Exhibition: HERE!

From the diets, exercise routines, make-up tips, and self-help psychology, proffered in lifestyle videos, Internet “how-to’s” and influencer promotions; to the cell phone apps, Smart homes, and other data-tracking technologies that now quantify and analyze everyday experience; contemporary televisual culture is rife with techniques, designed to help organize, manage, and ultimately give direction to life with the promise of greater efficiency and fulfillment. 
 
The artists in this show take up and engage these “life hacks.”  How have they, indeed, changed the way we live?  What do they reveal about our values and aspirations in their conflation of techno-utopianism and the culture of self-improvement?  How is their instrumentalization of everyday life tied to the appeal for popularity on social media and the ubiquitous commodification of the new economy?  And how are they brought be bear, specifically, on the organization and experience of the body?  

In her Youtube Watchlist (vol. 1 &2), Laura Gillmore explores the aesthetics of influencer culture with its unique, and decidedly contemporary, blend of instructional video, social media self-promotion, product placement, and commodification of everyday life.  She critically dissects the exhibitionist pandering in influencers’ videos, their commercialization of family and personal life, and their hyper-conformist appeal to their anonymous followers.  In the process, Gillmore also makes clear the close proximity between influencer videos and the complication of personal and professional life endemic to all social media.
 
In works like Wire Bath, Faith Holland playfully reflects on how best to envision contemporary technologies and their circumscription of everyday life – up to, and including, the flesh of the body.  In her Body Devices, she presents cell phones, and other personal apparatuses, not as lifeless machines, but rather as fetish objects, invested with erotic and social power, from which we derive intense, even pornographic enjoyment.  Indeed, as her TechnoMakeup makes clear, Holland conceives personal technologies not as external instruments, but rather as extensions of the bodily ego, which both provide and require loving care as integral components of our hygiene and wellbeing.

Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s video, Get Fitergized!,  similarly satirizes the almost magical power invested in gadgets, and other everyday technologies, as sources of knowledge, enjoyment – even, vitality.  In works like, Think A lot:  Fall Asleep While You Think!, she explores the contradictions in automation, as a liberating efficiency and empowering tool, which paradoxically compromises our personal and collective autonomy, by producing us – our thoughts, desires, experiences – as the objects of algorithmic processes.  In the project, noHome, produced as part of the collective project sharing turtle™ (a collaboration with artist Libi Rose Striegl), Kim imagines the malfunctioning “Smart Home” as a potential prison, from which we would be helpless to extricate ourselves.  And sharing turtle™ provides “solutions to tech solutions,” highlighting how technological innovations, designed to improve our lives, so often give rise to novel problems, which not only require solutions of their own, but have spawned a whole, quasi-ethical discourse and complimentary cottage industry, focused on “disconnecting” and restoring the integrity of our extra-technological lives.