GAMESCENES

EVENT: 30 LIVES (JANUARY 31 - MARCH 31 2024, MANILA, PHILIPPINES)

30 LIVES

31 January to 31 March 2024

Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design, GF De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde Design + Arts Campus, Dominga Street, Malate, Manila, 1004

Free to the public, the museum is open Tuesdays–Saturdays, 10 AM–6 PM; and Sundays, 10 AM–2 PM, except holidays.

An art world "extra life" arrives as the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila opens 30 Lives—the famed trove of bonus chances that unfold in video games upon keying the fabled "Konami code." Metaphorically, the exhibition explores society's myriad approaches toward play and gaming, those immersive escapes governed either loosely (play) or firmly (games) by boundaries and social contracts. Such temporary spheres divert attention from daily tedium, constructing pockets—be they physical spaces like courts or conceptual ones like board and video games—where critique and subversion germinate.

LuYang, Wrathful King Kong Core, 14' 48", 2013.

From 31 January through 31 March 2024, 30 Lives beckons audiences into this fertile terrain to traverse temporalities: from antique pastimes to video art harnessing gaming's storytelling power for philosophical ends. Long derided for frivolity, these mediums emerge as vital crucibles. Featured works by Harun Farocki (Parallel I-IV, 2012-2014), Lu Yang (Wrathful King Kong Core, 2013), Heecheon Kim (Cutter III, 2023), Ikoy Ricio (Drop Dead or Die) and Miguel Inumerable are complemented by original games developed by De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde's Interactive Entertainment and Multimedia Computing program.

Ultimately, the exhibition dares viewers to locate themselves across spectra from delight to challenge, skill to memory, strategy to knowledge, simulation to dystopia, roleplay to narrative indulgence, and all liminal spaces between.

LINK: 30 LIVES

GAME ART: YUCEF MERHI'S WHERE DO WE GO (2023)

Yucef Merhi, Where Do We Go, 2023
3 CRT TVs, Atari 2600 consoles, custom cartridges, Plexiglass furniture
31 x 59.5 x 34.5 in.

Yucef Merhi's thought-provoking installation Where Do We Go explores notions of physical confinement and mental freedom. The piece features three vintage CRT television sets with transparent casings, connected to Atari 2600 game consoles from 1977. Each console contains a custom cartridge programmed with one part of the central question that titles the work: "Where do we go/when we stay/in the same place?". The old-school game systems and their ponderous query sit atop two wide plexiglass pedestals, giving the impression that the technology floats in space.

Notably, Merhi acquired the televisions from prisons, where transparent-cased models were used to prevent contraband smuggling. This imbues the work with another layer of meaning tied to incarceration. Even confined to a cell, the human mind remains free to wander to new spaces through creative thought, imagination, and introspection. Merhi invites us to move around his installation and reflect on this interplay between physical restrictions and mental liberation. The blinking text onscreen reads like an existential mantra, while the visible interior workings of the TV sets symbolize the untethered workings of the mind. Ultimately, Where Do We Go investigates where the human spirit travels even when the body cannot, suggesting that new perspectives emerge whenever we quest inward.

installation view

Yucef Merhi is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and programmer whose innovative works fuse technology, language, and philosophical ideas. Born in 1977 in Caracas, Venezuela, Merhi studied at the Universidad Central de Venezuela before moving to the United States to continue his education. He earned a bachelor's degree from the New School University in New York City, followed by a master's degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. Merhi creates conceptually driven installations, sculptures, and digital works that engage electronic devices in unconventional ways. For example, his Poetic Clock converts the passage of time into computer-generated poetry, producing 86,400 unique poems daily. After establishing himself in the New York art scene over the past two decades, Merhi continues to push creative boundaries with his multidisciplinary practice today. His avant-garde works offer unique insight into the intersection between technology, poetry, and philosophy in the contemporary world.

LINK: Yucef Merhi

EVENT: ARE YOU FOR REAL. RITUALS OF NASCENT WORLDS. PHASE 2 (AUGUST 2 2023 - DECEMBER 31 2024, ONLINE)

The Rodina, Poring the Ecocide, 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist)

ARE YOU FOR REAL
Phase 2: Cosmo-clusters on computation, agency, and magic

2 Aug 2023 - 31 Dec 2024
Web-based project: areyouforreal.ifa.de

IFA BERLIN

press release

Are you for real? It would be an odd question to ask if we didn’t have technologies at hand capable not only of representing but generating realities. Computation propels a shift in our understanding of what "real" is, and how it should be distinguished from the merely possible, the virtual, and the actual.
 
Realities can be constructed by calculating machines as much as by the scientific activity that shapes how we perceive our digital and analog life-worlds. The understanding that computation and scientific investigation are two main forces that define our realities lies at the core of ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2. In arriving at this second phase, areyouforreal.ifa.de becomes a platform for investigating how computation and the sciences relate to reality—the full potential of their roles in generating new worlds—through the work of artists.
 
Artworks commissioned for or otherwise featured on the platform converge into thematic clusters, manifesting as planetary systems, to disclose a new cosmology of interpretations of the digital sphere. The intention is to show the irreducible entanglement of real and digital and to transpose fundamental questions present in our terrestrial life to the online sphere. 

The artists featured on ARE YOU FOR REAL use computers as tools, as collaborators, and as agents of world creation. They increasingly base their works on the results of scientific research, while also borrowing and transforming its methods in their investigations.
 
In recent decades computation has reached a planetary scale: its infrastructure now interconnects and forms the Earth. Because the ARE YOU FOR REAL artworks are held up by the stack of computation, the digital cosmos they create cannot be interpreted separately from the infrastructure it relies on.
 
The first cluster of artworks reflects on infrastructural issues. They engage with the manifold ways in which the virtual worlds generated by computation depend on the planet, but they also feed on its ecosystem’s imagery, relations, and data as they imagine alternatives for the world from which they emerge. 
 
The second cluster speculates on what never was but might have been; these artworks imagine the regenerative power of the virtual and its possible impacts on real-world scenarios, ecosystems, and non-human and interspecies alliances. They are collaborative human-machine explorations that provide counternarratives around technology and around artificial and natural agency.

The makers of the works in the third cluster interlace reality’s warp and weft, reconstructing it through combinations of technology and magic, reformulating ancient traditions. As its foundations begin to crumble under the pressure of technology, we can see ever more clearly that reality is not an unchangeable given, but a weave in a state of constant becoming. 

Rituals of Nascent Worlds closes the first year of Phase 2 releases by weirding our understanding and experience of reality through magic, as an alternative system competing with technic and as a generative tool that weaves "the ineffable" (Federico Campagna) into reality, manifesting and actualizing in digital worlds. By claiming the critical and generative potential of magical thinking, the artists featured in this third cluster reimagine our alliances with technology, queer our belief systems, and engage in collaborative practices. They obstruct and restructure perception, representation, and narrative by infusing them with alternative thought in dynamic and evolving environments. The third cluster of works is premiering a newly commissioned virtual space by Sahej Rahal: Azalabad.
 
ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 aspires to situate and question a multiplicity of cosmotechnics (to pick up Yuk Hui’s term) shaped by a diverse and decentralized community of artists through a sequence of cosmological propositions, alternating between planetary and terrestrial, ecological and technological, magical and decolonial. They enable us to grasp various aspects of digitalization, and to explore a reality now irreducibly entangled with the online sphere.
 
Visitors enter the website from a point of view experienced in real life only by astronauts. Navigating the platform, visitors may leap from planet to planet but also enter them, shifting between planetary and terrestrial perspectives. They surf among configurations of clustered planets, visiting commissioned and featured works as well as selected contributions to ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 1. 

Artists
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Can Karaalioglu
Nushin Isabelle Yazdani
Zheng Mahler
Rasheedah Phillips

The project features further contributions by
Ibrahim Cissé & Asmaa Jama,
João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga,
Nelly Y. Pinkrah,
Ainslee Alem Robson & Kidus Aailesilassie
Michelle M. Wright
Dior Thiam, George Demir, Luïza Luz, Mathias Becker
Ruben Susanne Bürgam, Gertruda Gilyte, Théo Pożoga, Andi Teichmann
Marcel Heise, Yuyen Lin-Woywod, Zaidda Nursiti Kemal and
Xiaoyu Tang & Sayaka Katsumoto

Curators
Julia Grosse
Yvette Mutumba
Paula Nascimento

LINK: ARE YOU FOR REAL

EVENT: DXP (DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PLANET) (OCTOBER 7 2023 - MARCH 17 2024 KANAZAWA CITY, JAPAN)

DXP (Digital Transformation Planet)
Towards the Next Interface

October 7, 2023–March 17, 2024
211st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
1 Chome-2-1 Hirosaka
Kanazawa, Ishikawa 9208509
Japan
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm,
Friday–Saturday 10am–8pm

press release

Eating the digital!?
Technology that integrates with the body
How will digital technology change our way of life and sensibilities? This question has been asked repeatedly since the 20th century. In 2023, we may answer this question: a completely different planet is about to emerge. On this planet which has entered the Anthropocene, we are immersed in an invisible network. Our lives are partly (and getting more and more) controlled by AI, and the relationship between technology and life is being generated anew every day.

DXP is an exhibition/interface that brings together artists, architects, scientists, programmers, and others to capture this transformation across disciplines, understand what is happening now, and propose it as something that can be sensed. The contemporary realities of AI, metaverse, and big data are the technologies of the moment. DXP is a vision of the future that follows it, explores the possibility of a comprehensive way of life that includes food, clothes, and habitation.

Yuko Hasegawa, Yuu Takagi, Mio Harada, Yishu Hang, Jin Motohashi

Keiken, Installation design for Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1 © Keiken

Featured artists:

AFROSCOE (Republic of Ghana)
・Refik Anadol (Turkey, USA)
・ANREALAGE (Japan)
・Shruti Belliappa & Kiraṇ Kumār (India)
・ GROUP (Japan)
・ HATRA+Yuma Kishi (Japan)
・ Keiken (Japan, U.K., Mexico)
・ Tomihiro Kono (Japan)
・MANTLE: Shu Isaka + Soshi Nakamura (Japan)
・Shoei Matsuda (Japan)
・David OReilly (Ireland)
・ Takashi Ikegami Laboratory, University of Tokyo (Supported by Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory, University of Osaka)
・ VUILD (Japan)
・ Jonathan Zawada (Australia)

Radical pedagogy section:

・Merve Akdogan (Turkey)
・David Blandy (UK)
・DEF CON 26 (Germany)
・Bert Chan, Takashi Ikegami Laboratory, The University of Tokyo (Hong Kong, Japan)
・Sarah Ciraci (Italy)
・Homei Miyashita Laboratory, Meiji University (Japan)
・Emi Kusano (Japan)
・MANTLE: Shu Isaka+Soshi Nakamura (Japan)
・Till Nowak (Germany)
・Sputniko! (Japan)
・David OReilly (Ireland)

LINK: DXP

RESOURCE: CURA. 41: NEW WORLD AGENCY™

CURA. 41

New World Agency™

Fall-Winter 2023-2024

press release

Through an extensive investigation of the new searches and work productions of international artists, the brand new CURA. 41, New World Agency™ raises questions related to the ability of art and artists to have a transformative role as regards the apparent irreversibility of the events that impact our present. In a shift between fiction and reality, New World Agency™ explores, with a transgenerational gaze, the artists who foresaw the building of new possible worlds and new modes of agency for alternative futures. Not only AI, CGI, videogames and virtual reality, but also highly advanced analog tools, animatronics, and mechanical devices are able to forge the imaginative, creative and narrative space of artists, founding new realities, in which mythology, ghosts, topoi, fables, childhood memories, technology, pop culture and magic intertwine, in the comprehensive illusion to be in different places and in part of it.

“A World is a super-organism you can believe in…Worlding is the art of an individual creating a World” —Ian Cheng.

CURA. 41 presents 4+1 covers with works’ premiere by: Diego Marcon introduced by Travis Diehl; Mark Leckey presented by a long mixtape of undead voices created by Charlie Fox; Cécile B. Evans presented by Asma Barchiche; plus a cover story and an insert by trans woman artist and activist Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), photographed by Myles Loftin. Anticipating the special cover coming out in December, Jordan Wolfson, in conversation with Caroline Busta and Lil Internet, reveals the production and what goes on behind the scenes of his third animatronic sculpture. Essays, interviews, and projects include an introductory text by Ian Cheng; a focus on the pioneering work of the American artist Mike Kelley, presented by the double gaze of the curator of La Bourse in Paris, Jean-Marie Gallais, and the artist, raised in his myth, Matt Copson; a conversation between Agnieszka Kurant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, investigating the evolution of culture and also “the relationship between predicting the future and how this is impacting the actual future”; new narratives, articulated in the visual essay conceived by Helen Marten. Furthermore, we present the new film and corpus of work by Martine Syms, introduced by the British curator Ben Broome; a special section curated by Countersubject that introduces us to the work of the multi-disciplinary art collective Bernadette Corporation; Anna Uddenberg’s totemic sculptures, presented by David Andrew Tasman; a photo shoot commissioned to the New York-based fashion duo of artists and activists Women’s History Museum which is introduced by a conversation with Ada O’Higgins. The New Now section also features the work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, with a text by Wong Binghao (Bing), of Gabriel Massan, investigated by Tamar Clarke-Brown, and Alice Bucknell in conversation with Sarah Johanna Theurer. The Portraits’ section features the work of Pete Jiadong Qiang with a text by Tadej Vindiš; Shuang Li with a text by Lina Martin-Chan; Gray Wielebinski presented by Francesca Gavin; Omsk Social Club with a text by Estelle Hoy; Ndayé Kouagou presented by Madeleine Planeix-Crocker.

Publishers and Editors in Chief: Ilaria Marotta, Andrea Baccin.

CURA. 41 will be available from mid-October 2023.

LINK: CURA. 41

EVENT: FUMI OMORI (JUNE 2 - 15 2023, ONLINE)

Fumi Omori

Home Sweet Home

machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 2’ 35”, Japan

June 2 - 15 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 
Home Sweet Home explores personal memories and their translation into physical architecture through Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With a history of frequent relocations, the artist captured their rooms in photographs, preserving emotional connections to past spaces. Animal Crossing, a beloved game providing an idyllic refuge during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowed the artist to craft personalized rooms reflecting their personality. This project questions the impact of translating real-life spaces into the virtual realm. Employing photogrammetry, the artist reconstructs their past homes in the game, blurring boundaries with imaginative architecture. The interplay between virtual and physical layers offers a fresh perspective, showcasing a unique visual hacking method. Automating realities on the virtual plane reveals the intricate relationship between our fragile understanding of reality and memories. Digital reverie becomes an avenue for escapism, confronting the present, future, nostalgia, and denial.

Fumi Omori navigates the crossroads of the cultural diaspora with her transcendent visual language. Currently nearing the culmination of her master’s degree in photography at the esteemed École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland, Omori’s diverse cultural experiences serve as a potent source of inspiration. Born and raised in Japan, the artist spent over a decade living in prominent American coastal cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco) before gravitating towards the medium of photography. Her previous stints as a perceptive graphic designer and discerning art director have indubitably permeated her artistic vision.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: REFIGURED (MARCH 3 - JULY 3 2023, NEW YORK)

Rachel Rossin, still from The Maw Of, 2022. Web-based animation with augmented reality (AR). Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website and Kunst-Werke Berlin Institute for Contemporary Art AP.2022.1. © Rachel Rossin

 

Refigured

Curated by Christiane Paul

March 3 - July 3 2023

Whitney Museum
of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014

press release

Refigured, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 3, brings together five installations by leading artists working in the field of digital art to reflect on the ways technology intersects with and influences our ever-evolving identities, underscoring the dynamic between digital and physical artworks and blurring boundaries between them.

Featured artists include American Artist, Morehshin Allahyari, Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, Auriea Harvey, and Rachel Rossin. Drawing from the Museum’s collection and including digital video and animation, virtual sculpture, and augmented reality, the installations in this exhibition respond to the various forces that form identity and engage with the concept of “refiguring.” Sculptures are presented concurrently in digital and physical space alongside animations that escape the confinement of screens and reach into the gallery. Constructs of identity, self-representation, structures of oppression, and colonialism are explored through a variety of lenses and mediums. Some artists investigate the ways identity is reflected in the structures of artificial intelligence and computer interfaces, while others consider how selfhood transforms in online environments and ancient cultural myths.

Refigured will be on view March 3–July 3, 2023 in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery, a space that is accessible to the public free of charge and often highlights the latest emerging talent and innovation in American art. Three works in the exhibition are also accessible on artport, the Museum’s portal dedicated to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art, and can be directly launched through a QR code. This exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Experimenting with the idea of ‘refiguring’ is at the core of the works presented in this exhibition,” says Paul. “Through practices of appropriating material forms and reinventing them, the artists are challenging what it means to construct or shape identity.”

“Under Christiane’s leadership, the Whitney has long been dedicated to building an important collection of digital art,” says Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “With Refigured we will shine a spotlight on this key area of our holdings and some of the most innovative artists working in the field today.”

American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates video, installation, new media, and writing to consider Black labor, visibility, and antiblackness within digital systems and the internet. Their legal name change to American Artist represents the basis for their practice and affirms blackness as descriptive of an American artist while simultaneously erasing identity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” remains anonymous online. Mother of All Demos III, American Artist’s installation in Refigured, alludes to the historical underrepresentation of the Black workforce in Silicon Valley. The installation features a mold of an Apple II computer—the company’s last model with a black home screen—coated in dirt, with liquid seeping out of the keyboard and handprints stamped on each side. The physicality of the computer sharply contrasts with the sleekness of Silicon Valley, commenting on how ideologies influence design choices and digital interfaces.

Morehshin Allahyari’s hypertext narrative The Laughing Snake was commissioned for artport in 2018 and will be presented in-gallery as an installation including a sculptural component. The work is based on the myth of jinn, supernatural creatures from Arabian mythology, to explore the status of women and the female body in the Middle East. Allahyari is an artist, activist, and educator whose work addresses the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. Employing technology as a theoretical toolset, the work documents and reflects on collective life struggles faced today.

A collaboration between artists Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :)))))) is a four-channel video installation centered on a chatbot examining the politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. The chatbot was developed by Microsoft in 2016, and its

learning and language imitation were influenced by aggressive trolling on platforms like Twitter. Within hours, these influences led the chatbot to use genocidal, homophobic, misogynist, and racist language, and it was shut down. For the installation, the chatbot is resurrected as an avatar to reflect on life after AI death and contemplate the experience of being stuck inside a neural network and the “apophenic” pursuit of patterns within information and algorithms.

Debuting both online and in the exhibition, Auriea Harvey’s SITE1 is the latest commission for artport. SITE1 is an illusionistic online space and the origin site of sculptural characters the artist has been working on over the course of many years. This work will be on view alongside Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis), the virtual and physical sculptures that represent the “origin story” of Harvey’s online identity. The sculptures embody the artist’s virtual avatar and her working process, which combines clay sculptures, digital 3D modeling, and video game and software development. Harvey’s digital sculptures are the core of the work, and she sees the physical sculptures as an extension of the virtual pieces.

Rachel Rossin’s THE MAW OF, a recent commission for artport that launched in 2022, is a transmedia story that unfolds across multiple platforms and formats and reflects on the alterations our bodies and minds experience with technology. Rossin, a multidisciplinary artist and established pioneer in the field of VR, blends painting, sculpture, new media, gaming, and video to create digital landscapes that focus on entropy, embodiment, and the effects technology has on our psyche. This work investigates the relationship between humans and machines, highlighting technology’s evolution from a tool to an extension of the mind and body.

LINK: Refigured

EVENT: THOMAS HAWRANKE AND LASSE SCHERFFIG (JANUARY 6-19 2023, ONLINE)

COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE – THE MOVIE

Digital video (1024 x 1024), sound, color, 55’ 33”, 2022, Germany  

Created by Thomas Hawranke and Lasse Scherffig

January 6 - 19 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

An adaptation sui generis of an early text-based adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure - The Movie remediates the program developed by Will Crowther in 1976 based on the architecture of the Mammoth Cave complex in Kentucky. The original game used text to describe the environment whereas the animated film uses AI-generated visuals. Every eight seconds, the AI system receives a new textual description, taken from Colossal Cave Adventure’s source code, comprising 379 inputs ranging from narrative descriptions of nature to jargon from the vocabulary of speleologists to single words meaning an object, a compass direction, or an exclamation. The camera constantly moves downwards, digging through geological layers and exposing new cave spaces again and again.

Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human-animal-machine relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern of his is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and received a PhD from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the zkm_gameplay in Karlsruhe and the RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Lasse Scherffig is an artist and scientist with a background in cognitive science/machine learning and computer science. Scherffig is interested in the relationship of humans, machines, and society; cybernetics and the technological infrastructures of communication and control; and the cultures and aesthetics of computation and interaction. His work oscillates between computer science and experimental artistic practices, engineering and amateur/DIY methods, science and humanities. A professor of Interaction Design at Köln International School of Design, he previously served as the Department Chair of Art and Technology at San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught as assistant professor. Scherffig co-founded the artist group Paidia Institute and off topic, magazine for media art. His art projects have been shown at numerous exhibitions. Lasse holds a doctoral degree in Experimental Computer Science from KHM, Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

WATCH NOW

CALL FOR ENTRIES: FILE 2023 (DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15 2023)

 

One of the most exciting digital arts festivals in the world, FILE - Electronic Language International Festival has recently launched its 2023. After a three years hiatus, FILE is back in grand style. Applications will be open from December 19th to February 15th.

 

The 22nd Edition of the Electronic Language International Festival will take place at the FIESP Cultural Center, in São Paulo, from July 5th to August 27th 2023. The selected projects will also be able to collaborate in parallel events in different states of Brazil, also taking place in 2023. The submission is free of charge.

FILE 2023 focuses on four  categories: Electronic Sound, Interactive Art, Digital Language (including video games and machinima, VR and AR) and Educational.

Click here for more information about the submission process. (Thank you Clarissa!)

EVENT: I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR: ART AND THE DIGITAL SCREEN (FEBRUARY 12-APRIL 30 2023, FORT WORTH, TEXAS)

Nam June Paik, Video Flag Y, 1985. 84 ten-inch television sets, three Plexiglas cases, fans, LaserDisc players, LaserDiscs, and video tapes. 72 x 144 x 50 inches. JPMorgan Chase Art Collection. © Estate of Nam June Paik.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen
February 12–April 30, 2023

Curated by Alison Hearst 

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
3200 Darnell Street
Fort Worth, Texas 76107 USA

press release

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents the landmark I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, a thematic group exhibition that examines the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. This exhibition surveys more than sixty works by fifty artists over the past five decades. The artists included examine screen culture through a broad range of media such as paintings, sculpture, video games, digital art, augmented reality, and video. Organized by Curator Alison Hearst, I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen will be on view at the Modern February 12 through April 30, 2023.

Screens affect nearly every aspect of life today. Their pervasiveness has bred a 24/7 breaking news cycle, the looming corporate-sponsored virtual-reality “Metaverse,” unlimited accessibility and content, and an ease in how ideas and images are distributed, undoubtably shaping culture in profound ways. This exhibition starts in 1969—the year of the televised Apollo moon landing and the launch of the internet’s prototype, ARPANET—as this was the watershed year where collective connectivity through screens was first mobilized in modern society. This era forged what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan presciently deemed in the 1960s a “global village,” a place where distance is collapsed and people from across the world readily interact. Following this trajectory, contemporary life is hybrid and increasingly mediated through screens. These flat and finite surfaces embody more than what meets the eye—they hold up a mirror to society and contribute to forming meaning in life and mainstream culture.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen is organized into nine key themes:

liminal space: From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, several artists were working alongside the early major technological developments of the screen: Gretchen Bender, Nancy Burson, Harold Cohen, Vuk Ćosić, Peter Halley, Frederick Hammersley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eduardo Kac, Tatsuo Miyajima, Nam June Paik, Lillian F. Schwartz, and Andy Warhol. These artists’ works are highlighted in this section for their innovative processes.

connectivity: Screens connect us with incredible ease to friends, colleagues, a network of other users and players, apps, news, and streaming services. We share—and are shared with—through screens. As culture courses through society via these means, screens are at the axis of most of our interactions, and these connections are a topic interrogated by many artists, including Cory Arcangel, Liss LaFleur, Eva and Franco Mattes, Cassie McQuater, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, and Wickerham & Lomax.

surveillance: While we find community through technology, we simultaneously become linked to broader systems of data extraction through our devices. Our information is captured for national security purposes, geo-mapping, and corporate surveillance capitalism, where targeted ads are deployed based on purchases and browsing history. Hasan Elahi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Jon Rafman investigate the positive, negative, and humorous aspects of surveillance today.

the repository: Today’s constant stream of data has led to round-the-clock ingestion of content. This informational sphere is made even more accessible via handheld devices. Speaking to a vast and complex array of image and information circulation in the screen age are the artists Morehshin Allahyari, Kahlil Robert Irving, Trevor Paglen, Jason Salavon, Skawennati, and Penelope Umbrico.

digital abstraction: While painters of all genres use technology in their work, artists such as Cory Arcangel, Wade Guyton, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, and John Pomara explore the intersections of the digital screen and formal abstraction. Historically compared to windows and mirrors, the often flat, rectangular format of paintings also acts like a screen in today’s world—a passageway that disrupts the viewer’s physical space or mirrors contemporary life.

the posthuman body: In the digital age, technology has become an extension of the body. Posthumanism, a concept arising from science fiction, is the idea that humans will be transformed by technological progress. Depictions of the human body in a media-induced world are far from monolithic, as demonstrated by the artists Caitlin Cherry, Petra Cortright, Huntrezz Janos, Guthrie Lonergan, Carson Lynn, Avery Singer, and Hito Steyerl, who traverse concepts of self and portraiture in the technological era.

automation and the loneliness epidemic: The relationship between man and machine is addressed by Cao Fei and !Mediengruppe Bitnik, specifically the tension of isolation in an increasingly automated world. Set in environments where human labor has been replaced by automation, Cao Fei’s and !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works exemplify the paradoxes of human intimacy in the screen age.

ecology: Electronic debris, such as plastics, batteries, monitors, and phones, fills landfills and off-gasses toxins that contribute to water pollution. Several artists in this exhibition, including American Artist, Alice Bucknell, Simon Denny, Kristin Lucas, Rick Silva, and Elias Sime, demonstrate the complexities of ecology in the digital age.

turning a mirror on ourselves: Holding a mirror to society and ourselves, screens construct reality, molding many of the themes at the forefront of culture today. Through extraordinarily different works, the artists Arthur Jafa and Molly Soda make videos that shine a light on society through the lens of found, vernacular videos already circulating online.

More than 25,000 square feet of gallery space will be devoted to the exhibition, which will include iconic works by prominent national and international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Arthur Jafa, Nam June Paik, Hito Steyerl, and Andy Warhol, as well as several leading artists living in Texas, including Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, and John Pomara. Several new and never-before-seen works by key artists Caitlin Cherry, Simon Denny, Hasan Elahi, and Kahlil Robert Irving will debut in this exhibition. This is the most in-depth show of its kind in the Southwest region and is one of only a few presentations exploring art and digital technology in the past decade at this scale.

Curator Alison Hearst notes, “Artists have long shone a light on the world and the human experience, and the artists in I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen respond to, challenge, and probe new technologies and the cultural conditions these technologies have shaped. Using the screen as a tool and formal device, many of the artists in this exhibition expand the parameters of artmaking through the digital language unique to their generation.”

Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue featuring contributions by Alison Hearst, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Dr. Omar Kholeif, director of collections at Sharjah Art Foundation; Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, Assistant Curator at Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and professor and cyberpsychologist Dr. John Suler. 180 pages, 100+ illustrations; published by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and distributed by DelMonico Books/D.A.P.

There will be an online platform for the exhibition.

Artists in the exhibition:
Morehshin Allahyari, Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Alice Bucknell, Nancy Burson, Caitlin Cherry, Harold Cohen, Petra Cortright, Vuk Ćosić, Simon Denny, Hasan Elahi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Cao Fei, Wade Guyton, Peter Halley, Frederick Hammersley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jacqueline Humphries, Kahlil Robert Irving, Arthur Jafa, Huntrezz Janos, Eduardo Kac, Liss LaFleur, Guthrie Lonergan, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kristin Lucas, Carson Lynn, Eva and Franco Mattes, Cassie McQuater, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Tatsuo Miyajima, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, John Pomara, Jon Rafman, Jason Salavon, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lillian F. Schwartz, Rick Silva, Elias Sime, Avery Singer, Skawennati, Molly Soda, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Penelope Umbrico, Andy Warhol, Wickerham & Lomax

LINK: I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen