by Danni Shen
“The language of art makes us aware of the weight of data, the data that has been ignored or being avoided to discuss”, “one of the challenges we face is how to meaningfully differentiate technologies that are used to differentiate us”, “algorithms are opinions embedded in codes” are just a few quotes from Laurie Frick, Ruha Benjamin, and Cathy O’Neil respectively, that the group exhibition Traces of Life draws from. It is the trackable nature of digital traces that feed the algorithms that then predict identities, political views, and the ideologies that shape our very worlds. A co-curatorial effort by Fang-Yu Liu and Kathie Halfin at The Hive Art Community, the show researches, as well as speculates, on information (in)security and the ways in which connection and transparency are redefined through the virtual. Fourteen U.S.-based artists–Ahree Lee, Art Jones, Cayla Skillin-Brauchle, Chin Chih Yang, Eva Davidova, Francesca Fini, Jana Astanov, Jaskarna Anand, Juan Miceli, Maho Ogawa, Natacha Voliakovsky, Sa Cha, Tara Foley, Ursula Endlicher, and Winnie Yoe–were selected from an open call engaging broader themes of the coded gaze, data justice, to subversion of digital technologies.
On opening night, the space–a second floor apartment gallery in Brooklyn run by co-curator Kathie Halfin–was open to the public, with its outdoor deck screening three video works by Francesca Fini, Natacha Voliakovsky, and Maho Ogawa. Through the front entrance in the kitchen is an immediate encounter with Ahree Lee’s Pattern: Code, in which computer-generated videos are projected against a loom. Lee’s installation investigates the interwoven relationships between computing and weaving, while tracing the histories of technics, techne, to the tech industry as patriarchal systems, all which owe to the (often exploited) labor of women. In a similar exploration of those relationships, Tara Foley’s painting Social Media Makes Your Inner Truth Meaningless from the series The Church of AI, further spells out a message about human nature through weaving as code, to transmit to what the artist terms “the coming of AI”. Jana Astanov’s work and performance #DeFiFem further embodies divine power through the goddess figure, who challenges the tech industry, cryptocurrency, and centralized systems of power. And performance artists exploring the multilayered nature of data, including Ursula Endlicher’s interACTcions, live!, Cayla Skillin Brauchle‘s, We the…, and Jaskaran Anand, were also included in the exhibition’s (virtual) public programs and panel series.
On a table is a laptop hosting movement artist Maho Ogawa’s Prosthetic Gesture, for which viewers can re-enact culturally and socially-specific habitual gestures. The screen captures me flipping the base of my palm toward my face and a few other movements, an attempt to interpret gestures from the Japanese movies Yojimbo and Tokyo Story. The movement feels awkward and foreign to my entire body (almost disembodied at the interface) but a shower of gold coins rain down on the screen to congratulate my completion and submission to the archive. For Ogawa, the archive also functions as a collective memory, where everyday bodily gestures make up the foundation of social aesthetic and ideology, and ultimately a diversification through the various histories participants carry with them, on and offline.
There is an intriguing range of screen-based works featured in Traces of Life, from Chin Chih Yang’s 123Soho.com, Eva Davidova’s Intentions > Transfer and Disappearance II, to Francesca Fini’s SKIN / TONES, Juan Miceli’s Colectivo NieVla. What appears to be another wall-hanging video, is on closer inspection, an ipad turned on to a live video call with Florida-based artist Sa Cha, in his studio space in Miami. In a COVID-19-free New York, he would be at the opening speaking to visitors. Now instead, he comes closer to the screen as I peer in, and we exchange pleasantries. Miami sounds really nice right now. As part of his project Taste Reservoir, the artist asks for a link to any YouTube video via email taste.engine@gmail.com, or sms. I send him the game play trailer to David OReilly’s Everything. In return I receive a video on “The Psychology of Resilience: Thriving in Adversity”. Both get added to a collective playlist at https://bit.ly/31YvddC. For anyone that views the playlist, the exchange becomes a way out of algorithmically-driven personal taste, toward the interpersonal act of sharing taste through the algorithm, which brings up encounters with new information and knowledge.
Bronx-based Art Jones’s continuous project (2018-) Blue Lives, pinpoints every documented fatal encounter between unarmed civilians and law enforcement from various reports of police data in the United States, creating blackened 3D prints of topographic maps. Each wall-hanging sculpture derives from Google Maps data to represent the exact coordinate location where an individual was killed. For a complete lack of better words, I quote Marisa Parham to describe the accounting for Black life, which “requires a capacity to constantly index Black death, and the intertemporal, crossroad processes that this instantiates, helps us conceptualize the digital dimensionality of Black diasporic life…The ‘mathematics of the unliving’ is a historical metadata that produces a sense of resonance beyond a discrete moment, producing a memory that circulates without origin.” Art Jones creates concrete compositions that subvert the teetering power relations between authoritarian data and public knowledge, as well as the supposed neutrality of technology, by meeting speculation head-on with a material precision traced from digital archives. These “topographies of the dead”, circulate beyond sheer numbers and ask “how does the power of blue divided by the number of lost lives reveal the American illusion of security? Can we formulate a new morality to inform alternative applications of state power in relation to people?” For Art Jones, the fact is: “We must!”
The last piece I encounter and end up spending the most time with, is Winnie Yoe’s Magnetic Bullshit: Hong Kong Police Edition. The interactive project exists offline and online, and had been previously shown at Tai Kwun, also the Former Central Police Station Compound in Hong Kong. Such as Art Jones’s work, Yoe’s approach makes for a critically poignant and acute intervention on data surrounding police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. By utilizing youtube-dl (an open-source software since removed by GitHub), the artist sourced automatic captions from Hong Kong police press conference YouTube videos to compile a 627-page source text, which further became a magnetic word kit of the 400 most frequently used words. In reference to the writing tool Magnetic Poetry, Magnetic Bullshit asks spectators to activate the tacticality of free word association to fill in blank lines after “Hong Kong police…”. From the project’s various renditions, a few phrases arrest our attention in particular: “Hong Kong Police ruins future”, “Hong Kong Police needs to say sorry”, “Hong Kong Police means fake justice”, “Hong Kong Police close to an end”. To further challenge state media rhetoric, some participants also arranged magnets into protest symbols and slogans. According to Yoe “while the compiled text is not perfect, perhaps there is a parallel between a machine-generated text and an authoritarian narrative,” which is further transformed here into collective poetry, a chaotic clamor to democracy reflecting the spirit of protests on the streets. And as they say the messier the story, the closer you probably are to the truth.
These artists’ works thus not only reflect how information systems manipulate perceptions of being as well as nonbeing in the world, but also how a critical undertaking of data, digital media, and operating systems can redirect and take back power. To cite philosopher and media theorist Yuk Hui, how do we escape the pull of a technological singularity, and move toward technodiversity? In the interconnected networks of the Internet, where freedom is increasingly indistinguishable from control, Traces of Life offers up strategies to diversify and decentralize virtual space through creating community, cultural narratives, empower marginalized voices and collectives, while deconstructing and complicating lived experience in and out of the infosphere.
Traces of Life will be on view by appointment only through 16 November 2020.
Danni Shen is an independent curator and writer based in New York, as well Critic-in-Residence at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, onscreentoday介面, among others.
