• Summary

    In this exhibition, nine artists and art collectives employ technology for self-expression and self-fashioning. In making visible both the restrictions and the freedoms of digital culture, they explore how identities and histories are created, transformed, or invented. For some, technology is a means to an end: a memoir, a fictional history, an intimate view of a person’s life. Others interrogate the power relations of these same tools, from virtual gaming and ‘big data’ consumer portraits to facial recognition software. The artists appropriate technologies to narrate, alter, augment, or invent their identities and histories. The idea of individual context, of experiential relativity, threads together the works in this exhibition, and structures its form and its content. The visitor is invited to travel a branching, non-linear, virtual path through works by artists who explore the transformation of individual identity that digital tools and internet connectivity have co-produced in our lives.

    Addie WagenknechtCao FeiEva and Franco MattesLee BlalockMaryam Al Hamramicha cárdenasRamin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam RahmanianSophia Al-MariaZach Blas

    Curated by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Maya Allison

    About the Guest-Curator

    Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
     

    Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the Walker Center for Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2020); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2019); the Daejeon Biennale (Daejeon, South Korea, 2018); the Guangzhou Triennial (Guangzhou, China, 2018); the World Economic Forum (Davos, Switzerland, 2015); the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale (Shenzhen, China, 2015); Transmediale (Berlin, Germany, 2015); and PS1 MOMA (New York, NY, 2011). Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK); the Wellcome Collection (London, UK); the Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA, USA); and the New York Historical Society (New York, NY, USA); among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.

    Heather has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at NYU Abu Dhabi, an artist fellow at AI Now, an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium, and is an affiliate of Data & Society.
     
    She is also a co-founder and co-curator of REFRESH, an inclusive and politically engaged collaborative platform at the intersection of Art, Science, and Technology. She curated the exhibition Refiguring the Future in 2019 together with collaborator Dorothy Santos at Hunter College Art Gallery in New York.

  • Read the essay

    A line is a direct path, the most efficient route between two points. A line is straight and narrow, evoking a sense of movement forward, progress, time’s arrow, modernity. The proposition of this exhibition is to curve the line, to use this virtual moment to offer a different view of contemporary art in our post-internet, post-corona, post-post-modern world.

    A line is also a boundary, and a threshold: in 2020 we crossed the threshold of the global pandemic, and yet these were multiple crossings over multiple lines, depending on the individual’s context. The idea of individual context, of experiential relativity, threads together the works in this exhibition, and structures its form and its content. The visitor is invited to travel a branching, non-linear, virtual path through works by artists who explore the transformation of individual identity that digital tools and internet connectivity have co-produced in our lives.

    In this exhibition, nine artists and art collectives employ technology for self-expression and self-fashioning. In making visible both the restrictions and the freedoms of digital culture, they explore how identities and histories are created, transformed, or invented. For some, technology is a means to an end: a memoir, a fictional history, an intimate view of a person’s life. Others interrogate the power relations of these same tools, from virtual gaming and ‘big data’ consumer portraits to facial recognition software. The artists appropriate technologies to narrate, alter, augment, or invent their identities and histories.

    We began our curatorial process with a question: 
what might a virtual exhibition be?

    In the pre-pandemic norm of exhibitions, you and your body physically enter the exhibition hall, to be surrounded by, immersed in, art. However, most digitally-born art doesn’t enter that physical exhibition hall so easily. As a non-object, it lives always behind a computer screen, between what we might call the “object-ness” of the monitor, and the “virtual-ness” 
of the digital artwork’s original form.

    Conversely, when we enter a virtual space, we do so through a computer screen, and our bodies stay behind in the physical world. Often now, we hold that screen, that world, in the palm of our hands. The smartphone, so easy to carry and pocket, has become a natural extension of our physical body, and an always-open door to the virtual world.

    This exhibition is curated to be viewed in the palm of your hand. In a time when many suffer from “zoom fatigue” and pandemic isolation, the smartphone persists as a site of diversion, escape, and the meaningful pleasure of discovery. And, crucially, more of our audience has access to a mobile phone than to a desktop or laptop.

    Instead of a list of links, or a sequence of screens, or a 3D render of our gallery, this exhibition is structured as 
a series of forking paths through born-digital artworks, a decentralized network diagram, the traversal of which 
is serendipitous. No two visitors will have the same experience. Its structure is inspired by early internet history and its anticipatory cultural predecessors: Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the rhizome (as a metaphor for non-hierarchical thought). These ideas speak to visions of an earlier time, when the internet was fresh and new and seemed, to some, so full of potential.

    The smartphone was already an extension of our bodies before the pandemic. We exist on multiple planes through these technologies that extend our bodies into the virtual world, and conjure an image of cyborgs. Wittingly or not, we have embarked on a journey of self-modification through technology. Through these works, each artist here takes as their subject this matter of agency, self-determination, and technology’s promise of liberation or threat of suffocation.

    Together, the works and our curatorial experiment might constitute a revisiting, a haunting, of the technological past, which has structured our experience of the present. Many of the artists here appropriate technology, and re-fashion it as a means of taking agency, offering a view of technology’s past and present through different eyes, with all the knowledge of how history has unfolded.

    [the essay continues, read the full essay here]


The Oral History of The Internet

The Oral History of the Internet program ia s series of video conversations with artists, authors, and critics telling us their stories of the early Internet. To view the entire series, click here.