“Happy Hump Day😜!” “Almost the weekend…😅” “TGIF!🙌🏽” Some might call this ‘smiling through the pain.’ The term “late capitalism” has recently become a particularly popular phrase used to refer to and criticize our modern economy. I interpret Fidelia Lam’s GIFs as a reaction to the overwhelming emphasis on hyper-productivity that…
Late Capitalist GIF Thoughts plays with the digital banality of the GIF format in an attempt to draw attention to the affective impact of late capitalism. The juxtaposition of text and emoji echo the feelings of anxiety and emptiness experienced in a society obsessed with hyper-productivity. The hypnotic repetition of…
Lilia Levine’s piece Ruminations depicts experiences of mental angst and obsession through laser cutting and 3D printing. Her work represents the modern anxieties women face within our nuanced (yet ubiquitous) patriarchal society by exploring language in the 21stcentury. Levine states that although we try our best to “perfect” most of our lives,…
I stepped into a frame in which artist Karissa Hahn allows for no escape. Just as how Nam June Paik employed a conceptual use of video in Buddha Watching TV, in which a camera and a monitor loop in real time, Karissa Hahn destructs parallels of frames so that she…
Become Android is a personal journey about connections and disconnections from the real world. The artist describes being frequently trapped by endless information from games, short videos, and daily routines to avoid being disconnected. Yet, this constant cycle crated debilitating anxiety. As we watch, the layers of information fed the…
Endangered Data responds to the growing concern that data which confirms anthropogenic global warming might be subject to manipulation, repression, or erasure by the Trump administration. Norman uses GIF to visualize an algorithm that preserves and transmits vulnerable data by storing it in the pixels of images, which can only…
Black Hole Son, Pete Burkeet takes the viewer on a visual rollercoaster of disastrous spectacle in American consumerism and culture. In 1986, Ohio released 1.5 million balloons, which caused an environmental catastrophe; 16 years later at Big Boom Bay, SanDiego a 17 minute firework display exploded in less than a minute….
In Immigrant Documentation, Linh Dao imagines a future where the immigration process mimics the ease, and flippancy, of our mobile culture. Here, the entirety of a person is distilled into data, barcodes, and numbers through a tracking system that likens “non-citizens” to tracking online packages delivery. Dao presents a powerful statement…
STRANGERS COWBOYS is the second, third, and four acts of the multi-media, performative series HOTLINE FOR THE LOST, a six-act morality opera by Emily Sasmor. Sasmor’s evocative and “dense” video winds through a non-linear narrative between the real and the simulated. STRANGERS COWBOYS confronts the idea of violence in a…
Does 👋🏻 mean something different than 👋🏾? What about ✊🏿 compared to ✊🏻? In 2015, Apple released a new array of emoji skin tones. Instead of only white or Simpson yellow, emojis range 5 colors, from a pale white (👍🏻) to a dark brown (👍🏿). The addition of these emojis rectified…