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…
Some Kind of Ether is a video piece that utilizes appropriated and original material to create a meditation on, as the artist puts it, “the origin of cybernetics as we know it, and the way we imagine technology as a result.” The cybernetics of the 70’s was heavily developed by the…
Eight, Four Five is Jessica Mairena’s exploration of trauma and psychology through conceptual drawings, as affected by the precariousness of the digital sphere. The traveling of the images via e-mail have continuously distorted the image, undoing the calculated and tedious manner in which traumas and unruly emotions have been walled…
Emily Sasmor’s STRANGERS COWBOYS is a journey that takes place over time, with many different elements, exploring the lives of (unnamed) characters taking place in a seemingly apocalyptic universe. Sasmor’s work is gripping– in a way that the viewer themselves can become lost in the labyrinthine layers of the complex…