OPENING THIS WEEK: FRANK WANG YEFENG'S AVATOPOLOGY

I’m excited to announce the opening of Avatopology, a solo exhibition I’m curating of Frank WANG Yefeng’s brilliant work at NARS Project Space in Brooklyn.

‘Avatopology’ explores a dialectic of control and submission among participants as they navigate the tricky terrain of creative collaboration. The work on view is the result of commissioned contributions by freelance creators around the world. It reflects the developing interpersonal relationships with the artist and the constraints on creative freedom as they each negotiate expectations, artistic identity, and the end result. 

Opening Reception Oct 4th, from 6-8pm. The exhibition will be on view through Nov 6th. The press release is linked here.

Just Published: Becoming camera in Virtual Photography

I’m honored to have my essay “Becoming Camera in Virtual Photography: A Player-Game-Camera Triangularity” included in the timely and illuminating edited volume Virtual Photography (eds. Ali Shobeiri and Helen Westgeest). The book is published by transcript Verlag and available in print + through open access.

JUST PUBLISHED: MY REVIEW OF eteam’s + lololol’s SEMI-CONDUCTING HAND-HELD MOONS

I’m pleased to share the publication of my review of Semi-Conducting Hand-Held Moons, which appears in the spring 2024 issue of Millennium Film Journal. This collaborative group exhibition was held last fall at PS122 in New York City featuring work by two artist duos: NY-based eteam and Taiwan-based lololol.

Currently reading: If All the World and Love Were Young

This book of poems beautifully pairs poetry and the levels of Super Mario World to weave together memory, grief, and longing. These two poems, in particular, resonated with me:

DONUT GHOST HOUSE What is there to be afraid of? Whatever moves in the rafters / a sparrow’s nest in the chimney stuck with hay and pigeon feathers / a knock knock knock on the slate roof is hello yourself long ago / and hello an afterimage after all one image pressed to / and escaping through another. As the world of the living peers / out into the world of the dead as the isle is full of noises / as the draught catches the blue door as its keyhole’s made / of nothing / as the fireplace crackles and offers the light of the forest / the sparrow leaves its nest of eggs or maybe it doesn’t.

CHOCOLATE ISLAND 2 As Dürer sees it under the hides of carburised iron thick / as armour plating fixed in place with rivets pinned along / the seams / a polished gorget at the throat of the rhino is mostly passive. / What he got wrong hardly matters since he’d never seen / one himself / having just a poem a sketch imagination to go on / making magic of the mundane. And so the sun sets in the west / which is to be expected there over the marshes and deltas / I should like to describe to you having never been there myself.

Currently reading: Critical Hits — Writers Playing Video Games

“In playing [Disco Elysium] you discover a new animal, a new being, personal and derived from your own heart. New ways of thinking, about conversations you’ve had and will have, emerge.” — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “This Kind of Animal”

RE-READING: A HACKER MANIFESTO

In anticipation of its 30-year publication anniversary, I’m revisiting Mackenzie Wark’s groundbreaking text.

“It is through the abstract that the virtual is identified, produced and released. The virtual is not just the potential latent in matter, it is the potential of potential. To hack is to produce or apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds, beyond necessity” (014).

CURRENTLY READING: MONSTERS: A FAN'S DILEMMA

Despite the delicious admission, “But of course Picasso was an asshole” (92), this book disappoints in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Dederer set out to do the work of articulating something that doesn’t come easily: addressing the ethical and emotional issue of consuming art created by monstrous men. But instead she assembles a tired apology for the shitty men whose “artistic genius”—a term as absurd as “auteur theory”— took over their better judgment and is the price we all pay for the creation of a so-called masterpiece. 

There is something about Dederer’s language — the ease with which she critiques the use of the term genius, yet so readily wields it herself, and often, as if it were fact — that leaves me frustrated and aching for something other than an apology or justification for her own participation in maintaining patriarchal hegemony by lionizing already celebrated artists (worthy of the label “monster”) and disguising it as critique.

Arguments are meandering, wobbly, and self-absorbed, and eventually the book devolves into memoir and reveals an inability to comprehend women through a lens other than motherhood. It all culminates in a conclusion that completely falls apart and exposes Dederer as some kind of strange feminist monster-apologist who rails against cancel culture (in a desperately unexamined way), and posits we’re all monsters anyway, so why bother criticizing it? (Ugh.)

Currently Reading: How to Think Like a Woman

“I tend to think that if you’re a woman and you care about your freedom, you cannot help but harbor some anger and frustration. Whether it’s expressed in a thought to yourself or in an essay, to think like a woman, to produce and create like a woman, often involves anger. It’s a feature of a woman’s psyche as she comes into her own in a world that (still) does not want her to” (167).

“My investigation revealed to me something I didn’t expect: the female gaze is not a twentieth-century invention. It did not start with the suffragists, it did not begin with Mary Wollstonecraft, and it is definitely not unique to the West. It’s at least as old as philosophy itself. Women philosophers were not late to the scene; it seems they were there from the start, and they had much to say about their oppressive condition” (191).

rhizome 2023 microgrant recipient

I’m honored to be among the recipients of Rhizome’s 2023 Microgrant program. My plan is to write about Rosa Menkman’s performance-based live-glitching work The Collapse of PAL (2010). More on that following its publication.

Currently reading: Atlas of AI

“Over and over, we see the ideology of Cartesian dualism in AI: the fantasy that AI systems are disembodied brains that absorb and produce knowledge independently from their creators, infrastructures, and the world at large. These illusions distract from the far more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What are the political economies of their construction? And what are the wider planetary consequences?” (215).

Announcing the opening of 404: erroR

The past few months, I’ve been working with :iidrr Gallery in New York City’s LES to organize 404: error, a group exhibition that explores how artists critically engage with errors, glitches, and other failures in their work in a provocative gesture toward new perspectives to redefine what we find problematic or correct. The show opens in less than two weeks, and I’m excited to see how the exhibition design comes together when the work is installed. More info in the press release here.

CURRENTLY READING: INTIMATIONS

“I always tell my students: ‘A style is a means of insisting on something.’ A line of Sontag’s. Every semester I repeat it, and every year the meaning of this sentence extends and deepens in my mind, blooming and multiplying like a virus, until it covers not just literary aesthetics and the films of Leni Riefenstahl but bedrooms, gardens, makeup, spectacles, camera angles, dances, gaits, gestures, sexual positions, haircuts, iPhone covers, bathroom taps, fonts, drink orders, dogs and people, and so much more—but people above all. Then semester ends and I forget all about it for a while” (53).

Donna Dennis's Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky Takes Over Private Public Gallery

I had the opportunity to meet with the visionary artist Donna Dennis at her studio in the Hudson Valley in advance of the opening of her exhibition at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, which I reviewed for Chronogram.com.

“Despite the gravity of what this work suggests, Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky brings comfort. The entire gallery is transformed into a vessel for it, letting the meditative rhythm of the soundscape, the almost imperceptible shift from day to night, and the surrounding darkness overwhelm you. It offers a life in three acts, or a full life brought into view, in a tableau of reflection, resistance, and calm. Moreover, it creates the possibility of not only occupying but fully becoming a room of one’s own.”

The rest of my review can be accessed here.

Class Visit: Snow Yunxue Fu

I had the opportunity to invite the brilliant new media artist Snow Yunxue Fu to my Video Game Culture class to discuss her work in relation to the broad world of video games. We talked about the metaverse as a kind of game, the use of interaction + rule-based systems as expressive tools, the creation of digital humans, building inhabitable + explorable virtual worlds, and letting curiosity serve as a creative prompt.

Creative AI: A Conversation with Carla Gannis + Stephanie Dinkins

Pinch me.

It was tremendous being in conversation with artists Carla Gannis and Stephanie Dinkins during the Creative AI panel I moderated at the AI + the Lens and Screens Arts Symposium on March 18. I have so much respect for these two artists, whose work has inspired my writing, teaching, and thinking. I’m still ruminating on our discussion and the many areas their work addresses: creating with non-human intelligence, encouraging humans to be more human through technology, the value of small data, and so much more. A recording of our conversation can be viewed here.

GUEST CURATING: 404: ERROR

I’m very excited to be working with :iidrr gallery in NYC’s LES as a guest curator. Here’s the open call.

404: error

A 404 error is a standard HTTP message resulting when a server is unable to find a requested website. This familiar but undesired message indicates something in the system has gone wrong: there’s been a glitch. 

Glitches are understood as machine hardware or network malfunctions that lead to an incorrect or unexpected result or behavior. They can be inconvenient deviations from protocol, the standards that guide systems and set our expectations. But when these errors are exploited and intentionally used, they can work toward dispelling the myth of perfect transmission and reveal certain truths about a system’s design and the ideologies that shape it. Glitch as error or as chaotic system can be situated within a larger context of creative intervention, wherein an artist plays with digital action, information flows, and digital material toward new aesthetics and new ways of thinking. In this way, to glitch can be a powerful, demonstrative, and even political act, with the potential to “modulate or productively damage the norms of techno-culture”, according to Rosa Menkman. For Nathan Allen Jones, glitch can lead toward a kind of poetics: “Glitches work to subvert and short-circuit intentions into their opposites: hindrance, aimlessness, lostness, but they also push into new forms of use, purpose and knowledge by revealing the nature of knowledge and feeling in relationship to technics.” And, in Legacy Russell’s idea of glitch feminism, acts of glitch can encourage the “in-between as a core component of survival—neither masculine nor feminine, neither male nor female, but a spectrum across which we may be empowered to choose and define ourselves for ourselves.”

Choosing an error message as the exhibition title is an invitation to not only embrace such mishaps but also invite others to reflect on what’s possible when this kind of disruption is planned, thus thwarting normativity, and arriving at something else.

We are looking for such error-driven artistic approaches that encourage an aesthetic of chaos, uncertainty, and slippage, using glitch as a form of expression and exploration. We invite emerging artists who identify in some way as glitch makers and glitch thinkers who view glitch as a meaningfully disruptive force rather than a problem that needs fixing. We welcome works using any digital format—photography, video, illustration, animation, web, AR/VR/MR, installation, video games, fashion, etc.—that find inspiration in, or create conditions for malfunctions, bad actors, disruptions, systemic failures, noise, dissonance, and feedback loops, not only as works of glitch art but also as glitch acts.

SOURCES:

Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), Amsterdam: Colophon, 2011.

Nathan Allen Jones, Glitch Poetics, London: Open Humanities Press, 2022,

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, London: Verso, 2020.

about :iidrr

:iidrr is an artist-run platform that supports artists who are critically engaged in new technologies and cultures. We collaborate with artists who are active in the contemporary art world, such as Liu Xin, Wu Ziyang, and Snow Yunxue Fu. Our exhibition space gives the public year-round access to expansive, new media-focused art experiences, performances, and artist talks. Founded in New York City in 2020, :iidrr is now also based in Shanghai.

NEW WAYS OF SEEING OLD THINGS

I wrote about still life painter Fern T. Apfel’s incredible solo exhibition Abide With Me currently on view at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY.

In her work: “Everyday objects of the past are collected, sorted, and neatly arranged before they’re translated to paint on canvas. Old calendars, personal letters, recipes, pamphlets, stamped envelopes, ticket stubs, diary entries, program notes, school attendance records, school textbooks, playing cards, dice, spools of thread, miniature figurines, and other small, old things are arranged using the semiotics of collage as a compositional guide, then set against a richly hued backdrop. Deep reds, jewel-toned blues, greens, yellows, and other colors fill the empty space, creating visual contrast and emotional depth. In the series Worn, items of children’s clothing are featured. Some of this source material is on view across two large display cases for context, helping us see how these and other old, forgotten, discarded, and lost objects are recreated and resituated into Apfel’s new visual logics, gaining importance and beauty in their rediscovery and arrangement.”

The full article is live at Chronogram.com.

CURRENTLY READING: IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS

“One need only compare American, French, and German films to see how greatly nuances of shading and coloration can vary in motion pictures. In the photographic image itself, to say nothing of the acting and the script, there somehow emerge differences in national character. If this is true even when identical equipment, chemicals, and film are used, how much better our own photographic technology might have suited our complexion, our facial features, our climate, our land. And had we invented the phonograph and the radio, how much more faithfully they would reproduce the special character of our voices and our music… And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines. These machines are the inventions of Westerners, and are, as we might expect, well suited to the Western arts. But precisely on this account they put our own arts at a great disadvantage” (9).

Wrapping up the year with Glitch Poetics

After spending some time thinking about AI image synthesis, I felt invigorated by Nathan Allen Jones’ Glitch Poetics (2022), a book that helped me untangle the complicated relations between photographic heritage, affect, and the productive misuse of our technical tools.

There are many passages worth emphasizing, but this one brings many of the book’s most significant ideas together:

“Oscillation is a key idea for glitching because it describes a mode in which the temporalities of a medium outrun perceptive capacity and produce ambiguous, strange, ghostly and illusory effects. Like a thaumatrope illusion, where the persistence of human vision blends the images on two sides of a rapidly spinning piece of card into a single image, the glitch oscillation produces an effect in the receiver that is temporary and virtual, yet ‘real’ and absorbing” (253).

AI and the Future of the Lens and Screen Arts

My recorded conversation with the extraordinary artist, writer, and digital culture theorist Lev Manovich is now live. This talk is the first of a series of events about AI’s impact on image-making organized by the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media department at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. The next event is a one-day symposium on March 18, 2023.

Scrolling left to right: Charles Traub, dept. chair; me; Lev; Lev and I in conversation