The Perfect Specimen: Read Our Interview of Lauren Lee McCarthy On Her Exhibition "Bodily Autonomy" @ Mandeville Art Gallery In San Diego →

medical pamphlet with man spitting into a vial says "So You've Decided to Exchange Saliva"

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

When asked to read through a long list of terms and conditions before giving consent, most of us have developed a reflexive response of scrolling to the bottom and trudging ahead. There’s a miniature risk/benefit analysis that we all conduct, which includes a completely unknown potential risk in the distant future, and the near future benefit of moving on. Time is such a valuable commodity that we regularly find ourselves sharing everything from personal data, browsing data, biometric data, and more. Oftentimes, there’s no contract at all. You may have thought you were showing all of your friends how your looks changed from 2009 to 2019, but you were really training someone’s private surveillance software. The list of myopic, nefarious applications that we serve by giving ourselves away to faceless data farms in exchange for what often amounts to a forgettable laugh is endless. In Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Bodily Autonomy exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery, she explores two very specific aspects of the way that we engage with science and technology. With “Surrogate,” she created an application where couples and individuals who are interested in hiring her as a surrogate mother are invited to dictate everything from her eating and sleeping habits, to her daily activities, and more. While these requests are not actually fulfilled, the application itself challenges notions of reproduction, genetic selection, and commerce. With “Saliva” she has created a saliva exchange station that is activated every Thursday from 6-8pm where visitors are invited to give and receive samples of their own saliva. Each participant is given agency to label their sample as they prefer and they provide the conditions for what happens to it (scout’s honor). Doreen A. Ríos, a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego and an independent curator and researcher, spoke with McCarthy to discuss the implications of these technologies and the imperative within the work to embody a more transparent form of participation. Read more.

Cloud Gate's Lunar Halo Questions the Body's Purpose in Our Current Technological Age


text by Lara Monro


Cloud Gate was founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-Min; one of the first Taiwanese choreographers to bring contemporary dance to the Chinese world. His language became emblematic of the country’s own national struggle in establishing an identity for themselves, perched between communist China and the wider world. 

Cheng Tsung-lung took over from Hwai-min in 2020. Big shoes to fill. Fortunately Tsung-Long’s undeniable determination and vision—from humble beginnings as a street hawker of slippers to internationally recognized choreographer—made it a manageable challenge.

The timing of his appointment as Artistic Director, on the other hand, not so much. No sooner had he decided to create Lunar Halo—a production inspired by the natural phenomenon of the same name exploring how our bodies inhabit a technologically-advanced world—Covid-19 forced the world to pause. 

Light refracts through layers of ice in the atmosphere to produce a lunar halo, which is ultimately a sparkling ring around the moon. Tsung-lung first witnessed the arresting event in Iceland. Soon after, he went on to choreograph the 70-minute piece that includes thirteen dancers (seven male, six female) and examines “the invisible hand of all-powerful big data.” The hauntingly etherial soundtrack created by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós both compliments and jars with the dancers versatile movements, which are indicative of Cloud Gate’s unique training; a fusion of tai chi, calligraphy, martial arts, and meditation. 

To signify the forever growing dependance of society’s reliance on technology, the performers interact with one another in a multitude of mesmerizing, abstract, and experimental ways. Take the opening scene, where a sea of male bodies converge as one; flowing and shape-shifting between what looks like a strand of DNA and a centipede. Tsung-lung further exaggerates the overarching theme of technology, by using multiple LED screens to present images and shapes that reiterate the insidious nature of technology and our ubiquitous, cult-like dependance on it. As the performance draws to an end, a thin screen appears from the ceiling, presenting a larger-than-life naked male; perhaps a digital god, or Satan? 

Either way, Lunar Halo presents one of the essential questions of our age: if we can satisfy our needs and desires with just a few taps of a screen, what is the purpose of the human body? A beautiful irony in this case given the physical nature of the performance; the strength and reliance of each dancer and their dependance on one another. 

group of dancers huddled with big hair movement

Analia Saban Explores the Intersection of Humanity and Technology in Synthetic Self @ Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles

Analia Saban, Flow Chart: Drawing a Hand, 2023. All images courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

text by Mia Milosevic

Analia Saban’s Synthetic Self ventures into the human instinct to quantify virtually everything. The exhibition—a unique two-part feature with different showings at Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery—encompasses nearly all aspects of technology's intersection with human civilization…from the heating of the universe to pornography. The mechanization of the world is intricately realized in her work, where minneal entities of the everyday are applied to the AI-entrenched craze of the present. 

Upon entry to Sprüth Magers—the site of the first half of Saban’s exhibition–and my first encounter with her work, the contrast between black-and-white coloration seems unapproachable, sterile, even unnerving. The work is, at first glance, not captivating and evidently not meant to be—that’s not the point. As we explore the nuances of natural phenomena we are simultaneously led to blend in with it. We become embedded in the mechanics of life and come to find out that this is actually our perpetual resting state.

To the left of the entrance at Sprüth Magers are rows of tapestries, detailed and glistening with copper thread which consecutively form the same shape as the marble structure residing on the floor of each room in the exhibition—it’s a computer fan. Its intended purpose is explained by the name, but what it symbolically represents in Saban’s exhibition is the cooling of the planet and broader stratosphere. It serves to comment on what has actually become the center of our universe, and what has the power to fix it. This allegory to climate change is present throughout the entirety of the exhibition, using technology as an emblematic resource with which to further delve into the problematic nuances of society. The computer fan is also symbolic of what powers contemporary life. This specific sculpture is equal in power to the engine it depicts. 

 
 

Saban seeks to replicate the encyclopedic age, invoking an omnipotent approach to nature. But there’s a lot of irony in this—she’ll never be able to define all of the variables. What characterizes this omnipotence to nature is the compulsive human tendency to quantify and define it. Saban’s work poses a multitude of questions, but seeks to answer none–this is the beauty of her work. What does it mean when a serious academic takes a selfie with a mouse filter? Saban’s work is filled with these kinds of satirical dichotomies. Her self-portrait of internet log-ins is another example of the individual identity we have inevitability entrenched in the technological realm; there’s an extreme absence of privacy, and invasive expectation to share. 

Images of the quotidian are almost all wrapped in the grid overlay that is quintessential of photoshop. Upon closer inspection, these figurative panels are full of errors–extra body parts and augmented facial features. She even includes an AI-generated “deep fake” of her own face. We see the world through the lens it’s run by. Saban’s art informs everyday life in simple terms. Not one image is spared the obstruction of a technological interface—of AI’s recognizable touch. It’s interesting to see the interplay between human nature and the artificial; to see how human instinct folds into the context of the invented. Even though the human instinct Saban depicts is the urge to quantify, define, explain, understand, her work actually achieves the opposite.

Synthetic Self is reminiscent of an iPhone, with the exhibition at Sprüth Magers being the front of the phone, and the one at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery being the back. The front represents a more human aspect, pervaded mostly by our own instinctual habits. The back represents the consumption of energy; it’s the burnt out crevice of humanity and the promiscuities that are hidden in our private browser. 

Upon entry to the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, a series of computer circuits rendered in thick printer’s ink line the walls. Historical computer graphic cards are engraved with their countries of origin; this is where the natural and manmade come head-to-head. These variant computer parts highlight the global effort towards intelligent development. Embedded within each work is the irony of our reality in coexistence with worldwide industry—our rather insignificant role in the broader technological stratum becomes abundantly clear. 

The very last portion of the exhibition is pornographic—incorporating one of the most provocative uses of the innovation that rules the world. Images of black-and-white penises harbor a small squarespace, all of them slightly obstructed by different forms of measurement or anatomical labeling. The involvement of measurement is at its most satirical in this context, where the urge to quantify and define appears all the more trivial. The finale of the exhibition reverberates its most intriguing purpose, which is to unveil the inner-workings of the most up-to-date status of human instinct. 

Analia Saban, Cooling Rack (4 x 4), 2023.

Synthetic Self is on view through October 28 @ Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Berlin Atonal Combines Ritual, Installation, and Performance in an Exploration of Ephemerality

 

Florentina Holzinger
Etúde for Church (2023)
Image credit: Mayra Wallraff

 

Berlin Atonal immerses audiences in constant states of change and fluctuating intensity, where seemingly static artworks defy any rigidity. In Florentina Holzinger’s Études, stunt effects meet the world of music to create scores for bodies as instruments. At Atonal, the artist presents Étude For Church, a performance in which a two-ton iron bell is asked to ‘call in the canonical hours, summon tempests and awake the sleeping soul’.

Bridget Polk
Reclaimed Damages (2023)
Image credit: Frankie Casillo

Bridget Polk will be present throughout the exhibition, reconfiguring Reclaimed Damages by assembling precarious sculptural forms over time, in dialogue with the audience and other works in the exhibition that manifest in ephemeral reflections on the past, present, and personal.

Mire Lee
Installation view
Image Credit: Frankie Casillo

Mire Lee has created a hanging fabric installation, where worn-out, torn, and ripped fabrics are dipped in viscous liquid clay. Over the course of its exhibition, the clay absorbed by the "skin" of the work will be slowly thinned down by water. It promises a misty viscerality as a space to question human fantasies of technologies that contradict the realities of subjects that decay and deform through time.

Cyprien Gaillard
Absorbent Figure (2023)
Image courtesy of artist

Cyprien Gaillard’s "Absorbent Figure" is based on an existing object found by the artist at the Kijk-Kubus-museum house in Rotterdam. While the meaning of the statue is widely debated, the design is similar to the ‘weeping Buddha,’ and one interpretation is that those who touch it will feel a mysterious alleviation of their sorrows. With its new industrial skin, the figure sits outside Kraftwerk amidst those gathering, taking part in the collective experiences of music and nightlife.

Atonal features visual art and concert nights intermittently through 9/17 at Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin.

Transmundane Economies: Queerness, Spirituality & Heritage Overlap in the Work of Theodoulos Polyviou →

 
 

Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist whose practice explores the multilayered spaces where queerness, spirituality, and cultural heritage overlap across physical and digital worlds. Often utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology, Theo’s work also features architectural and sculptural elements, text, and sound, resulting in installations that are at once intellectually deep and sensuous to experience. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies throughout Europe, and has a forthcoming project in Lecce, Italy, later this year. I met Theo on the occasion of his recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he has pursued a long-term artist residency. As an art critic, I’m usually hesitant and skeptical regarding the experience of art in virtual reality. But I found how Theo uses VR in Transmundane Economies to construct a “ritual space” that conjoins queerness, religion, and Cypriot cultural heritage to be profound and compelling. So I’ve met with him again to find out more. Read more.

Watch CLONES: Balenciaga's Spring '22 Runway Presentation

Balenciaga’s Spring 22 presentation considers our shifting senses of reality through the lens of technology. We see our world through a filter—perfected, polished, conformed, photoshopped. We no longer decipher between unedited and altered, genuine and counterfeit, tangible and conceptual, fact and fiction, fake and deepfake. Technology creates alternate realities and identities, a world of digital clones.

To illustrate this concept, every look in the Spring 22 collection is seen on Eliza Douglas, an artist who has either opened or closed every show and appeared in most campaigns for the past several years. In a video directed by Quentin Deronzier, Eliza appears as a series of digital clones, some of which are deepfakes, or models with Eliza’s photogrammetry-captured and CG-scanned face digitally grafted on.

Some looks are styled to illustrate artificial manipulation using props, like chainmail headpieces in silver, gold, chrome, and rusted metal. The models march down a minimalist runway to a sci-fi-inspired soundtrack composed by BFRND and an AI voiceover reciting the lyrics of “La Vie En Rose.” The video’s post-production processes include planar tracking, rotoscoping, machine learning, and 3D modeling, implemented in order to achieve a hyper-realistic effect.

Digital Mourning: A Solo Exhibition By Neïl Beloufa @ Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan

The French-Algerian artist, Neïl Beloufa, is one of the leading voices of the past decade and a keen observer of our times, offering vivid representations of the world through films, videos, installations, and sculptures. 

Avoiding direct judgments and forceful declarations, Beloufa successfully conveys a reality that, in its subtlety, is often awkward to behold, focusing on highly topical issues such as power relationships, the technological control, the perils of data collection, as well as on a possible collapse in the management of a pandemic. 

Digital Mourning is on view through July 18 @ Pirelli HangarBicocca Via Chiese 2 20126 Milan

Mika Rottenberg Presents "Easy Pieces" @ The New Museum In New York

Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings to manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls (NoNoseKnows, 2015) to the millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores (Cosmic Generator, 2017). The exhibition presents several of her recent video installations and kinetic sculptures, and premieres a new video installation, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), that explores ancient and new ideas about materialism and considers how humans both comprise and manipulate matter. Together, the works in the exhibition trace central themes in Rottenberg’s oeuvre, including labor, technology, distance, energy, and the interconnectedness of the mechanical and the corporeal. Easy Pieces is on view through September 15 at the New Museum 235 Bowery, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery


bitforms gallery presents "IDEAL CONTAGION" in New York

IDEAL CONTAGION is curated by David Hunt, and features the work of Barry X Ball, Richard Dupont, Peter Gronquist, Jon Kessler, Ted Lawson, and Lynn Hersman Leeson. As a whole, the exhibition suggests a looming middle future where our current tsunami of data and information—largely blank, implacable and bewildering—is seamlessly internalized by each individual artist as the substrate of their work. Technology is transformed from a passing zeitgeist fetish into something inscribed on, or within, the artist’s own body, etched like algorithmic scrimshaw into the far recesses of his or her own mind. Each artist in the exhibition signifies a modernist categorical academic division, such as landscape, body art, or appropriation—that have yet to percolate and trickle down into traditional digital and techno-art discourse.

IDEAL CONTAGION is on view at bitforms gallery through August 16 at 131 Allen Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of bitforms gallery, New York and Shark Senesak

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Presents 'Relax Into The Invisible' @ LAXART In Los Angeles

Relax Into the Invisible is an exhibition by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon comprising works on paper, artist books, a new body of sculpture, and site-specific Supergraphics. These works build upon the artist's signature design sensibility while cleverly playing with language, feminism, symbolism, technology, mass media, politics, and personal narrative. Relax Into the Invisible is on view through August 10 at LAXART 7000 Santa Monica Blvd Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Davide Balula: Outsourced Affects @ Galerie Frank Elbaz In Paris

For going on two decades, the body, ecology and technology have been Davide Balula’s central interests. Whether using a canvas to collect sediment and organisms from a riverbed, creating wifi antennae that emit monochromatic signals, or installing heat lamps in the gallery to amplify the audience’s body heat, the material and the immaterial have always been of equal concern. The prosaic and poetic never assumed to be antithetical.

During the opening reception, Davide Balula presented two new performances: ATTENTION SPAN COLOR METER (Brain Activity) and SELF BREATHING LUNGS, with the participation of Julien Derancy, Louis Laurain, Laurent Pascal, Elisabeth St James.

Outsourced Affects is on view through December 22 at Galerie Frank Elbaz 66 rue de Turenne, Paris. photographs by Claire Dorn, courtesy the artist and Galerie Frank Elbaz