'Screening'
June 11 to 16
Screening / American made machines // (canción g.)
- Abstract: We live in the age of the algorithm. It’s organized around an ancient impulse alive and well in both the contemporary collective and individual — the desire to bring order to chaos, to control the unknown, to domesticate the wild. In this contemporary moment, we experience this impulse through an obsession with information, convenience, order, and efficiency. A great deal of our lives are shaped by the dynamic of these socio-technical realities, with a logical terminus on this quest for illusory control being a technocracy: a digitalization where every interaction can be monitored, analyzed, optimized, commodified, exploited and ultimately controlled. The price of this quest for constructed control is a world without genuine wildness, without chaos, without chance.
The american made machines series reveals a hidden potentiality inside of this dynamic while simultaneously encouraging a reflection of the personal, ethical, and social dimensions at play. The work is as much a (re)presentation of the form + function of our always-on digital infrastructure as it is a chance to revisit individual intentionality and possible futures within this relationship. While the imagery itself is literally composed of HTML/CSS objects, through their algorithmically generative transformation these visualizations function as Rothkoesque color fields or Rorschach tests. This seductive (re)presentation of the www asks you to look inward as much as it does into the digital world. What is your relationship to the internet, screens, and technology at large? You can surely survive without modern technology, but can you thrive? On a larger scale, are we ready to do the difficult work of training ourselves out of problematic internet behaviours and into a deeper appreciation of one’s own role within these systems? Do you confront and factor in your role within these systems? What do you want it – and yourself – to be?
- Biography: Christopher is an artist, educator, and technologist. At its core, his work is an investigation into society and technology’s mutual influence. The complexities which emerge from our material and technologized landscapes are research subjects, while the methods of interaction, exploration, and engagement collapse into a research-based practice that itself formally resolves as time-based media, creative coding, poetics, performance, and new media. His primary interest is intervening into our relationship with modern socio-technical systems, pushing back against their boundaries to allow for speculative design, ethical considerations, and future imaginaries to arise, ultimately seeking to find contemplative, transformative, constructivist silence amidst the noise of an increasingly mediated society.
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