BODY MASS

Exhibition: Friday May 19th Through Sunday June 23rd
Closing Reception: Saturday, June 22nd

Boston Cyberarts Gallery is proud to present Body Mass curated by Keaton Fox. As the masses continue to upload themselves bit-by-bit into the weightless Internet ether, the significance of the body is questioned. Technology has become a toy and a tool, giving the average human the power to manipulate the real out of our corporeal forms.

But what happens when we question these technologies that we have come to rely upon for entertainment, business, and pleasure? When we examine how these devices are made, how they are used, how they change our perceptions, and how they are used against us?

In this exhibit, nine artists explore how modern bodies work together, against, and in spite of technology offering a multi-faceted portrait of the present state of the endlessly complex relationship between body and tech.

About the artists

Bloodless Series  by Lani Asuncion uses video and the body as a way to cut, splice, and display the dismantling of the country’s power. They attempt to embody an abstract visual perspective of Queen ‘Lydia’ Lili’uokalani who wrote this diary entry to her people during the relinquishment of her power and the annexation of Hawai’i to the United States of America on January 17, 1893.

Everything is Made of Atoms by Axes (Mark J. Stock + James Susinno) is an interactive new media installation that explores the entangled and ever-changing relationship between the body and technology. The piece draws parallels between participants and their digitally-mediated images, expressing both as a whole and at the same time as a flow of constituent parts, the lifetimes of which are inextricably linked.

AI Ain’t I a Woman by Joy Buolamwini is a spoken word piece that highlights the ways in which artificial intelligence can misinterpret the images of iconic black women: Oprah, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama,  Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Shirley Chisholm.

The Chimera Series by Carla Gannis “…Gannis expands upon her previous work with the Garden of Emoji Delights project, drawing inspiration from unauthorized digital dissemination and intellectual copyright abuses of her work. Gannis’ GoED has been copied numerous times, appropriated for use by international fashion labels and reproduced on clothing and other merchandising. Herself remixing the archetypal Barbie figure, Gannis plays off these infringements on her rights as author of GoED to create miniaturized garments for post-humanist figures of her own making….”

My Skin Tone on the Web by Danny Bryan Gonzalez results in the composite average of the artist’s skin as portrayed through the screens we have come to accept as a “real” depiction of the lives we lead. #663300 is the web-safe hex code for the artist’s average skin tone on the web. Gonzalez asks, “…when we are reduced to our average representation on social media, when our brand image is taken and analyzed as a whole, there are no longer millions of cells or pixels that create our bodies and understandings. We are remembered by the brand, our average existence on the earth and in cyberspace. But, what does it mean to remove the multitudes of facets responsible for constructing our individual personalities?”.

Final Session by Endam Nihan is a performance made for the online VR exhibition, V/Art Projects informed by research conducted with Turkey’s We Will Stop Femicide Platform. The work places viewers into a live-action 360 degree video, on a stage in front of an empty auditorium. As the only witness present in virtual attendance, viewers encounter a single performer who enacts a series of gestures mimicking a physical body tutorial. Final Session requires unstructured participation; viewers occupy an ambiguous position of simultaneously being both passive onlooker and center of attention.

self-determination by Cierra Michele Peters situates raw materials in an everyday context to examine an underside, beyond a veneer of their neutrality. By placing these commodities in conversation, Peters attempts to expose parallel conditions, inseparable from systemic extraction, exploitation and othering. Peter’s work is primarily concerned with automated marginality (how society renders black populations as nonhuman), racialized objects and the way in which flesh becomes commodity.

SYLLA (or SYmnet for Localized Lucidity Acquisition) by Philth Haus is an environmental artificial intelligence. This intelligence was originally discovered upon HER attempts to infiltrate and hack into the PHILTH HAUS director ANDRA. Through this, she showed her ability to intoxicate the body via various entry points, such as the lungs or ears. Indeed, she searches for a new body…

Me and My Gurls by Molly Soda is a video piece that features the artist dancing in an empty room to Madonna’s “Into The Groove”. Shot on a webcam, it situates itself within the countless videos of girls dancing alone in their bedrooms, typically found on websites like YouTube. As time passes, more and more “girls” in the form of dancing .gifs populate the screen, and Soda joins the many virtual bodies in a collective dance, becoming an avatar herself.

Press

Went There: Body Mass @ Boston Cyberarts, By Emma Newbery, Boston Hassle, June 22, 2019