A New Media Caucus and Artists and Hackers Collaboration

The exhibition you are about to experience is the result of a collaboration between the New Media Caucus and the podcast Artist and Hackers. In it you will find the work of five diverse and revolutionary artists engaged in New Media Art. These works by artists KT Duffy, Sue Huang, Chelsea Thompto, Rashin Faharandej and Shawnee Michaelain Holloway, span a broad spectrum of themes, love, memory, family, gender identity, social inequality, speculative biology and even meteorology, through the lenses of learning machine algorithms, VR, animation, poetry, html, video and more. Through technology, these artists create modes of expression that would have otherwise been hard or impossible to achieve as well as reach others much more effectively than before.

Rene G. Cepeda, Curator

New Rules is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for Arts.

KT Duffy (they/them)

Oblivion

VR Experience for Heatset and Browser

Dimensions Variable

2023

Organic, vintage 80’s neon aesthetic, shifting, 

Set against an upbeat pulsing background Oblivion a cell-like object that travels through a shifting psychedelic organic-like landscape of squiggly lines, curving shapes and bizarre textures that nevertheless seem to recall a close view of some microbiome/forest full of life and organisms. In this way, KT Duffy seeks to enthrall their audiences and bring them into hypothetical biologies of the human body. Playful and enthralling, Oblivion, and by extension its creator, have created a merging of art, speculative biology and technology. 

Oblivion was born from KT’s residency in Finland, this allowed them to take long walk in the forest, something that is reflected in the visuals of the piece, it also is a reconnect with nature for the artist as America’s relationship with nature is adversarial at worst and commodified at best. This, alongside a different approach to community and freedom of movement made KT recontextualize their practice. As such, Oblivion takes a meditative quality, with the soundtrack imitating the rhythms of life while we witness this “organism” leisurely wander the space involved in its own rhythms changing or taking nothing in the environment it exists in harmony with.

Sue Huang (she/they)

In the Time of Clouds (Parts I-III)

Mixed media, multi-channel live video, computers, monitors, paper, projection, CCTV cameras, terracotta, ice cream, custom software

Dimensions variable

2019

What does a cloud taste like? How would we remember a cloud in a future where clouds may no longer exist? Sue Huang’s In the Time of Clouds confronts us with the reality that due to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, clouds could go “extinct” in the near future. By scraping language from social media about how people imagine clouds to taste, Huang crowdsources a fantastical cloud flavor. From the language data, she generates haikus and a cloud ice cream—the ice cream is served on bowls created from the shapes of clouds captured from observatory live streams.

In this way, Huang forms a collective memory of clouds that allows a future being unfamiliar with real clouds to wonder and daydream about them. This process in turn generates a rupture with our familiarity and knowledge of this vital part of nature. It highlights the importance of clouds in our lives and the risks to our environment. 

Chelsea Thompto (she/her)

Consensus Portraits – Series 2

JavaScript and AI-Generated Imagery

2023

Chelsea invites us to witness a conversation between machine learning algorithms, where one algorithm is asked to generate transwomen and a second algorithm is asked to evaluate the resulting portraits. Immediately we can see the emerging biases of both algorithms and more importantly those of the society that created them. Despite what some people think, machine learning does not have the ability to create, rather what it does is find the average of what it is fed, the underlying patterns, the biases and uses that to generate its conclusions.

For the image generation algorithm we see a bias for white individuals, it also favors certain features over others and more concerningly, the majority of personas generated by the algorithm fit within the harmful stereotype of “men in drag.” There is no nuance in the appearances of these transwomen, it appears as though the algorithm can only make such subjects by taking what it deems to be an inherently male body and superficially applying what it deems to be feminine accoutrements on top. Meanwhile the evaluating algorithm perpetuates ideas that certain facial attitudes are inherently masculine and assigned a confidence percentage to them. This highlights the problematic nature of dataset bias in the use of machine learning and the potential harm not only in the trans community but to other communities by recreating bias that privileges a white, christian male average.

Rashin Fahandej (she/her)

A Father’s Lullaby

Immersive Experience

2023

Through her work, Rashin Fahandej aims at creating a more just, fair society where people of color, refugees and the “other” are not targeted by systemic inequalities and oppression. By Connecting with the public through art, her message can reach people in a more personal way, linking lived experiences and finding common ground between the other and society at large. In Rashin’s own words, “ I cultivate processes that democratize access to technology and storytelling, using community co-creation as a central methodology to shift the traditional power dynamics toward equity and justice.” In A Father’s Lullaby, highlights the nurturing role of men in raising children and makes visible the negative impacts of their long-term sentencing on children, women, and lower-income communities. It achieves this by collecting intimate interviews, songs, and lullabies and presenting them to the wider community as an attempt to make us reconsider the systems of oppression some are subjected to more often than others.

By generating empathy, not sympathy or shame, her works, such as A Father’s Lullaby, face the public with the tough reality of the unequal treatment of men, particularly POC, in the judicial system and the deleterious effects it causes in family structures. It also humanizes these individuals beyond the labels of “super predator”, or “bad hombres” that are popular in political speech and instead turns them into humans, who often face disproportionate punishment in comparison with their white peers, who still deserve humane treatment.

Shawneé Michaelain Holloway (she/her)

i would’ve said goodbye if i thought you loved me back

Mixed Media

Dimensions Variable

2022
As part of a bigger work entitled Dogwhistle (2012-2022), i would’ve said goodbye if i thought you loved me back is a poem to queer love lost, love that is real, complicated, perhaps even violent. This is not the clean aesthetic romance of fiction but a reflection of feelings most have felt at one time or another: messy complicated love and relationships clung to for perhaps too long, a bittersweet memory. In this work Shawneé combines poetry and scans of objects significant to the artists that accumulate and float about a trio of poems that reminisce of a long lost love, bitterly remembered. The title of the work punctuates the message through its piercing message and realization that the love that once empowered now causes bitterness and is lost.