physical

Amay Kataria

I am a Chicago-based artist interested in philosophy, the history of control, and cybernetic theory. My art practice is a platform to think, elaborate on ideas, experiment, play, and meditate on externalizing the internal affairs of my body’s interaction with our society. My creative acts create a bridge between the biotic (human) and abiotic (machine) in an attempt to pause and pay attention to the aesthetic capacities of systems. Every act functions like a systemic metaphor, assembled with the craft of computation, code, and algorithms.
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"Figments of Desire" is an audio-visual installation examining the poetics of attraction through two synthetic agents that are choreographed to a musical score. The sonic composition activates the agents to unwind a generative narrative of behaviors of attraction, repulsion, and entanglement using custom algorithms. The synthetic couple explores its states of desires in this artificial life system.

"Generative Decay" meditates on the duality of objective and subjective phenomenon in the world. With the use of computation algorithms, it creates a moving digital perception of a physical flower vase.

Amay Kataria is currently an artist in residence at Mana Contemporary in Chicago. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Art & Technology Studies. He was invited as a visiting artist at the Ethereal Summit, ThoughtWorks and Bellas Artes Outpost. He has participated in group shows at the Electromuseum, Ars Electronica, TIFA India, Art Center Nabi, ThoughtWorks, and Experimental Sound Studio. He is an upcoming artist in residence at Sandnes Kommune in Stavanger, Norway and was awarded the media arts residency at Art Center Nabi in Seoul, South Korea. To support his work, he has received the Shapiro Level-Up Research Grant and Bajaj Art Scholarship.

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Brett Wallace

My practice explores work, technology, and the greater economy. The lines of inquiry in my practice include how new technologies like artificial intelligence are reshaping work, the often unseen and obscured material conditions of work, and the socio-economic shifts impacting worker’s rights, livelihood, and dignity.

My work is socially committed and spans writing, photography, video installation, and activism. My recent exhibitions have mapped the rise of algorithmically managed labor platforms, such as Uber, the impact of artificial intelligence on truckers, and Amazon’s continued expansion, listening to workers, and those most impacted by the changes reshaping work. The exhibitions were composed of physical, material work stations, each of which included video essays that exposed and examined the underlying shifts and systematic inequality in work.

Mechanical Turk Workstation (installation view) 2019. Photo: Nicholas Knight.
​From the exhibition, Working Conditions, at NURTUREart gallery, New York.

One monitor plays a video of Mechanical Turk workers, an invisible labor force on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, discussing their work. Workers were paid $2.00 for each 2-minute video submitted over Amazon’s platform as a work task. A second video shows work tasks, such as identifying images, which an artificial intelligence program could not do without human assistance.
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Mechanical Turk Workers from Brett Wallace on Vimeo.

Mechanical Turk HITs from Brett Wallace on Vimeo.

​Brett Wallace is a New York-based artist and filmmaker. Reviews of his work include The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, ARTnews, Artnet, Artslant, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Magazine, BmoreArt, and WHITEHOT magazine. Wallace’s work showed in recent exhibitions at The New School, NURTUREart, Our Networks, Silas Von Morisse Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Reshaping Work, and Gallery 46. He is an alumnus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Harvard Business School, and he holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also the founder of AMAZING INDUSTRIES, a research engine that fosters discussions about work.

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Jeff Thompson

My work makes visible the complicated physicality and poetics of technology, in particular how we use computers to order and represent the world. Through historical and technical research, digital dumpster-diving, building new tools, and by creating conceptual structures in the studio, I gather collections of materials, often massive and found or crowdsourced: images of pebbles, screenshots of computers in popular media, photographs of apartments for rent, interactions with my phone. These are transformed into project-based works that take the form of code, sculpture, sound, and performance, often modulating back-and-forth between the digital and physical. 

"Pebble Dataset" is a poetic machine-learning dataset made of 5000 images of found pebbles. Mimicking the datasets used to train computer vision systems, this project is an intervention that highlights the things we ignore when recording and classifying the world through data. In my work, I’m particularly interested in making visible the friction between data, labor, and the immense abstraction created when we reduce things – objects, people, ideas – to systems. Pebbles are not the stone of building or triumphal statues; instead, they are literally cast-off on the sides of roads and washed up on beaches, the kind of “useless” objects left out of utilitarian AI work.

Primarily sited as a repository on the code-sharing site Github, this project is also shown as a print of all the pebbles in the dataset sorted by visual similarity and a video. Created while a Visiting Fellow (King’s College) and artist-in-residence (Computer Laboratory) at University of Cambridge.
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"Pebble Dataset" (2018). 60"x60". 5000 found pebbles, Github repository, C-print on paper, custom software. Image courtesy of the artist.

"Pebble Dataset" detail. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Thompson is an artist, programmer, and educator based in the NYC area. Through code, sculpture, sound, and performance, Thompson's work physicalizes and gives materiality to otherwise invisible technological processes. Thompson has exhibited and performed his work internationally at venues including the Museum of the Moving Image, Tufts University, Fridman Gallery, Somerset House, Sheldon Museum of Art, Drugo-more, Salzburger Kunstverein, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Recent commissions and residencies include SPACES, Bell Labs, the Computer Laboratory at University of Cambridge, Abandon Normal Devices, Brighton Digital Festival, Impakt, Rhizome, Turbulence, Harvestworks, and Holland Computing Center, the supercomputing facility for the University of Nebraska system. With Angeles Cossio, Thompson co-founded the experimental curatorial project Drift Station, which has mounted exhibitions and publications across the US and online. Thompson earned an MFA from Rutgers University in 2006. He serves as Assistant Professor and Program Director of Visual Art & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology.

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Liliana Farber

​In my practice, I investigate the ways the virtual world redefines the physical one, from cloud corporations transforming geopolitics through information and capital flows, to the ways machine learning algorithms influence spoken languages. I use custom-made software and collected material from the internet, to create still and moving images, installations, and interactive works. Products of research-based practices, my works condense an abundance of information into unsuccessful data visualizations, be it abstract images output of processed data by an algorithm, or a line drawing mapping a performance between machines in the internet infrastructure. These artworks hold the memory of their origin only through their titles, captions, or narrations, which are poetic assemblages of found texts, like Instagram tags or fragments of a classic novel.
 
The politics embedded in the algorithms we use daily fascinates me, and in my work, I highlight their design ramifications. I build interfaces that celebrate chaos, and experiences that use frustration as strategy. I am captivated by how data visualization and machine learning technologies exploit the relationship of the one to the many, and explore visual and textual narrative potentials in feedback loops, usually breaking or highlighting the process in which the data we create as individual feeds models that ultimately influence us as a collective.
 
As potential cartographies of the space left between the online and the offline worlds, my artworks map abstract and pixel broken landscapes which portray worlds that cannot be grasped. I document spaces that function between reality and fiction, between a close-up journey around the globe on Google Earth, and a transformation of viral videos, from flood documentations, to animals being rescued from floods.  I create pieces that evoke an existential reflection to a world co-habited by humans and algorithms, often portraying adrift and senseless voices in post-natural catastrophe scenarios.
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"Blue Vessel" is a mobile app hosted on a server located on a flagless ship drifting on international waters and invites users to write anonymous web messages by selecting words from the book Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The app also allows users to imagine survival skills from a chaotic browser that decomposes itself with each scroll movement. ​

​Hundreds of fingers sliding across screens every second, repeating the same movement, right, left, up, down. Our fingers are the vehicle that connects us with information, entertainment and affections. "Feed" explores smartphone’s interaction muscle memory through the study of Facebook, Tinder, and Candy Crush movement patterns

Liliana Farber is a new media artist based in New York. She received an MFA from Parsons School of Design, completed the Postgraduate Fine Art Studies at the Hamidrasha School of Art, and a B.A in Graphic Design from O.R.T University. Farber had solo shows at 1708 Gallery, Arebyte Gallery, Dodecá Center, and Marte UpMarket Gallery. She participated in numerous collective shows at The National Museum of Contemporary Art (Portugal), The National Museum of Fine Arts (Chile), The National Museum of Visual Arts (Uruguay), Ars Electronica Festival, WRO Media Art Biennale (Poland), FILE Festival (Brazil), Katonah Museum of Art, and more. She received the Network Culture Award from the Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival, The Art and Technology Award from Montevideo City Hall, and the Prize for Excellence in Art from the Ministry of Immigration (Israel). ​

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Sophia Brueckner

"Captured by an Algorithm" is a commemorative plate series that looks at romance novels through the lens of Amazon Kindle’s Popular Highlight algorithm. A passage in a Kindle e-book becomes a Popular Highlight after a certain number of people independently highlight the same passage. Popular Highlights are displayed as underlined along with the total number of highlighters. The highlights in romances are not the racy, salacious quotes that one might expect. Instead, they reveal the intense feelings of loneliness, grief, and discontent that are felt by the readers. With all the social technologies available today, it is astonishing to see that so many people feel so lonely.

Popular Highlights change based on readers’ interactions with the books and Amazon’s adjustments to the algorithm. These poignant examples of shared vulnerability are preserved on porcelain commemorative plates. Photoshop’s Photomerge algorithm, intended to stitch together photos into panoramas, is instead applied to scans of romance novel covers. Because the covers are so similar, the algorithm finds areas that it believes should overlap producing dreamy, hybrid landscapes. Each plate features one of these landscapes as well as a Popular Highlight from a romance novel. The nature of these highlights suggests they are not serving as bookmarks for readers to return to later. They are not the type of quotes people share on Goodreads to look smart or well read. When a reader highlights one of these Popular Highlights, it is as if they are saying "I understand" or "me too!" They can take comfort in knowing that they are one of many feeling the same way. 

Over seventy thousand individual acts of highlighting were used to determine the content for this work, and more are always being added.
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Commemorative plate featuring Kindle Popular Highlight “She felt her aloneness all the way to the bone...She was alone in a way she’d never before imagined, as solitary as if she were an astronaut come untethered from the mother ship, drifting unnoticed in an emptiness so vast it was beyond comprehension.” Image courtesy of the artist.

Commemorative plate featuring Kindle Popular Highlight “One whisper added to a thousand others will become a roar of discontent.” Image courtesy of the artist.

Commemorative plate featuring Kindle Popular Highlight “All she wanted was to matter. To be more than an opportunity. That’s all." Image courtesy of the artist.

Commemorative plate featuring Kindle Popular Highlight “Her scars were not thistles, they were velvet artwork on her heart.” Image courtesy of the artist.

Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist/designer/engineer. Inseparable from computers since the age of two, she believes she is a cyborg. As an engineer at Google, she designed and built products used by millions. At RISD and the MIT Media Lab, she researched the simultaneously empowering and controlling nature of technology with a focus on haptics and social interfaces. Her work has been featured internationally by Artforum, SIGGRAPH, The Atlantic, Wired, the Peabody Essex Museum, Portugal’s National Museum of Contemporary Art, and more. Brueckner is the founder and creative director of Tomorrownaut, a creative studio focusing on speculative futures and sci-fi-inspired prototypes. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Nokia Bell Labs and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan teaching Sci-Fi Prototyping, a course combining sci-fi, prototyping, and ethics. Her ongoing objective is to combine her background in art, design, and engineering to inspire a more positive future.

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Michael Sedbon

Since most of life on Earth is now modulated and influenced by human actions and infrastructure, one may ask how our technologies and ecosystems interact, how our life support apparatus is designed, and what politics do they serve.

How do these designs produce narratives around the concentration of resources and power?
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What sort of ecological and social logic should be implemented in the design of automated infrastructures and algorithms?

Is it possible to picture our technologies and system as an emergent life form subjected to the rules of biological evolution? If so, what are the fitness factors that determine survival?

How are these factors measured?
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A video documentation of the installation as shown at the  “Polarities” show at MU, Eindhoven from the 29th of November 2019 to the 1st of March 2020. Video courtesy of the artist.

​Here are two artificial ecosystems sharing a light source. Access to this light source is granted through a market. Each colony of photosynthetic bacterias can claim access to light thanks to credits earned for their oxygen production. The rules driving the market are optimized through a genetic algorithm. This artificial intelligence is testing different populations of financial systems on these two sets of Cyanobacteria. Like so, the photosynthetic cells and the computer are experimenting with different political systems granting access to this resource. The system oscillates between collaborative and competitive states.

The genetic algorithm pictures the rules of these proto-societies as genes. By breeding populations of societies, new generations of markets arise. Like so, the sum of microscopic series of events determines the status of the system at a macroscopic scale.
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A top view on one of the Bioreactors. Image courtesy of the artist.

A side view side view of the setup as shown during the “Polarities” show at MU, Eindhoven from the 29th of November 2019 to the 1st of March 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

"CMD: Experiment in Bio Algorithmic Politics" was conceived of and produced by Michael Sedbon, with collaborators Bio-physics of photosynthesis & Hybrid Forms Lab (VU), Raoul Frese(VU), and MU Hybrid Art House.

Michael Sedbon is an interaction designer and artist working in Europe and Asia. His work explores digital networked technologies and systems through their convergence with non-human intelligence (including plants, unicellular organisms, insects, and bacteria) in regards to the Infocene problematics, seen as, our current cultural era where Information is the force having the biggest impact on human societies and environments. He holds a Master in Interaction Design from the London College of Communication.

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