on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
*A good choice, as Julia Kaganskiy is exceptionally knowledgeable and perceptive.
“For millennia, speculations about how technoscientific innovations could transform living organisms — by accident or design — have animated our imaginaries of cyborgs, mutants, automatons, and replicants. As our environment becomes increasingly synthetic, polluted, and governed by planetary-scale computation, what kind of lifeforms will it support?”
*Oh come on, who can’t like that?
Presenting Harbingers, a new Experimental Exhibition using Blockchain Data to Manipulate and Mutate Each Artwork, Minted on Tezos
Julia Kaganskiy curates Harbingers, the new Feral File exhibition bringing together a bestiary of the posthuman. Harbingers takes on a new, experimental approach, using blockchain data to manipulate and mutate each artwork. Every time the works are sold and traded on-chain, a random glitching process will progressively distort the works.
Harbingers features 14 new artworks in total from:
Zach Blas
Pinar Yoldas
Ricardo Dominguez / *particle group*
Shu Lea Cheang
Sofia Crespo
33 editions of each artwork will be available for sale at a per edition price of $75. Of these editions, 10 will be initially available only in exhibition sets during the exhibition’s first twenty-four hours for $1,050 ($75 × 14 artworks).
Exhibition Opening:
September 28, 2022
14:00 UTC+0 (7am Los Angeles, 11am São Paulo, 4pm Berlin, 10pm Shanghai)
Collecting starts one hour later.
Please join us on Twitter Spaces for a conversation with the artists on September 28 at 17:00 UTC.
“Generic Mannequin Gets Flayed” by Zach Blas. Image courtesy of the artist and Feral File.
Feral File is pleased to announce Harbingers, an exhibition of five international artists assembling visions of transhumanist desires and technogenic anxieties.
Curator Julia Kaganskiy on the exhibition:
“For millennia, speculations about how technoscientific innovations could transform living organisms — by accident or design — have animated our imaginaries of cyborgs, mutants, automatons, and replicants. As our environment becomes increasingly synthetic, polluted, and governed by planetary-scale computation, what kind of lifeforms will it support?
The group show Harbingers brings together a bestiary of the posthuman, assembling artistic visions of transhumanist desires and technogenic anxieties in an age of accelerated biosocial transformation. A menagerie of mutant creatures emerges from the recombinant crucible of computational manipulation, genetic engineering, viral mutation, biohacking, and cross-species contamination. Novel corporeal formations, at once familiar and strange, are produced through complex interrelations of nature, culture, and technology. Modernity becomes an agent of metamorphosis through the vectors of engineering, adaptation, and aberration. Each work in Harbingers offers a portal into a fabulated mirror world governed by its own mythology. The organisms assembled here include coded chimeras, genetically modified superhumans, bodies held captive by the algorithmic surround, and plants and animals that have evolved to metabolize plastics and toxic waste. All serve as sentinels of the transfigurative powers of technology and ecocide.”
Preview of the Artworks:
Generic Mannequin Gets Flayed (pictured above)
“Generic Mannequin Gets Flayed” is a corporate term for digital representations of bodies that are examined for risks and anomalies during airport body scans. Zach Blas appropriated this non-image in his installation “SANCTUM” (2018), a security-detention-center-meets-sex-dungeon environment that probes the dynamics of power, exposure, and desire inherent in surveillance and predictive policing through the lens of BDSM. Rendered silent and pliant through biometric capture, we see the mannequin bound, whipped, contained, and harvested for use in the creation of new weapons or sex toys. By invoking queer aesthetics and consentual power play, Blas leaves the question of complicity up for debate — are the mannequins prisoners, sex slaves, worshippers, or experimental test subjects? The work’s ambiguity problematizes our symbiotic relationship with technology, examining the nature of personal agency, surveillance, and control in a world shaped by data mining and social engineering.
LES MUTANTS, #3
“LES MUTANTS, #3” by Shu Lea Cheang. Image courtesy of the artist and Feral File.
This excerpt from UKI, Shu Lea Cheang’s forthcoming feature length sci-fi viral cinema, recounts the adventures of Reiko, a de-commissioned replicant. UKI is the sequel to Cheang’s iconic cyberpunk porn film I.K.U. (2000), which tells the story of biotech company Genom Corporation and its plan to harvest orgasm data to engineer and sell addictive orgasms. Discarded on the toxic waste dump E-trashville, Reiko encounters Les Mutants, creatures who have evolved over generations of e-trash remixing, toxic pollution, and viral infection. Les Mutants help Reiko reboot themself back to existence and transform into the virus UKI, capable of infiltrating and sabotaging Genom Corp’s BioNet. In “LES MUTANTS, #1,” we see Reiko meeting the mutants’ Mother Yeast, a body of ever expanding blobs, appearing like lumps of dough rising in all directions, and VARIUS, a black and white photograph of a 1900s boy whose face and body are pockmarked from smallpox infection.
Ojo! Don’t Slip On the Ba-nano Peal
“Ojo! Don’t Slip On the Ba-nano Peal” by *particle group*. Image courtesy of the artist and Feral File.
This nanopoem was co-created by Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez of *particle group,* along with Maribel Montero (a nanolithography specialist). It was produced with a Raith50 E-beam Writer on silicon coupons at nano3 (UCSD). The writing field of the coupons was between 0.5 um (nanometers) to 5.0 um (for the sake of comparison, recall that a white blood cell is 7,000 nanometers in width). Two trajectories were at play in developing these nanolithographs — the work focuses on the year 2012, the year that the Mayan Calendar ended/shifted. Representations of that time-change oscillated between the apocalyptic and the utopic, paralleling representations of “nanocausts and nanotopias” tracked by the artists in their work. The year 2012 also marked the inauguration of the Tijuana Institute of Nanotechology (TIN), a speculative space for nano-scale research and art production where these signs first were “taken for wonders.”
We look forward to seeing you at the opening on Feral File.
Exhibition Opening:
September 28, 2022
14:00 UTC+0 (7am Los Angeles, 11am São Paulo, 4pm Berlin, 10pm Shanghai)
Collecting starts one hour later.
Please join us on Twitter Spaces for a conversation with the artists on September 28 at 17:00 UTC.