we are tech and tech are us

Curatorial Statement

I read a book – an actual book, with pages made of paper – for a half hour this morning.

Sometimes I have this lingering sense of my time having passed for certain things, like oh I should have read more when I was younger… but you can learn, you can be influenced at any age. It all matters. Deciding that you’ve passed the window of opportunity is just that, a decision.

Putting together the tech show is making me think about AI a lot more than I want to. I have a lot of fears, many of them perhaps unfounded or naive. Maybe I don’t have enough fears. Those fears are part of my own piece, whispered desperately in the audio track. I want this show to be engaging and at least slightly terrifying.

Reading the book this morning – it’s called The City, Not Long After -– I think I have discovered that I am far sighted. Perhaps it’s also a function of reading most things now on a screen, with glowing letters that I can enlarge without even thinking about it.

I feel that, increasingly, there are generational shifts associated with tech. I think this happens more and more rapidly, with shorter and shorter timespans between generations. The tech shifts are so massive that they change thought patterns, ways of perceiving and interacting with the world, maybe even brain structure. Talk about generational gaps. What does that do to societal relationships?

I have heard people divide sci-fi into hard and soft. “Hard” sci-fi is the mechanics. It concerns itself with the immediate, not the future. To me it is ultimately less interesting, less important, than its “Soft” counterpart. The soft tissue is what lives, what moves and grows. This is what fascinates us, and what actually directs the future.

My main purpose for my own “tech” work is to explore the idea that all of our creations have their own life. Whether they are technically “alive” or not. We focus so much on the HOW and the WHAT of our inventions. What about the WHY? How about the WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

The small tree right outside my window is sprouting new leaves. It bends in the wind, as the morning traffic speeds by. Tech exists alongside Nature. Maybe we’re reaching the point where the two have a lot in common? Can tech be regenerative? The standard poetic trope is for persistent leaves to poke through cracks in the concrete after the downfall of a high tech civilization. Could that be different in the future, our actual future, not sci-fi? I understand so little.

Gretchen Hasse, Curator
August 2023

Anahit Yakubovich

@thegirlwithastaronherface

I am a 22 year old currently studying fine arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, born to Russian parents in California, raised in Chicago. My art practice is centred around creating immersive works that aim to directly engage viewers with research led concepts.

Analog LLM Poetry Files is an installation based around 5 original booklets of poems on the topic of tech, written by manually cutting out words and phrases from printed out websites. Viewers of the installation have the opportunity to read through the original booklets and receive their own transferred analog file. This cut out technique was chosen for its similarity to how large language models such as ChatGpt generate content, essentially copying and reassembling information from the internet. The covers of each booklet were created by similarly collaging found internet images which in some way access our collective digital consciousness being viral images or memes. The sources for the creation of these booklets were chosen to contradict and supplement each other, such as, bringing together Wikipedia articles on both Techno-Utopianism and Neo-Luddites, or combining text from subreddits on anti-aging with articles about climate doomerism. Embodying these algorithmic processes upon internet content in a way that culminates in a physical outcome to be presented in a non virtual space, I reflect on the concept of tech in a way that simultaneously rejects and embraces it.

anna reed

@annaoreed

Anna Reed is a Chicago based artist whose work addresses themes of identity, post-humanism, fragmentation, and the boundaries of virtual space. She teaches high school and is the digital gallery director for Art ConnectEd. She received her BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University, and MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

I am fascinated with the progress of tech and social media. I am focusing on the areas where the physical and the virtual intersect and overlap. Our media saturated world shapes how we see and project ourselves by making daily events simultaneously precious and mundane. Through this virtual space we become simultaneously hyper connected and disconnected. My work questions the the sense of self through the images and information that is both curated and fragmented. Do we have a human future or have we become commodities as we project and consume our own images? I program the devices with looped images and social media content so that the content is continually changing. In exploring these questions, I often use my body as source images. Created from Xerox, scans, and other lowfi devices I press my body into the screen creating an intimate performance between human and the machine.   

Bettina Cousineau

@bdcousineaustudio

I’m celebrating my 40th year of being an artist. I never received a BFA – I just made art as part of my life. I’ve exhibited widely, been awarded grants/fellowships, and have been invited to residency programs. I just left my 25 year museum career to expand my studio practice.

I make drawings about the future that look like they were drawn on a rock in a pre-historic past. But this is not the future we’ve anticipated: in this place, things appear and recede, stack in ways that defy gravity, and live at the edge of memory. I draw a place that could happen and is happening and did happen: the past, present and future are all available simultaneously. But there is no tech here – did we take a different turn? Instead of external tech devices, did we develop inner resources and find the pathway to a higher, more organic vibration?

BOB FIELDS

@bobfieldshere

Bob Fields… Calls Chicago his “home,” for living and working. Attained his MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR, and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Refers to himself as an abstract / minimal / conceptual artist. He has exhibited his work all about …locally & nationally. Most recently at… Buckham Gallery - Flint, MI, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, and the Riverside Art Center. He describes his practice as an evolutionary process; “I’m interested in materials & processes, their relationship, connections… the planes, edges and voids.” One move leads to the next. “Titles? They come from and are more what I would call ‘text-fragments’ extracted from my reading research over time.”

I suppose, could say: Work conceived and built with the basic, foundational construction materials, and processes / technology of my time. The available mix of manual & mechanical. Digital? Still OUTSIDE looking IN. Low-Tech... (What else can I say?) ... like hammer + nail, straight edge, tape measure, pencil + eraser + a level... Got'm. Covered.

Emily Berens

emilyberens.com

Emily Scheider Berens is a multimedia artist and Associate Professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Throughout her work, Emily looks to help artists discover new techniques of archiving inspiration, remixing found materials, and finding nonconventional ways to incorporate digital media into their studio practice.

I like to refer to myself as a ‘Tra-Digital’ media artist; I create mixed media work using a combination of traditional and digital tools. In the Excavations series of work featured here, I start by mark making with acrylic paint, brushes, and found objects, with a focus on handheld tools that emphasize layering and texture. I digitally scan these traditional marks and combine them with digital painting processes to generate dynamic image composites intended to comment upon improvisation and play. I’m fascinated with repurposing tools, and what it means to do so from both a technical and conceptual perspective. Mapping the manipulation of marks and found objects is important to me – building a heightened understanding of a workflow by charting the same path repeatedly, and observing resulting growth. I study how new iterations of marks evolve over time through slight variation, similar to how tools and technologies themselves evolve. I embed natural ephemera, analog maps, and blueprints into my work as a means of contrasting where we come from to where we are. My work draws comparison between the natural and the technical world; both can be regulated, but have the capacity to grow independently into a role other than that which was intended. Tech shapes us in that it pushes us to keep growing in both planned and unexpected ways; we are driven to advance our technologies because curiosity and experimentation are fundamentally human. This work also explores the possibility of what happens when conventional tools are removed; the natural world takes over and we find new ways to substitute what we have. Evolution takes improvisation into hand. I believe enmeshing analog and digital elements provides a unique opportunity for storytelling and celebrating materiality. The disruption of both traditional and tech-based workflows helps us understand further what they are and what they can be.

Gabriel Patti

@gpatti2

Gabriel Patti is a Chicago based artist with a Bachelors in fine art from Knox College, Galesburg, IL. He has exhibited his artworks nationally and internationally.

My cell phone masks are a melange of dissected obsolete mobiles and a reinterpretation of traditional masks from Africa, Indonesia,and Japan. They are both primitive and futuristic.

LArdo

@lardomoney

George John “LARDO” Larson is a Chicago based visual artist. Born in Chicago, and still residing in the Chicagoland area. He studied painting with Morris Barazani, in 1985, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Barazani challenged George to take risks, and not be hesitant in his work.

I work in a factory, and one day I was drilling a hole in the concrete floor to bolt down a guard rail. Nearby was a workstation with a computer screen. I noticed that the screen was going haywire. There were squiggly lines going all across it. I thought what the? And let go of the drill trigger. The screen went back to normal. I pulled on the trigger and it went crazy again. I finished what I had to do without anyone noticing what I had noticed. I wasn’t going to try and show this to anyone else. They might tell me to get drug tested. I started wondering if the drill was shaking my brain and I was getting concussion symptoms. Was this the start of CTE? If so, what else is new?

This demonstrates how technology can be so ingrained with us that we no longer really know what is going on!

gretchen hasse

gretchenhasse.com

Gretchen is a Chicago-based storyteller working in comics, video, animation, murals, and installation. She co-founded Agitator Artists’ Collective in 2017, and since then curation has been a crucial part of her practice.

It’s not like we can escape technology. We have to live with it, whether we understand it or not. I have lived a relatively long time, and it amazes me to think how much I currently depend on technology that didn’t exist even a short while ago. Sometimes I can barely remember what it was like before, with land lines, paper maps, and no internet.

Is my brain changing? I hope so.

My body has been enhanced by technology. I am vaguely bionic. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be alive without some fairly recent technological advances. So that tech? It’s okay.

The other tech though – the stuff that feels like it’s reaching inside our brains and scooping out the best parts for itself – I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not sure how to understand it.

All the Gifts is an acknowledgment of what I owe to tech, what I hope it might do, and what fear from it. It is all bound together.

GURKAN MIHCI

gurkanmihci.com

Gürkan Maruf Mıhçı uses A.I. to reimagine artworks. Gürkan Maruf Mıhçı’s artworks are inspired by science, politics, and ecology. Mıhçı merges these concepts to create imaginary worlds, satires, and visualizations.

Gürkan Maruf Mıhçı reimagines Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych painting in the light of artificial intelligence and science fiction. He uses Artificial Intelligence tools to create a futuristic animated version of the artwork. The left panel (garden of Eden) and the right panel (hell) depict the end of the world. His imaginary world is earthly, but what if we extend his concept to the galaxy? The central panel represents a landscape of fantastical creatures and human figures. However, how can we imagine the end of the world scientifically and a landscape of imaginary futuristic galactic worlds? How can we represent these concepts using technology (animated computer-generated loops - Artificial Intelligence generated and/or 3D/2D visualizations- on the triptych Led Screens)?

Haydon Mayer

@haydonmayer

I am a student at the DePaul School of the Cinematic Arts, primarily working in the realms of video art and experimental narrative. I’m interested in bridging the fractured relationship between Man and Wireless Signal. Post- Internet art is where we can begin to untangle the tangled wires of our dopamine-based psyche.

An ode to the 2000s webpage and flash game culture.

'On a sleepy summer night in 2004, my parents are fighting but I wish they would shut up because I'm trying to fix my new blog.' A child dissociates against within the world-wide-web, traveling between conspiracy sites, malware, porn, and web players in an attempt to lose themselves. Passing through blog graveyards, broken hyperlinks, and digital spirits, they begin to realize the Internet is so much more. There's a certain spirituality behind each IP address you surf across. A monster lurking behind pop-up advertisements. The demonic cycle of being the first generation to seek nurture beyond reality, growing up on the falsehoods of cyberspace. The development of the brain and biological systems through a false reality with the shame of unfiltered sexual exploration. Both temporary and forever.

Finding myself in the first generation of humans to develop biologically alongside the Internet has led me to construct my own digital nurturing and coping mechanisms. Due to the time I have been born in, I cannot detach myself from this digital fixation as the Internet becomes ever-more prevalent in our daily lives to the point where we cannot function without it. My view of the world was shaped through a screen and that is singed onto my life forever.

helena schultheis edgeler

helenaschultheisedgeler.eu

Helena Schultheis was born 1972 in Zagreb, where she completed the school for applied art and design. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She has been employed at the Faculty of Textile and Technology of the University of Zagreb as an associate professor on a group of drawing and painting courses. She is active in the field of painting, video art, photography and artistic installation. She has participated in numerous exibitions domestic and abroad.

Thirteen is an animated experimental video that questions the aspects of the action of human consciousness and creativity in the context of fast-paced development of AI and digital identities. It explores the possible direction and way of their coexistence throughout the intelligent separate realities and virtual media. The video was made with a combination of 3D and 2D computer animations with a recorded material that is visually aestheticly uniform with animated parts and meaningfully incorporated.

At the beginning of the video, a unit station, as a material carrier of human consciousness, expands from the micro dimension into the multiplicity of macro existence, and follows an account of the animation of the planet, on which statues from the Easter Islands as a symbolic human collective project to project their own psychic contents into the newly established virtual space of social networks. Modern material reality, created as a product of collective human activity from the sources of individual internal psychological dimensions, in the form in which it currently exists, shows in one part of its deep inconsistency at the collective level and reflection is irrevocable but intensely real underwater underwater sphere of individuals who participate in such the quality of common consciousness.

jeffrey mendenhall

@jeffmendenhall3010

Jeffrey A. Mendenhall has B.S. Degree in Art Education from Florida State University. He has an A.S. Degree in Graphic Design from The State College of Florida. His body of art work incorporates the themes of color, emotions, brush textures and shapes. The art work is created thorough the use of Corel Painter and Adobe software on a computer. His art work is revealing the culture of modern art work.

The work was created on a computer using Adobe software. The orange to green to purple is in 3D. Tech software drew the 3d part of the art. My abstract art is a result of technology. Since cameras can capture the realism of art, I create abstract art. One of my themes is to use the latest tech to create and display my art.

Jiayi Liu

Jiayi Liu works with real-time simulation video. Her work combines motions, forces, and interaction of objects based on the notion of worldbuilding. Jiayi uses game engine to develop looping systems with distorted causality. Each of her work can be seen as a simulated reality on the stage.

City Illusion is a contemplation on the connection between urban city structures and nature. It is a dreamland where the boundaries between birds and humans in the city gradually blur. On a tour bus, the chirping of birds overtakes the voice of the guide, as they soar towards the reflections on the glass windows of tall buildings and then plummet to the ground. Each collision yields slightly different scenery, as if seeking novelty amidst infinite repetition.

This artwork draws inspiration from birds that are deceived by the reflections in city skyscraper windows. During the day, birds may collide with windows because they see reflections of vegetation or potted plants on the other side of the glass. At night, migratory birds (including most songbirds) may crash into brightly lit windows during their nocturnal journeys.

City Illusion is a real-time rendered video that I created using the Unity game engine. This artwork explores the possibilities of narrative through programming. In City Illusion, from a technical standpoint, I pondered the characteristics of technology as a medium. For instance, in my work, I used Unity and programming to establish a closed-loop system where limited cause and effect cycles form a microcosm of the real world.

This virtual reality, to some extent, re􀋢ects my own understanding and construction of the world because these causal relationships are abstractions based on my experiences. While the tour bus routes and bird flight paths in the artwork are completely random, I have a firm grasp on the core of the work (the programming logic) within the virtual world. This sense of certainty in the technology makes me feel incredulous. If I were to be the god of the virtual world, whimsically establishing a rule, how can I convince myself that this real world isn’t a joke from a higher-dimensional being?

Kateryna Tkachenko

@strange.beautiful.bloomy.world

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine Studied at Kharkiv Art college, baccalaureate in painting and teaching, 2002 Studied at Kharkiv Academy of Design and Arts, specialization - monumental painting.

I like that the artist is at the same time part of the world around her and also a mirror of that world. I like to admire the beautiful world around me. I like that by putting emotions and experiences through the mind I can create works of art.

Technology has become a part of our lives. Our heart beats in unison with the age of technology and sometimes a heart turn to be more mechanical than flesh. Probably soon mechanical heart could enhance flesh heart if it's needed.

Kyle Wiles

@KyleWilesStudio

Kyle Wiles started his art career after a catastrophic industrial accident, he used art as a way to improve his health both physically and mentally. He started out with photography, and expanded to Glitch art, and AI often combining the formats.

This piece explores the profound human yearning for technological advancement. Through a poetic process that intertwines art and innovation, I embark on a transformative journey. Beginning with an AI image portraying a captivating cyborg-like figure (our quest for recreating life with the use of circuits and motors), then I harness the power of circuit bent color processors from the beginning phases of home video editing back in the days of VHS, and the ever enchanting Orion CRT TV to breathe new life into the simple AI generation. By rescanning and modifying the image using a camera I delve into the realm of Glitch Art. This harmonious convergence of cutting-edge technologies and aged machinery captivates me, symbolizing the dichotomy between our past and future trajectories. Moreover, it serves as a celebration of the imperfections inherent in our explorations.

Matthew Butler

charm.farm

Matthew Butler is an Intermedia artist living in Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature. His main studio practice focuses on an informatics approach to conceptual writing and art. His influences are mostly Fluxus, OuLiPo, and early information artists such as Dan Graham. He has a beautiful wife and son.

Nathan Peck

Nathan Peck is a digital art professor at Saint Xavier University who maintains a relentless exhibition schedule in a wide range of art media. After graduating from the Intermedia program at the University of Iowa, he has employed the philosophy of cross-media-hybridization, especially in terms of site-specific and process-based approaches to art making. Peck has been an active member of many collaborative and performance art groups in Chicago, and is a co-founder of the Chicago Art Department.

Creating community is central to everything I do. I come from small, supportive communities both in art school and in my hometown. I thrive in small groups of people who enjoy working together.

It’s never possible to get everybody to care about everything, but you can get groups of people to care about stuff together. Early on in Chicago, I plugged into The People’s Republic of Delicious Food, a weird list serve art group that would say hey we’re doing this thing on this day, and you would show up wherever with your thing, and blast it into whatever was going on... sometimes night clubs, sometimes galleries, sometimes on the street.

More recently, I’ve moved to Beverly to plug into the community here. Students see my work in progress at school. Sometimes they’ll riff off of a direction I have, and I get inspired in turn. And with a group of us working on various iterations of tech-based projects, we can test the logistics of a concept better than any one person could.

When iPads first came out, and SXU – like all universities – bought 200 of them, I asked the person in charge of instructional tech: when these are obsolete, can I please have them all? So that eventually happened. My class made sculptures with them. Most of my materials are part of the university waste stream. The wood is all scraps from our laser cutter. They’re exactly the size of the cutter bed; when you stack them up they fit perfectly, and the negative spaces interact.

My sabbatical was in 2020, and I had the entire art building to myself. When I do the same thing all day, whether it’s art or factory work, I tend to work a third shift in my sleep. After working in the studio for eight hours, I’d make another ten pieces in my sleep, some very absurd. I started taking very careful notes every morning. I can forget how important absurdity is to the creative process. It pushes boundaries.

Eventually what I did during the day became material to work on in my sleep. Then I built on it the next day. That working model created the Dream Machine.

Sara Peak Convery

@sara.peak.convery

Sara Peak Convery is a Chicago based visual artist and curator. She began to organize exhibitions in nearby Portage Park neighborhood and beyond in 2015. Convery has won Best in Show at Beverly Art Center and South Shore Arts Salon. She established Slacks Window Gallery in 2019.

I created a collage using photos taken by an app on my phone of me as part of a security measure intended to protect the integrity of information on my phone. I only ever saw photos of myself on the app-no other apparent transgressions.Technology surveying the user of said technology seemed somewhat funny to me at the time I created the collage (in 2016). It now seems both quaint and more disturbing.

Zach Bartz

Zach Bartz is a Chicago artist who frequently upcycles materials from the thrift store into new works of art. He draws from his career as an improviser to discover new works on pre-existing objects instead of inventing something onto a blank canvas.

This artwork not only upcycles an old piece of tech, it re-contextualizes it into being a relic of our past.

Zen Evans

ishti.dance | @kinnarivora | @ishtidance

On the battlefield of the digital panopticon, oil painting risks total obsolescence and irrelevance. I am to reclaim some lost ground by re-presenting the pixelated nature of the computer on canvas.

The three paintings seize on ubiquitous icons of our time: the computer’s cursor and hourglass. They do so with an air of distress.

Two of the works, Terminal Node ’98 and The Mausoleum Of Hope And Desire, show the mouse cursor in a moment of glitchy dread, repeating itself stuttering around the canvas.

And the third, Memento Mori, in a scatter of wires, executes in oil that which a flat computer screen cannot render: thick, tactile, emphatically physical and dimensional works.

All three are titled to reflect a sense of finitude and mortality. Although some conventional wisdom suggests “the internet is forever” – I disagree. My profession as a software engineer shows me that the world of computers is fickle; bugs and “bit rot” plague every program, files can be evaporated forever with a simple accidental “delete” key. There is an quiet effort to “keep the lights” every day with every piece of software that runs our world.