Onassis ONX Winter Exhibition: "All Will Be Considered"
Onassis ONX Winter Exhibition: All Will Be Considered
Opening Reception:
Wednesday, January 24, 6:00 - 8:00PM
Public Viewing Hours:
January 25 - February 4, 2024
Thursdays to Sundays Only, 12:00 - 6:00PM
The inaugural Onassis ONX Winter exhibition, All Will be Considered, draws from the vast talents of the ONX membership and their collaborators. The exhibition comprises new media works on themes including science fiction, identity/otherness, nonhuman subjectivities, and Anthropocene ecologies. The seven new media installations on view use a variety of tools including AI, custom software, data scraping, and immersive sound to pose existential questions about a post-human world that seeks to remain humane. Each of the studio’s major zones will be devoted to a single ONX member and their collaborators, yet all the installations stand together in a polyphonic hum of new worlds born from old worries. More on each below…
YOUR URGE TO BREATH IS A LIE
Miriam Simun
Welcome to the wet, soft and more-than-human future. YOUR URGE TO BREATHE IS A LIE is an invitation to join the Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution. A psycho-physical training regimen for human enhancement, the work follows scientists, dancers, engineers, synchronized swimmers, and the artist-as-freediver as they train for survival amidst climate crisis by evolving the capacities and sensitivities of the cephalopod (octopus, squid, cuttlefish, nautilus). A sensorial experience of growing tactile awareness, shapeshifting ability, and distributed intelligence, the work aims to transcend and redirect the primacy of sight and sound in moving-image, in order to instigate somatic, corporeal sensation directly in the audience’s physical bodies.
THE BORDER LINE &
DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO REPORT
Marc Da Costa
The Border Line is an experimental video work that uses data scrapping as an artistic practice. Drawn from all the public Instagram posts created within 5 km of the Turkish-Syrian border between 2017-2019, the piece chronicles everyday life in the midst of war and migration. Moving through footage taken by bored truck drivers and brides on their wedding day, the piece investigates historical memory mediated by big tech companies.
Do You Have Anything to Report? attempts to frame the sprawling, almost sublime scale of the state’s boundless impulse to interrogate. The installation video provides an ambient, visceral encounter with bureaucratic rationality by displaying each and every form produced by the US Government in 2023 (approx. 107 billion). An accompanying book provides an index and guide to those things which are legible to the state, and implicitly, those which are not.
PASSAGE_SOFTRAINS
Kevin Peter He and Matthew Gantt
Passage_SoftRains is a speculative audio-visual installation where the ecosystem becomes a live instrument. The project explores the entanglement of natural and artificial systems through a rich ecosystem of cybernetic flora and fauna, simulated in a game engine with AI. Variables such as time, the gaze of the documentary camera, and varied micro-biomes foster emergent behaviors that modulate and alter the audio and visual composition in real-time, forming a feedback loop within the installation’s techno-biosphere.
STAINED
Jeremy Kamal
Stained is centered on two large stills of characters from the artist’s film, which takes place in an Afrofuturist tea garden in which rival gangs use flora to mark territory. The characters in question, Demetrius and his elder Bump, are at odds due to Demetrius’ fascination with a blue herb - forbidden by his gang the Crimson Needles. An accompanying sound and video work animates the prints and brings emotional tone to their portraits. This project emerges from the larger fictional world of MOJO:Da Fringes, in which landscapes are shaped by Black culture and symbiotic relationships with machinery and technology enable Black Americans the godlike ability to transform geology, weather, and ecology.
NATURAL CONTACTS BETA
Peter Burr, Mark Fingerhut, Bridget DeFranco, and Matthew Gantt
NATURAL CONTACTS Beta is an installation centered around a desktop from Onassis ONX’s managerial department. The computer at the heart of the work is installed with custom software designed to arrest control permanently over its host machine, transforming it into a persistent virtual garden. The piece plays with notions of time in software, probing viewers’ attention and encouraging us to reimagine the possibilities of administrative technology beyond its traditional work-centric confines.
AI 2 & Android 4
Ashley Zelinskie
Android 4 and AI 2 deal with the promise of new technologies to augment our bodies and our humanity for convenience and productivity. In Android 4, Zelinskie's own DNA code is embedded in a 3D-printed bust of the artist, suggesting our intense desire to become one with our mechanical companions. In many ways a spiritual inverse of Android 4, AI 2 posits that machines will someday be indistinguishable from humans. Once we are able to fully recreate ourselves with technology, there will be no way to tell who you’re talking to.
(all images courtesy of the artists)