The exhibition for Zach Blas took place at Gaswork marking the premiere of Jubilee 2033, a queer science fiction film. The idea of challenging today's norms in the society as people are constantly online and using the internet without much thought into the process, sometimes disregarding dangers as it is not directly highlighted. I like the challenge that Zack brings in that sense because he uses the science fiction film to get a deeper sense of the society we live in through the live-action performance, cleverly using it in digital form to convey his message of society. This links to the same idea Langdon Winner put out there as he says, "technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something in between.".
"This exhibition presents a range of ideas about science and medicine since Henry Wellcome's death in 1936. It reflects the experiences and interests of scientists, doctors and patients.
Within the huge field of medicine this exhibition attempts to focus on only a few topics: the body, genomes, obesity and living with medical science. Each is explored through a range of exhibits from science and everyday life, as well as artistic responses to the issues presented in red 'art cubes'.
The exhibition features work by Luke Jerram, John Isaacs, Ellie Harrison and from The Institute of Plastination."
"This immersive environment, conceived
specifically for the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, is an adapted version of the videos presented on monitors in Sondra Perry’s Wet and Wavy – Typhoon coming on for a Three-Monitor Workstation (2016) also included in the exhibition. The series of seamless projections coursing through the gallery space is accompanied by a new ambient soundscape. The projected videos begin with an animation of an ocean that the artist created using the tool Ocean Modifier available in the open source software Blender that allows users to simulate, generate and deform ocean surface. In her video, the ocean is purple as is the colour warning that appears on the software when there is an error with the simulation. The animation then blends into a digitally manipulated image of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). The original work depicts the drowning of 133 slaves by the captain of the British slave ship, Zong, to claim compensation for these ‘goods’ under the salvage clause of the ship’s insurance policy."
"Sondra Perry (b.1986, Perth Amboy, New Jersey) constructs multifaceted narratives that explore the imagining, or imaging, of blackness throughout history. Often taking her own life as a point of departure, she makes works that revolve specifically around black American experiences and the ways in which technology and identities are entangled. Her use of digital tools and platforms, such as Chroma key blue screens, 3D avatars, open source software, and footage found online, reflects critically on representation itself. Perry’s investigations demonstrate that digital technology functions as an attribute of power, and another tool that reimagines the possibilities of networked collectivity. As the artist says: ‘I’m interested in thinking about how blackness shifts, morphs and embodies technology to combat oppression and surveillance throughout the diaspora. Blackness is agile’."
"In each episode, the Emissary — caught between unraveling old realities and emerging weird ones — attempts to achieve a series of deterministic narrative goals, an analogy to the narrative nature of consciousness. But crucially these goals can be set off course, procrastinated, disrupted by the underlying simulation and its non-narrative agents who vex the Emissary with other kinds of minds.
Seen together, Emissaries is a macro-scale portrait of the life of a landscape: from chaotic Volcano, to fertile Crater Lake, to Sentient Atoll. By first observing the lives of its agents — seeing the neurons for the brain — we now zoom out to find a landscape who itself might begin to resemble something like an intelligence."
