Artists: Lois Bielefeld, Ryan Kuo, Harris Rosenblum and Theresa Faison (for Transcendence Collective), Viktor Timofeev
Intercession considers a spirit that seems to animate the digital devices that help us participate in pleasure, social life, ethics, and politics. Despite—or perhaps because of—the intimacy of this human-computer partnership, digital technology often seems to act as if by magic or prayer. Works by Lois Bielefeld, Ryan Kuo, Harris Rosenblum and Theresa Faison (for Transcendence Creative), and Viktor Timofeev play with digital interfaces and their potential to both facilitate and challenge analog life.
Humankind has harnessed the profoundly expansive capacity of computers through touch interfaces such as the mouse and keyboard as well as AI assistants like Siri, trained to mimic human behavior. Intercession examines the spooky ways in which interfaces exert their presence on the functions they help articulate—the exhibition’s title refers to both the act of mediation and the Christian practice of praying on another’s behalf. Vacant architectures and virtual automatons haunt the exhibition: an antagonistic chatbot, a conversation with absent participants, a thwarted attempt at coherence by generative AI, and a megachurch seen through the eyes of its livestreaming apparatus. Their uncanny animacy recalls forms of religious or mystical thought and experience that existed long before the emergence of digital technology.
In Bielefeld’s images of the broadcasting equipment in their childhood church, the silent apparatuses prompt us to consider what constitutes the interface beyond our use of it. The empty workstations of Timofeev’s Chat (2019) envision a conversation disrupted by both linguistic and technological confusion. A mutating alphabet and tampered keyboards demonstrate how an interface’s vulnerability affects communication itself. Meanwhile, an interactive chatbot by Kuo and a tapestry made from AI-generated imagery by Rosenblum and Faison challenge the obedience projected onto tools.
