Starting next weekend, American Artist's work will be on view at the MoMA and the Whitney in New York as part of two group exhibitions.
Offering a timely examination of video, art, and the public sphere, The Museum of Modern Art will present Signals: How Video Transformed the World, a major exhibition that will be on view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions from March 5 through July 8, 2023.
Artist will be presenting 2015 (2019), a 21-minute single-channel HD video showing an example of predictive policing technologies, artificial intelligence tools intended to help dispatch officers to high risk crime zones before incidents are reported. The work highlights the collective bias that is encoded within such seemingly neutral or scientific tools: aided by algorithms developed by tech firms like PredPol, the police car transforms the world out the window into a criminal landscape by targeting locations and imagining infractions.
Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, the works in Refigured reflect on interactions between digital and physical materiality. The exhibition brings together a group of artists who engage with the concept of “refiguring,” appropriating material forms and bodies to re-create and reinvent them. Refiguring becomes a process of imagining alternative worlds as a means for constructing identity.
American Artist will present Mother of All Demos IV (2022), which embodies qualities that are antithetical to high technology: blackness, brokenness, slowness, and transparency. Its shape is modeled after the Apple II, the last personal computer to use an all black interface: a thick layer of dirt is covering it, and a mysterious dark fluid is oozing from its keys. The computer here works as a metaphor for modernity, and, furthermore, modernity here is “birthed” from Black labor. Blackness is not only the origin of all things, but it is also the hidden DNA within technology. The sculpture, made of dirt with black goo on the surface, is named after the seminal demo in 1968 of the first computer graphical user interface.
