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Maintaining Clarity: Recent Works in Distribution (Online)

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
eai.org
March 15th to March 30th, 2023

Works

AI and I
Cecelia Condit
2021, 7 minutes, color, sound

Using Amazon’s virtual voice assistant Alexa, a woman (played by Condit) interrogates the nature of consciousness — whether human, animal or man-made — as she walks through the woods, dragging electrical cords behind her like bread crumbs.

Blockedt!
Jayson Scott Musson
2017, 8 minutes, Color, Stereo, English

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Blockedt!
Jayson Scott Musson
2017, 8 minutes, Color, Stereo, English

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Blockedt!
Jayson Scott Musson
2017, 8 minutes, Color, Stereo, English

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Girl Talk
Wu Tsang 
2015, 4:02 min, color, sound, HD video

An iPhone-shot reverie depicting poet and scholar Fred Moten letting loose to the eponymous 1965 jazz standard, performed by Josiah Wise (known professionally as serpentwithfeet). The effect is a blurry, constantly shifting interplay between singer, dancer, camera, and viewer, a cheeky tribute to the fluidity of performed identity.

Score for Joanna Kotze
Shelly Silver 
2019, 04:10 min, Color, Stereo, English

Score for Joanna Kotze was written by Silver for the choreographer Joanna Kotze during their shared time at the Bogliasco Foundation Residency in Italy, and later reformulated as a moving image work. The score itself is un-danceable, examining the attunement to a surrounding environment enacted through performance.

Sobriety
Ulysses Jenkins 
2022, 5:41 min, color, sound, HD video

Three Waves
C. Spencer Yeh 
2017, 4:47 min, color, sound, HD video

Following up earlier works Eclipse and Baby Birds (2009), Three Waves amplifies and investigates the anatomical production of sound and its mediation through sensory technology — what Yeh describes as “kind of a moving-image riff on concrete poetry.”