g_URL 2.0 x techno-utopia

About

g_URL is pleased to present its second iteration techno-utopia, a group exhibition exploring the relationship between technology, the future and femininity. The show combines sculpture, video, print and VR, and features new works by Proxy Mund, Johanna Flato, Boheyon Kim, Samantha Harvey, Sian Fan, Stacey Davidson and Sarah Jenkins.

techno-utopia seeks to continue a conversation and search for some answers, although we admit that they are yet to be found: how can we begin to build new visions of utopia and how can we create the space in which it can be realised? How useful is the concept of utopia to a progressive feminism? What does a feminist techno-­utopia look like? Despite vast technological developments, dystopian nightmares are bleeding into our everyday experiences - from the hacking of elections to the rise of predictive policing. Now it is perhaps more urgent than ever to start thinking through how we can imagine the future, and how that can contribute to an emancipatory political and social project.

The body (whether human, machine or avatar) functions within this exhibition as a site of possibility, in which the artists are seeking out notions of utopia and how they can emerge and interact with embodiment. Johanna Flato’s Lipsum Corpus Recite, Samantha Harvey’s Asphyxiated Algorithms and Proxy Mund’s (+dis-)embodiment approach technology as a means to explore emancipation and possible utopias. Both Flato and Harvey present digital renderings of a human-like form, reminiscent of an ungendered replicant that both artists have applied machine learning to dictate movement and response. Flato’s video-sculpture of a bust, built from body scans of the artist herself, has been taught by an algorithm to respond to a compilation of theoretical meditations on pleasure and pain that have sprung from the “unassuming gibberish” of the ‘lorem ipsum’ text, a placeholder that functions to temporarily fill a space or a void in an attempt to embody and generate meaning. Samantha Harvey seeks to explore alternate ways we can exist with technology through her video Asphyxiated Algorithms, depicting a human-like form that is responding to the accompanying text and code within the video, as though in symbiosis. Proxy Mund, exhibiting together for the first time, have collaborated to produce (+dis-)embodiment, a video that explores the potential and significance of embodiment and the poetics of hands “as proxies that interlink different utopic realms.”

The interrogation and imagination of space occupies a large part of utopian discourse. techno utopia will also focuses on the ways in which space can activate utopia, or utopia can activate space, examining the implications of materiality and objects-in-space through the artworks of Sian Fan, Stacey Davidson, Sarah Jenkins and Bohyeon Kim. Sian Fan interrogates the relationship between the digital and the natural in her VR work Garden2, a virtual garden space in which the artist has positioned herself and invites viewers to explore this alternative universe that is filled with hyper-feminine motifs and references female mythological figures such as the nymph or the goddess. The virtual space in Davidson’s digital collages are that of her laptop desktop,  reversing the privacy dynamic by exposing the screen as a site of public information. The compositions are littered with files, memes, screen grabs, word art, open tabs and other digital detritus that offer an arch vision of contemporary culture as a far reach from the sleek and streamlined digital futures previously anticipated. Like Fan, she transcends us to an alternative digital space through the screen-as-portal. These digital, immaterial spaces in which utopia and alternative futures are imagined are juxtaposed with the sculptural works of Sarah Jenkins and painting installation by Bohyeon Kim, both of whom focus on materiality, technological texture and objects-in-space.

g_URL was co-founded by Olivia Yallop and Alexandra Hull as a means of showcasing and collaborating with emerging female-identifying artists who are working at the intersection of art and technology.

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