Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, Team Rolfes, JOLENE, Music video, 3m06s, 2022.
Human-alike
October 4 – November 6, 2024
Curated by Linda Rocco
With works by Petra Cortright, Sarah Friend, IOCOSE, Kalen Iwamoto, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, and Bogosi Sekhukhuni
Opening Reception: Friday, October 4, 6-8pm
NARS Main Gallery
Human-alike exposes the politics, ethics, and absurdities in our relationship with technology. The exhibition critically examines the effects of digital saturation on personal identities. As the engineering of machines increasingly embodies and commodifies our behaviours, Human-alike explores how the psychology of scrolling has instilled inflated stereotypes and manufactured desires in our collective imagination. Showcasing work by six international artists, the exhibition opens a critical window into possible technological futures.
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About the curator:
Linda Rocco is a London-based contemporary art curator, researcher, writer, and lecturer at the Royal College of Art. Her practice is situated at the intersection of contemporary art, the curatorial and new media, and converges with interdisciplinary research in emerging technology paradigms, social systems and networked organisation, and alternative economies, advancing propositions for infrastructural futures. With over nine years of independent curatorial experience, Linda has curated exhibitions, public programmes, and residencies internationally, with established organisations such as Delfina Foundation, Yinka Shonibare Foundation, Goethe Institut, and the Mayor of London. She holds an AHRC-funded PhD from the Royal College of Art.
About the artists:
Petra Cortright is an American artist celebrated for her pioneering work in digital and internet art. She first gained international recognition for her self-portrait videos created with a domestic webcam and then uploaded onto YouTube and captioned with spam text. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include works in painting and sculpture. Cortright's work has been exhibited globally, including at the Venice Biennale, the 12th Bienniale de Lyon, the New Museum (NYC), the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), the Whitechapel Gallery (London), and the Hammer Museum (LA). Her work is featured in permanent collections at MoMA (NYC), Péréz Museum (Miami), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), amongst others.
Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. She is currently a Creative Resident with IDEO and is teaching as part of the Dweb Curriculum for Creators at Gray Area, in San Francisco. In 2023, she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, and in 2022, she was a visiting professor at the Cooper Union. She is represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler (Germany) and has exhibited at and worked with MoMA (NYC), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), bitforms (NYC), Albright Knox Museum (Buffalo), Rhizome (NYC) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) among others.
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst are artists renowned for their pioneering work in machine learning, software and music. They develop their own technology, and protocols for living with the technology of others, often with a focus on the ownership and augmentation of digital identity and voice. These technical systems not only facilitate expansive artworks across media, but are proposed as artworks unto themselves. They were awarded the 2022 Ars Electronica STARTS prize for digital art. They have sat on ArtReview’s Power 100 list since 2021. Holly holds a Ph.D in Computer Music from Stanford CCRMA, Mathew is largely self taught. They have held faculty positions at NYU, the European Graduate School, Strelka Institute and the Antikythera Program at the Berggruen Institute. They publish their studio research openly through the Interdependence podcast, and recently co-founded Spawning, an organization building a consent layer for AI. Their critically acclaimed musical works are released through 4AD.
IOCOSE investigates how the narratives surrounding the future of technology leave traces on the present. Their artistic practice focuses on the failure of narratives about the future and technological innovation while producing new interpretations of imaginaries, iconographies and rhetorics through surreal poetics. Founded in 2006 by Matteo Cremonesi, Filippo Cuttica, Davide Prati, Paolo Ruffino, IOCOSE have been exhibiting their work at artistic institutions including MAMbo (2018), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2017), The Photographers Gallery (2018, 2016), Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2022), Tate Modern (2011), Science Gallery (2012), Jeu de Paume (2011), FACT (2012), Transmediale (2013, 2015), and featured in publications such as Wired, The Creators Project, Flash Art, Neural, Liberation, Der Spiegel, El Pais.
Kalen Iwamoto is a conceptual writer and artist. Her concept-driven work is based on a transdisciplinary and transmedia practice at the intersection of art, text, and technology. She takes a playful and experimental approach in exploring unconventional reading and writing experiences, giving visual and material form to literary concepts that invite us to contemplate the meaning of text, and our relationship to it in contemporary culture. She is a co-founder of theVERSEverse, a literary gallery where poems are works of art, and cofounder of the art & language atelier, Wen New.
Artist and designer Bogosi Sekhukhuni offers considerations on cultures and histories of technology and science. Working across a range of media such as sculpture, video, set design, furniture design, and performance, Sekhukhuni develops approaches that think through the mechanics of futurity. Sekhukhuni pursues a research engagement exploring material and theoretical histories of living systems, environments, and physical phenomena. Since 2012, Sekhukhuni’s work has been featured internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including Fondazione Prada (Milan), New Museum (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sharjah Art Foundation and African Biennale of Photography (Bamako) among others. Their accolades include the Prix Net Art Award, Rhizome, New York (2017). Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the artist group NTU (South Africa) and has worked closely with CUSS Group (South Africa). Sekhukhuni is a co-founder of the design firm INFANT.
NARS exhibition programs are made possible in part through the generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and, in part, supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
