Spring emerges as the semester draws to a close. Our thumb drives are bursting with new files. We’ve uploaded files and planted new seeds. See our work live in this spring 2023 student exhibition featuring Art & Technology courses in the Department of Art. Watch as this work downloads and grows.
It’s the end of the semester. Put down your pencils and pass in your work. Turn off your computer, the Machines are Done Learning. We’ve trained the machines on our new ideas, our rough drafts, our revisions. Here’s the final result. Artwork can be seen in Hopkins Hall 146, 156, 167, and throughout the first floor hallway, as well as online. The exhibition features work from Digital Imaging, 3D Modeling, Moving Image, Internet Art, New Media Robotics, and Studio Practice courses.
An exhibition of student work throughout Hopkins Hall & Online
An To unmute is to press a button and speak up; to change our status, come alive, and raise our voice. An action we’ve gotten to know these past few years.
Now our so-called return to normal is actually an evolution into a new form.
This exhibition showcases student work from art and technology classes this spring semester. Student work shows creative decisions plotted in a tumultuous world, sounding an unstoppable voice, ever evolving. We are unmuted, changed forever. We share the un•mute•tation.
An exhibition of student work throughout Hopkins Hall & Online
Dec 8, 5 – 7pm; First floor work on view through Dec 10
Set in a hybrid of online and physical space, A Textured Transmission is an exhibition of student artwork showcasing the range and depth of work coming from art & technology area courses in the department of art. After a semester of exploration with tools, technology, and time, students are ready to broadcast their ideas and accomplishments. This exhibition signals an exchange of ideas and carries an energy that emerges as we make our way back to physical spaces. It also melds with the new techniques and online spaces we have built over the past year. This is a textured transmission.
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The contemporary moment is one of unprecedented transfiguration. A constant tug of war where institutions, communities, interests, and most importantly, individuals coincide in an undulating state of deformation and alteration. Those boundaries that defined our movements and occupations have blurred to the point of non-existence, facilitating an amorphous space for constant activity. Shopping for winter clothes while attending a lecture, replying to business emails at the dinner table, or participating in job training while taking the subway, the established limits of social and personal spaces are expunged, and with that, so are the boundaries of the individual. And while this shapeless chimeric reality in its unparalleled distraction and discontinuity demands the individual’s utmost awareness and participation, it continues to expand its disciplinary practices to every crevice of daily life. The punch clock is now next to the bed; better wake up, sunshine!
Nothing is ever finished anymore, and no one is ever done with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the factory, and the household subsist in a simultaneous state of coexistence. And it is at the dawn of this new day of bewildering complexity and anomalous virtual convergence that I ask from you, from you the eternal surveilling gaze, from you my mentor, my peer, my adversary, and my friend: the audio seems to be working, but can you see my screen?
We are collected, crunched, and curated by surveillance capitalism as we move through real and virtual spaces. New and improved pleasures, fears, insecurities, and desires are constructed for our consumption; continually forming and reforming us along the way. We experience our own data shadows and code bodies. Our data fingerprints possess a mirror of us, with in-depth knowledge about who and what we have become.
Can we be who we are, or have become, without our quick connections to search engines, our constructed social media selves, friends, and our surveillance data? Does it matter?
Though we might imagine the internet as an immaterial, fluffy cloud, it is actually the largest coal-fired machine on the entire planet *. Our server clouds are crushing us. And with 90% of the internet being advertising, it is both paying the electric bills and simultaneously fueling global warming through increased energy use – and material consumption of the earth.
Cloud Crusher is the Spring the Themed Art & Technology Exhibition, where students explore these ideas and themes through their courses in Digital Imaging, 3D modeling, Art Games, 3D Animation, Moving Image Art, and Studio Practice.
In keeping with our virtual teaching and physical distancing, this exhibition will be exhibited online starting April 24th, 2020.
* Lozano, Kevin, Can the Internet Survive Climate Change? The New Republic,
Art & Technology exhibition
Non-Human Intelligence: In the realm of animal, insect, plant and computer systems, can humans co-create with “other”? Can we look beyond human-dominated ways of understanding?
Artists, technologists, and scientists are as likely to collaborate with bees, bacteria, spiders as with artificial intelligence in the creation of their work, provoking difficult questions regarding the nature of creativity and non-human others’ consciousness. When working with living systems, the biggest struggle is to keep the systems alive and this requires a sensitive humility and respect. Donna Haraway’s concept of “becoming with” describes the back and forth nature of interacting with animals as we form a connection and broaden our notion of the nature of the intelligence of others. It entertains the idea of multispecies and transspecies interactions in the co-creative process. “Becoming-with” allows us to better acknowledge “others” right to exist, thrive, and express individual agencies.
Through an expanded understanding of the intelligent, intertwined, symbiotic nature of our living planet, might we become more human?
“Becoming-with” allows us to better acknowledge “others” right to exist, thrive and express individual agencies. Through accommodating non-human others, might we become more human in the process, by demonstrating an understanding of the deeply intertwined symbiotic nature of our living planet?
This semester, students in the Art & Technology courses – ranging from animation, art-science, 3D modeling, and internet art to robotics – have created individual and group artworks related to this theme and they will be presenting them in this juried exhibition. Make sure to visit the special installation in the Emerging Technology Studios on the 3rd floor of Hopkins Hall.
Trans-Species Skins is a themed art exhibition exploring skin as a metaphor and substance that transcends species categories. Skin is the multilayered and multipurpose organ that shifts from thick to thin, tight to loose, wet to dry, across the landscapes of bodies and machine interfaces. Natural and artificial skin responds to heat, cold, pleasure and pain. It lacks boundaries and flows seamlessly from exposed surfaces to our internal cavities real and virtual. It is a self-repairing, semi-permeable surface, with inner layers that are flush with nerves and glands, sensors and chips. New tools allow artists, designers, and engineers to look at a new emerging organicism that takes shape across the surface of the grown and manufactured. Skins can modulate meaning, touch, function and can provide feedback and change with light and heat. Flexible membranes embedded with sensors and materials are bent, impregnated, or inflated to become structure. Re-skinning allows deceit; the non-living can approximate life, and the living can appear otherwise.
This semester, students in the Art & Technology courses – ranging from animation, art-science, digital imaging, and 3D modeling to robotics – have created individual and group artworks related to this theme and they will be presenting them in this juried exhibition.
Opening Wednesday, December 6, 5:00pm – 8:00pm
Open hours: Thursday, December 7, 11:00am – 5:00pm & Friday Dec 8, 11:00am – 4:00pm
Where: Hopkins Hall Gallery, Lobby, Corridor, and Collaboratory – directions
Admission is free and open to the public
Art & Technology Student Exhibition open to the public Monday April 24 to Friday, April 28, 2017. Located in Hopkins Hall Gallery, Lobby, Corridors, Collaboratory and New Media Labs – all on the first floor of Hopkins Hall.
Reception: Monday, April 24 from 5-7 PM