The Hmm @ REBOOT

Martine is an artist who uses language as raw material, focusing on ‘speech acts’, modes of address, and words in the public space. Since 1996 she’s been creating virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence in which the real author remains invisible. Tonight she’ll be speaking about mouchette.org and visions.of.mouchette.org. Created in 1996, mouchette.org was one of the first works of art to explore the game of online identity that later became prevalent on social media platforms. Link

Swendeline is a writer and multi-artist at heart, whose work revolves around humanity, belonging, and our undeniable connection with nature.  All that she creates is an attempt to make one, anyone, feel like they are seen. She will be joining us to speak about her work ‘Ami’ which is a response to Martine Neddam’s mouchette.org. Swendeline created a space for ‘Ami’, a digital fictional persona, that gives room for visitors to find out more about Ami by progressively revealing aspects of themselves—experimenting with human connection and what that means to us.  Link

Cihad’s artistic work explores the politics of the image through the mediums of video, photography, music, motion-capture, and CGI. His research-driven practice revolves around (re)presentation, language, marginalisation, and alterity. His fictional CGI characters are often multi-lingual protagonists in non-linear, metaphorical narratives that employ humour, absurdity, and poetry to critique the status quo. He’ll be joining us to speak about his work in the exhibition, a barrel organ with the music composed by an AI agent, which responds to Steina’s Violin Power and reverses the visibility of the technical processes. Link

From Balenciaga in the metaverse to virtual dressing rooms, digital fashion is on the rise. Aga is a new media artist who focuses on character building and hybrid experiences, using her background in fashion design and textile technology. Aga seeks to craft experiences that transcend the limitations of merely superficial aspects of fashion. She’ll be joining us tonight to speak about the possibilities within digital fashion in the context of her artistic practice and how she uses a range of digital tools to create 3D garments and video work. Link

While today’s global context is complex; collaboration, the commons, and collectiveness endures, and stretches over time and place. Ål Nik is a mixed-media artist, designer, and facilitator who experiments with various mediums such as visual, digital, and sound art. Léa explores digital technology as a medium for spaces and creates new typologies of virtual experiences. Léa and Ål Nik have very different work, yet the affinities in their approaches brought them together. Tonight they’ll share the ways in which they use alternatives to mainstream communication tools in order to create new typologies of collaborations and independent territories amidst mainstream tech a.k.a. small corners on and off the world wide web. Link and Link

How can photography help us understand how new technologies influence how we observe each other in fragmented ways in the public space? Anna creates imaginative narratives through researching the position of the viewer. Her work seeks for nuances that fail to characterise the divide between private and public, discomfort, spontaneous actions, spatial rigidness, and the unpractical merge in an absurd landscape. Tonight she’ll be speaking about the automatisation of city planning and how this influences how we can avoid ‘inconveniences’ among each other in public space. Link

Jaakko is a Finnish Artist based in Amsterdam, whose mixed-media sculptures and digital works seek to become extensions of ourselves. Tonight he’ll be joining us to talk about the cave, which was the initial site where humans began sharing information. As an open-ended space that centered around a bonfire, these sites provided stability and protection from the outside world while allowing formation of early cultural traits and language. Jaakko will expand on the fact that today, instead of the warmth of a bonfire, our information infrastructures and datacenters gather at these sites for the geographical characteristics that allow stable cooling amid changing climates. Link

Kexin is a multidisciplinary artist and designer working with video, installation, and digital fabrication to explore psychosocial and political forces in the digital realm. In her work she investigates the ways in which propaganda exploits a symbolic “Other” to achieve its political objectives, specifically in the context of the post-truth era and social media. Tonight she’ll utilise snippets and imagery from her personal desktop film, concerning the concept of ‘self’, to analyse the impact of emerging virtual mediums such as AI on individuals’ identity recognition. Link