Sunday March 6 – Wednesday March 9, 11pm PT
“Seeing With No Eyes: Video & AI”
Works by Memo Akten, Morehshin Allahyari, Minne Atairu, Carla Gannis, Faith Holland, Jieyuan Huang, Ha Na Lee, Bill Posters, Rachel Rossin, and Taietzel Ticalos
Organized with Yiran Xu
In-person & online
Followed by a Q&A with many of the artists
Microscope is very pleased to present Seeing With No Eyes: Video & AI, a screening program of video works by emerging to established artists including Memo Akten, Morehshin Allahyari, Minne Atairu, Carla Gannis, Faith Holland, Jieyuan Huang, Ha Na Lee, Bill Posters, Rachel Rossin, and Taietzel Ticalos centered around Artificial Intelligence as a means of collaborative video making.
Although the origin of AI can be traced back to as early as the mid-1940s, its mass commercialization and real-world usage just started to develop during the past 20 years. With social media algorithms and conversational bots starting to permeate our society, the scope of artificial intelligence also expanded from imitation of human intelligence to a collaborative relationship that extends to human abilities.
The works in this program, spanning from 2015 to 2021, were made with a range of AI technologies including GAN, GPT-3, Deepdream, Deepfake, and weak AI. Through uncanny AI-generated imagery and conversations, these videos test visual and narrative possibilities through the hybrid teamwork of human and machine.
This event is organized with Yiran Xu of Microscope Gallery Event Series.
General Admission In-person: $10
Members Admission In-person: $8
Online tickets and the link to watch will go live at 7pm ET on the day of the show on this page.
Please note: The event has a limited capacity of 30 on-site, with proof of vaccination for Covid-19 and masks required.
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Memo Akten received the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for his work ‘Forms’ in 2013. He has exhibited and performed internationally at venues such as The Grand Palais (Paris FR), The Barbican (London UK), Victoria & Albert Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow RU), Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum (Shanghai CN) and many others. He has also collaborated with celebrities such as Lenny Kravitz, U2, Depeche Mode and Professor Richard Dawkins.
Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری), is a NY based Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of SWANA (Southwest Asia and Nort Africa). Her work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops at venues throughout the world, including the New Museum, MoMa, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale di Archittectura, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst among many others. She is the recipient of The United States Artist Fellowship (2021), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019), and the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Her artworks are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Current Museum. She has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera, among others.
Minne Atairu is an interdisciplinary artist. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence (StyleGAN, GPT-3), Augmented Reality and 3D printing, Aitaru generates artworks by recombining historical fragments, sculptures, texts, images and sounds which often hinge on the questions of Benin’s art history, repatriation, and post-repatriation of Benin Bronzes—resituating them within speculative and open-ended narratives.
Carla Gannis is a transmedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces works that consider the uncanny complications between grounded and virtual reality, nature and artifice, science and science fiction in contemporary culture. Fascinated by digital semiotics, Gannis takes a horror vacui approach to her artistic practice, culling inspiration from networked communication, art and feminist histories, emerging technologies and speculative fiction. Gannis’s work has appeared in exhibitions, screenings and internet projects across the globe. Recent projects include “Portraits in Landscape,” Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY and “Sunrise/Sunset,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Artport. Publications that have featured Gannis’s work include The Creators Project, ARTnews, Wired, FastCo, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, El PaÍs and The LA Times, among others Gannis holds a BFA and MFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Boston University, respectively. She is a Year 7 Alum of NEW INC, in the XR: Bodies in Space track, New York, NY.
Faith Holland is an artist, curator, critic, and educator whose multimedia practice focuses on gender, intimacy, and technology. In works that negotiate physical and embodied relationships to technologies, Holland uses equal measures of humor and tenderness in sculpture, performance, video, animated gifs, and net art works. She has exhibited at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and DAM Gallery (Berlin). Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times UK, Elephant, Hyperallergic, Broadly, and The Observer. She has been a NYFA Fellowship Finalist in Digital/Electronic Art, an artist-in-residence at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and Harvestworks, and a finalist for Fotomuseum Winterthur’s Post-Photography Prototyping Prize. She opened Hard/Soft, her third solo exhibition with TRANSFER, online and offline in 2020 as well as Touchscreen at L’Unique in Caen, France. She is the recipient of a 2021 New York State Council on the Arts grant.
HUANG Jieyuan is an transdisciplinary artist, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany, Linz, Austria and online space Image Field Space. He is the initiator of the large-scale ongoing project Image Field, in which he considers issues such as cyberspace, digital identity, visual power, media art and environment. easyJet©Wong is the shadow bilocation of media artist HUANG Jieyuan. This is the conception of a new role for the artist, in which the artist is more of a composite project initiator, facilitator and decentralized fundraiser.
Ha Na Lee works on a broad range of art projects including large-scale immersive multimedia installations, audio-visual, algorithmic composition, new media installation, and public art. Through the artwork, she focuses on exploring the stories of socio-bio-politically marginalized individuals in the contemporary world. Her artwork is exhibited nationally and internationally including ISEA, The Santa Fe International New Media Art Festival, Seattle Art Fair, and SXSW UNESCO Art Showcase. She currently works and lives in Houston, Texas.
Working under the pseudonym Bill Posters, Barnaby Francis is an artist-researcher, author and activist who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Poster’s works often interrogate persuasion architectures and power relations that exist in public space and online. He works collaboratively across the arts, sciences and advocacy fields on conceptual, intervention, new media, net art and installation-based projects. Recently he has focussed on computational forms of moving image making that include pioneering deep fake and deep video portrait works. His projects have received organic global media coverage in print, on radio and TV.
Rachel Rossin is a transdisciplinary artist, computer programmer, researcher and engineer who is internationally recognized for her work in virtual reality, painting, and sculpture that have been exhibited at K11: Shanghai, The New Museum, Kiasma, Rhizome, KW Institute of Art, and The Akron Art Museum. Rossin’s works are in the permanent collections of the Borusan Contemporary Museum of Art in Istanbul, The Zabludowicz Collection, The Stolburn Collection, and is currently being acquired by the Whitney Museum Collection. She holds the first fellowship in Virtual Reality Research at The New Museum’s incubator and has won awards at Prix Ars Electronica and the Sundance Film Festival. Rossin has presented her work at Staedelschule, Chicago Institute of Art, Pratt, Frieze, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford among many others. Rossin is currently working on a co-commission for the KW Institute of Art and the Whitney opening September 2022.
Taietzel Ticalos (b. 1986) is a visual artist based in Bucharest, Romania. Her artistic practice investigates the transmutation of reality into the virtual space and contemplates the development of digital narrations. She focuses on sexual objectification, social media as consumer media, digital performance and digital reenactment. Between 2014-2016 she coordinated with Gabriela Mateescu the mobile group Nucleu 0000, a flexible collective of young Romanian artists.
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Microscope’s Event Series 2021-22 is sponsored by Re:Voir, a home video label for classic and contemporary experimental film in Paris, France.
