Silicon Valet

Silicon Valet Silicon Valet also hosts a digital arts residency and an online exhibition program.

Silicon Valet is a virtual parking lot for expanded internet practice, serving as a hub for the global spread of artists working with the internet and digital materials.

TORONTO, ON 🚕: “Mantis,” solo show of work by at .Ran October 15 - November 12, 2023. 🚗💨“Mantis is a mixed reality proj...
07/02/2024

TORONTO, ON 🚕: “Mantis,” solo show of work by at .

Ran October 15 - November 12, 2023.

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“Mantis is a mixed reality project that includes five new photographs and two video sculptures.

In this speculative future, human presence is felt only in the nostalgic capitalist objects and architecture of the past. Condos, malls, store facades, computers, led screens, and gardens merge to create an interstitial atmosphere of transformation. Some of the objects have mutated and assume the shapes of exceptionally resilient natural and animalistic forms. The AI has focused on a particular insect to achieve a superior sense of sight and mind.”

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SAN JOSE, CA 🚕: “Leymusoom Garden: Following Naked Dancing and Long Dreaming,” solo show of work by at . Ran September ...
07/01/2024

SAN JOSE, CA 🚕: “Leymusoom Garden: Following Naked Dancing and Long Dreaming,” solo show of work by at .

Ran September 16, 2023 - February 18, 2024.

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In her first solo museum exhibition, Leymusoom Garden: Following Naked Dancing and Long Dreaming, Heesoo Kwon explores her spiritual journey connecting Korean shamanistic and indigenous perspectives to the land with her female ancestors. Her multimedia installation extends the q***r feminist utopian digital space of Leymusoom to the mysticism of the garden, deepening her connection to the land and women’s freedom and desire.

The newest video piece, Leymusoom Garden, explores the Korean shamanistic worldview, the Dokkaebi folk myth (Korean: 도깨비), the Mago creator myth, Skywoman myth, Kwon’s female ancestors, and her community from the Leymusoom Collective and the D**g Ji Collective. The exhibition emulates the garden at her maternal grandparents’ home in Gongju-si, South Korea and the land she currently lives on in the unceded Ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. The garden becomes a sanctuary for Kwon to confront generational trauma by collecting oral histories from elders, clearing out the weeds of past traumas, and sowing new seeds that will flourish.

Positioning herself as an artist, activist, archivist, anthropologist, and religious figure, Kwon builds feminist utopias in the digital realm that liberate one from personal, familial, and historical trauma rooted in patriarchy. Central to her practice and substantial bodies of work is Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017 as a form of resistance against misogyny as an ever-evolving framework for investigating her family histories. Kwon utilizes technologies such as digital archiving, 3D scanning, and animation as her ritualistic and shamanistic tools to regenerate her female ancestors’ lives without constraints of time and space, and to q***r her past, present, and utopian dreams. Leymusoom becomes a practice for her to reimagine time, boundaries of love, sacrifice, violence, and trauma.

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LONDON, UK 🚕: “CULTUS,” solo exhibition of work by at . Ran October 11, 2023 - February 18, 2024. 🚗💨“CULTUS is a multim...
06/30/2024

LONDON, UK 🚕: “CULTUS,” solo exhibition of work by at . Ran October 11, 2023 - February 18, 2024.

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“CULTUS is a multimedia installation that addresses a burgeoning AI religiosity in the tech industry. CULTUS is the second installment of Blas’s Silicon Traces trilogy, a series of moving image installations that contends with the beliefs, fantasies, and histories influential to Silicon Valley’s visions of the future.

Comprised of an 6.1 surround sound design and five channels of video created with computer graphics, motion-capture performance, and AI-generated imagery, CULTUS considers the ways in which artificial intelligence is imbued with god-like powers and marshaled to serve beliefs centered around judgement and transcendence, extraction and immortality, pleasure and punishment, individual freedom and cult devotion.

CULTUS names a techno-religious computational device –a god generator, a holy engine –that invokes a pantheon of AI gods: Expositio, the AI god of exposure; Iudicium, the AI god of judgement; Lacrimae, the AI god of tears; and Eternus, the AI god of immortality. Summoned on the gods’ behalf, prophets share their divine teachings, rituals, and symbologies. While AI religious organizations like the Way of the Future church center around the emergence of coming AI gods, CULTUS suggests that AI gods are already amongst us, actively worshiped and served.”

zachblas.info/works/cultus

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BERLIN, DE 🚕: “Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics,” solo show of work by at . On view through September 1, 2024....
06/28/2024

BERLIN, DE 🚕: “Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics,” solo show of work by at .

On view through September 1, 2024.

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Progressing like a rite of passage through both floors of Schinkel’s iconic octagonal halls, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics presents sculptures, video, drawings, and a large-scale pneumatic centerpiece in Bašić’s poetic, deeply nuanced material language.

Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place.

At once tender and violent, each of Bašić’s hand-made sculptures combine vastly disparate materials — wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster — into figures approximately human in scale, evoking human skin, womb fluids, and insect bodies, all of which are in the process of transformation or dissolution.

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VENICE, IT 🚕: “swell of spæc(i)es,” solo show of work by at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, organized by as pa...
06/28/2024

VENICE, IT 🚕: “swell of spæc(i)es,” solo show of work by at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, organized by as part of . On view through 24 November, 2024.

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The installation shapes a poetics of alterity, merging multiple perspectives and knowledge systems. The film fuses Dogon cosmogony and recent discoveries into a circular narrative of creation, featuring a cast of interspecies characters synthesised using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools. Sources for these creatures include 3D models of marine life, scans of West African statues held in museum collections and photographs witnessing decolonial independence movements. Through her act of blending, Ntjam embeds histories subject to hegemonic erasure within marine and cosmic landscapes to enable their resurgence. This approach draws influence from electronic duo Drexciya, whose mythology tells of an underwater population born from the wrecks of the Atlantic human trade, and musician Sun Ra, who envisioned Saturn as a host planet for Afro-diasporic people.

“swell of spæc(i)es is an alchemical process in perpetual agitation, the alloying of ancestral geneses with new image creation technologies.”
— JOSÈFA NTJAM

Ntjam’s installation is housed inside a blue prism-shaped pavilion designed by UNA / UNLESS architecture studio, led by architect Giulia Foscari. Its striking geometry stands in contrast to the organic forms emerging within.

In a satellite space at Palazzina Canonica – CNR-ISMAR (Istituto di Scienze Marine), Ntjam asks audiences to join her process of multiplying avatars of these histories into ever-new forms by creating their own AI-generated hybrid species from her dataset. These creatures will inhabit a virtual ecosystem on-site.

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