Your Consent is Implied

November 1 - 22, 2014

Zach Blas
Natalie Bookchin
Joshua Mittleman
Guston Sondin-Kung
Eddo Stern

Opening: October 31, 17:00 - 22:00

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When you use a phone, walk the streets, drive a car, use the Internet, have a bank account, play games, have a conversation, meet friends, see the doctor, make a purchase, when your heart beats, you have given your consent. The exhibition Your Consent Is Implied examines the impact digital capitalism is having on social relations and identity. The expansion of this form of technology into every facet of life is creating a space where different actors engage in the practice of activism, corporate dominance, illicit activity, warfare, surveillance, personal expression and the building of community. The participating artists utilize their artistic practices in ways that seek to illuminate, question, dismantle and disrupt this ever-expanding topography.

Zach Blas – Facial Weaponization Suite protests against biometric facial recognition–and the inequalities these technologies propagate–by making “collective masks” in community-based workshops that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies. The masks are used for public interventions and performances. One mask, the Fag Face Mask, generated from the biometric facial data of many queer men’s faces, is a response to scientific studies that link determining sexual orientation through rapid facial recognition techniques. This along with three other masks and a video will be shown in the exhibition.

Natalie Bookchin – Zorns Lemma2 is a remake of a Hollis Frampton structuralist film Zorns Lemma (1970). It consists of a collection of street signs and other found signage viewed through live feeds of security webcams “photographed” remotely by means of a computer screenshot. Following the structure of Frampton’s film, the signs are arranged alphabetically in one-second intervals. In each subsequent set, one letter of the alphabet is replaced by a webcam image, continuing until all letters are replaced. In place of the all-English signs photographed in Manhattan in Frampton’s film, the signs are from around the globe and appear in multiple languages.

Joshua Mittleman presents six artworks from his ongoing project, Archive of the Forgotten Present that confronts the implications of the reach of technology and what transpires on the frontier of digital innovation. The pieces exhibited deal with the material process of locating, collecting and archiving the activity of entities (both states and criminals) that are intent on maximizing the potential and power that technology affords them regardless of the cost.

Guston Sondin-Kung – STUXNET IN DENMARK is a video work that tells the story of the artist’s encounter with an unnamed intelligence officer who has participated in the cyber warfare attack against the Iranian Nuclear power plant in Natanz from a hotel room in Copenhagen. What unfolds through the story is a dialogue about the role of the artist, the fictive side of documents, the trap of paranoia and the unattainable desire to be completely immune to mass surveillance.

Eddo Stern – Best Flamewar Ever is a 3D computer animation re-creating an online flame war about degrees of expertise within the computer fantasy game Everquest. As the argument between two players escalates, there is a proposal to leave digital space and engage in a physical fight with very specific guidelines.