No Emoji for Ennui, a group show featuring the work of current student Alison Nguyen, is on view at Light Work in Syracuse, New York until March 26.
This show “explores the difficult-to-define emotional tenor of our time,” according to the press release. This mood often leaves us overstimulated and underwhelmed while simultaneously demanding unending positivity. The show delves into the ways in which “the seductive surface of the touchscreen shatters and the polygon meshes underlying our shared social reality peek out from under the digital skin.”
Asking questions about what it feels like“ to be a person in a world in which our sense of self has been thoroughly disoriented by technological entanglement and co-opted by neoliberal capital,” this exciting exhibition offers a multitude of answers. At once disturbing, thoughtful, funny, and filled with existential dread, “the resulting show is a collective selfie of who and what we are now.”
For this show, Nguyen collaborated with a machine learning program, Andra8, created with Achim Koh, which is “a simulacral subaltern created by an algorithm and raised by the Internet in isolation in a virtual void.” Placed in an apartment, Andra8 works as a digital laborer, surviving off the data from her jobs as virtual assistant, data janitor, life coach, aspiring influencer, and content creator. As she labors throughout the day, Andra8 is monitored and surveilled, finding herself overcome by a web of global client demands. According to the press release, “something begins to trouble Andra8: her life depends on her compulsory consumption and output of human data—or so she’s been told. Andra8 explores the implications of such an existence, and what happens when one attempts to subvert them.”
Nguyen is a New York City-based artist whose work spans video, installation, performance, and new media. Her screenings include Ann Arbor Film Festival, Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, CPH:DOX, Edinburgh International Film Festival, e-flux, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Microscope Gallery, Open City Documentary Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS Film Festival, and True/False Film Festival. Nguyen’s residencies and fellowships include BRIC, the International Studio & Curatorial Program, The Institute of Electronic Arts, Signal Culture, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, and Vermont Studio Center. Her grant awards include the Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYSCA, and The New York Community Trust.
