5 surprising things we learned about art and tech at MoMA’s myth-busting new exhibition

Last week, the world wide web turned 30, prompting its founder Tim Berners-Lee to reflect on how his invention has been misused in recent times. In order to overcome the web’s problems — including online crime and harassment — he argues that we must first try and understand it better. The drive to understand technology and its subsequent problems is the motivating factor behind a new exhibition at MoMA, New Order: Art and Technology, which opened yesterday in New York. Through the work of a number of key artists including Sondra Perry, Harun Farocki, Ian Cheng, Louise Bourgeois, and Tauba Auerbach, the exhibition highlights the physicality and material presence of technology. This is in stark contrast to the frequency at which tech is spoken and written about in terms of “wireless” networks,  invisible “clouds” and virtual streams and feeds.

According to the exhibition’s curator Michelle Kuo, many of the exhibiting artists deconstruct technology in order to “demystify” it. Through a variety of means, they break down the indeterminate, phantasmagoric, illusionary, even “magical” elements of technology as a way to “draw our attention to technology’s dark side.” As Kuo tells SLEEK, the artists “don’t accept technology as it is but confront what it does, mounting powerful critiques of the military-industrial complex, social networks, and mass surveillance.”

The result is an exhibition that strips technology of its untouchable aura, reducing it to its composite, physical parts that reveal the very real effects and dangers that it has on the world.  If we have learned anything in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s that tech and the information it stores (data) can have an unparalleled impact on our daily lives, wreaking havoc on our fundamental understanding of freedom and democracy. So, if by investigating the material dimension of tech as New Order proposes, and we are encouraged “to invent new technologies, forms, and systems,” then surely that can only be a good thing.

Here are five things we learned from speaking to Kuo:

1. Tech is not invisible

“Today, so much technology seems seamless, invisible, weightless. But that’s a myth. Networks fail, signals are interrupted; all technologies are embedded in machines and bodies and materials, silicon and flesh and plastic. Investigating the material dimensions of technology is a way of investigating the very real effects that technology has on our world: its dangers, its risks, but also its possibilities.”

2. Tagging photos on social media is dangerous

“A number of the works in the show actively address Web 2.0 and beyond. For example, Trevor Paglen’s photographic series It Began as a Military Experiment looks at the rise of mass surveillance, big data, and disinformation. It reveals the origins of facial recognition technology at the US Department of Defense in the ‘90s. DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) used photographs of military employees as a data set to train algorithms to identify physical features, classify them, and learn from them. But fully functional facial recognition has only become possible very recently, with the advent of social media: it depends on the gargantuan amounts of data uploaded via social media, billions of tagged photographs, which are aggregated and used to train neural networks. The dangers of misidentification or misuse are many. Paglen forces us to connect all these dots.”

3. Women artists are major players in tech innovations

“I wanted to highlight a number of the women artists (from Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Bourgeois to Josephine Pryde, Anika Yi, Tauba Auerbach and Leslie Thornton) in the collection that have had innovative approaches to technology. Trockel, for example, has actually engaged technology throughout her career. Her work in this show is from a series of computer drawings: she would draw portraits of different figures, then scan them, digitally alter and composite them, and output them as inkjet prints. Meanwhile, Bourgeois created a little-known set of holograms in 1998 that had to be recreated in 2014, as the medium was unstable. The result is a pretty mind-blowing instance of virtual reality, the illusion of three dimensions in the round, embedded in silver halide emulsion on glass plates. The presentation of these works for the first time is a revelation. Both artists confront the ways in which simulation—the virtual—is never quite realistic but in fact seems surreal, uncanny, tactile.”

4. The supremacy of tech can be challenged

“Many of the artists in New Order explore and challenge the paradox of how to create art under conditions of technological control and surveillance —  how do you tweak the system, maybe even invent a new one?  So, for instance, Sondra Perry examines race and technology: the ways in which black bodies are both circulated and policed online and offline, via networks of surveillance and social media. In this exhibition, she’s turned two exercise machines into interactive sculptures that merge physical exertion and virtual experience. You can ride the bicycle, but the pedals have been put on backwards. Three video monitors are placed where the handlebars would normally be, from which the artist’s avatar—designed in Blender, an open-source 3-D–rendering program—speaks to you. There’s also a rowing machine, whose resistance mechanism has been filled with hair gel, making it very difficult to use. The Chroma Key Blue backdrop recalls the blue screens used in digital video editing as well as the “blue screen of death” from a computer crash. These machines and bodies are rogue, refusing to perform as expected.”

5. Tech needs to be contested in order to be understood

“Artists have, throughout history, been particularly attuned to these effects of technology, in part because these shifts affect our perceptual experiences: the shape of objects, the look of images, the speed of thought. In order to understand how forms and media change over time—and what new forms might be possible—many artists turn to exploring technology … The artworks in this exhibition show that technology is never simply given; it’s made. Understanding how technologies are constructed can enable us to contest them, change them, or invent wholly new configurations in turn.”

New Order: Art and Technology runs through to 15 June at MoMA.