Four looping digital animations – three walls and the floor – made for Technology and Humanity Canvas, a group show at Kanvas, an immersive new-media gallery in Dubai, put on by my gallery, Vernissage. Eight artists were selected worldwide for the show curated by Marina Alvitr. November 8-12, 2023.
Every other installation I’ve built, I designed by walking the space first, in person. Dubai is 7,574 miles from my studio, and I couldn’t get there before the show – this was the first time I worked from dimensions alone, without ever standing in the room I was designing for.
I started with a single drawn line, the same kind of instinctive gesture I’ve worked with since Untangled, and built outward from it: looping it, layering it, letting it cross and knot against itself until one line became a dense field of interlocking marks. Each stage of that drawing went through Studio Artist, software I use to iterate on my own images and video, until the lines became the moving animation installed across the walls and floor.
The show’s premise asked whether a human behaving like a machine is more unsettling than a machine behaving like a human – and whether technology is something alien to fear, or a mirror reflecting our own nature. My piece, Soulful Synthesis, sat inside that question rather than answering it: each line reads as either a boundary or a channel, depending on how you’re looking at it.
Kanvas, Dubai UAE, 2023
