FROM_LISTENERS
To read my new performance art event review, “FROM_LISTENERS: A Performance Installation by Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit at Artists Space” in the April 2023 issue of the Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, click on the link: FROM_LISTENERS in Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.
FROM_LISTENERS A Performance Installation by Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit at Artists Space
April 1, 2023
5:00 p.m.
Link to event: Artists Space FROM_LISTENERS
Segue Reading Series
Artists Space
11 Cortlandt Alley
New York, NY 10013
Telephone: (212) 226-3970
Email: info@artistsspace.org
Website: https://artistsspace.org
Open: Wednesday – Saturday
Time: 12 p.m. – 6 p.m.
By Stephen Wozniak,
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, April 2023
Excerpt
“Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.”
– Jean Baudrillard, Philosopher
As audience members enter the darkened, purple-hazed room – loosely populated by the ground sprawl of wired computing devices, flat-screen monitors, colored lights, a mini synthesizer, illuminated rectilinear clear objects and digital wall projections – Tianyi Sun winds through the crowd, speaking a frosty, fractured, poetic narrative. But we soon realize that a dialogue between two voices remains in play; one is a pronounced AI-generated series of declarations in Sun’s voice, while the other is her live, more human response to the call. Wearing a white lab coat, we may feel she has, like Doctor Frankenstein, ostensibly created the other echoing, staccato speak, but like Frankenstein’s Monster, it has a life of its own. We hear metallic and broken sound bites like, “Spotlights are versatile and powerful tools. The spotlight is on me. The spotlight was spot-on the topic,” which deal with looking, focus and perception. Sun responds live with, “’A spotlight’, she said,” possibly in the third person, making me scratch my head. Abbott and Costello’s famous comedic “Who’s on First?” routine comes to mind. Then again, “What came first?” Was it the source human dialogue or the AI machine dialogue? It begs numerous questions about our identity and voice in the face of AI’s vastly growing presence – in both our many-hours-a-day virtual electronic lives and our dwindling human-to-human, real-time lives. We blur them both constantly and AI seems to blur them back.
Links
Tianyi Sun website: https://suntianyi.studio/
Tianyi Sun Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tianyisun_/
And @tianyisun_
Fiel Guhiy website: https://fielguhit.com/
Artists Space: https://artistsspace.org
Stephen Wozniak Websites: www.stephenwozniakart.com and www.stephenwozniak.com
Stephen Wozniak Instagram: www.instagram.com/stephenwozniakart/
And @stephenwozniakart
Stephen Wozniak Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephen.wozniak
About Tianyi Sun
Tianyi Sun 孙天一 explores the structural functioning of digital interfaces, archival systems, imaging technologies, and physical architecture as concurrent networks of power. Through installations of responsive environments, she decodes the metaphor of memory equals storage, and questions the body’s enmeshment in technologies that both oppress and console. Sun earned an MFA from both the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and from the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Tianyi Sun is based in New York City and has recently exhibited at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Helena Anrather, New York; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; and Proxy Gallery, Los Angeles.
To learn more: https://suntianyi.studio/
About Fiel Guhit
Fiel Guhit is an artist based in New York City who explores systems and their peripheral experiences. He builds software objects to simulate and invert the ways in which innovation has distanced the human experience. His work often proposes new perspectives that reconfigure one’s orientation towards invisible structures. Guhit earned an MFA in fine arts from the Parsons School of Design. He has exhibited work in such spaces as 99 Canal Street, Artists Space and Black Beyond.
To learn more: https://fielguhit.com/
About Stephen Wozniak
Stephen Wozniak is a visual artist, writer, show host and actor based in Los Angeles. His works have been exhibited in the Bradbury Art Museum, Cameron Art Museum, Leo Castelli Gallery at Brenau University, and Lincoln Center, among others. He has performed principal roles on the network television series Star Trek: Enterprise, NCIS: Los Angeles, and the double Emmy Award-nominated television special Time Machine: Beyond the Da Vinci Code, among others. He co-hosted the performing arts weekly series Center Stage on KXLU radio in Los Angeles and currently guest hosts Art World: The Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art podcast in New York City. He earned a B.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art, as well as attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
To learn more: www.stephenwozniakart.com and www.stephenwozniak.com