—The New Media Artspace Docent Team: Anya Ballantyne, Angela Bernabeo, Maya Hilbert, Cindy Qiu, Anika Rios, Jafrin Uddin
We are both products and producers of our environment, molded by the countless waves that wash over us, and in turn, sculpting our surroundings with the waves we set in motion. From the habits we adopt to the sayings we share, every interaction leaves an expanding mark on the world. The artists of ripples trace these transient waves back to their source, reflecting upon the influence of our predecessors and how we influence those who come after. With art as their vessel, they gather up slippery, ephemeral abstractions and pour them into a concrete medium we can perceive, hear, and remember.
ripples delves into interconnectivity, revealing how art can unveil the subtle threads that weave our diverse lived experiences into a shared existence. Every action, every decision, and every experience sends ripples cascading far beyond their inception. The works focus intensely on these moments of impact, following the ripples emanating from encounters spanning death, labor, self-identity, immigration, surveillance, misinformation, the climate crisis–and the role of art in making sense of the chaos of memories and potentialities. These artworks serve as beacons, illuminating the interconnected tapestry of human experience and the transformative power of art to unleash meaning from life's challenges and possibilities.
Through the series Nature Simulation by Jingyi Chen, we are taken into realms that ripple visually, touching on the interconnectedness of human life. In Sacred Waters 2 by Kelly Niceley, ripples are represented visually again within the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, showing that not only does water ripple but also carries history. Metabolization by Jayne Breakfast displays history within filmed memories, showcasing the rippling of morphed events that blossom from loss. These works, among others in the exhibition, capture the vast interpretations of ripples, from immigrant journeys to particle systems, all contributing to a complex, living system.
In the multimedia piece, My 4,500 Hexagons, artists Nityasya Belapurkar, Joe Soonthornsawad, and Anni Reffsin tell the story of a handcrafted multicolored quilt and the intricacies of its creation through a documentary short. With pieces of fabric sourced from materials of Reffsin's past, we watch Reffsin physically join aspects of her life together. As she does this, she discusses her experience growing up as a transracial adoptee and her relationship with her adopted mother. By the end of the short, Reffsin reflects upon the time held within the piece, and the time taken to make it, and leaves us questioning the decisions we make with time. Through the intimate recounting of sewing a quilt steeped in memories, Belapurkar, Soonthornsawad, and Reffsin encourage us to consider our memories in the making, and how we exist in those of others.
Metabolization by Jayne Breakfast compiles a year's worth of footage during the artist's college years, spanning hundreds of hours. Initially driven by the desire to explore scopophilia, the love of looking, the project evolved into a poignant meditation on loss, depicted symbolically as a phantom limb. The fuzzy footage takes viewers back to taped home videos, a memory trigger as familiar as smell to many of us. The transformations of Metabolization—reality funneled through camcorder, coming of age, the changing context of captured footage—parallel how grief both imperceptibly and monumentally shapes us. The video explores the mundane connections, but through the memories' associations and the overlaid poetry it transcends the physical realm to reflect on the intricate web of human relationships and experiences. Metabolization challenges viewers to contemplate the enduring impact of fleeting moments and the interconnectedness of all things.
Jingyi Chen presents a series of otherworldly excursions called Nature Simulation that play with the fabric of our universe. The three videos feature surreal realms devoid of human presence but full of their own personality, and meditative in their mesmerizing, rhythmic motions. By bringing us into these new worlds, Nature Simulation pushes us to journey beyond known possibilities. These simulations take inspiration from nature but transform our familiar landscapes: From Flora's energetically undulating grass to the playful purple ocean of Lavender Wave to the algorithmically deconstructed topography of Mountains, each piece offers a contemplation on the mysteries of our world. Together, they form an exploration of the cyclical nature of life and our place in a vast and unknowable universe.
Derived from satellite imagery, Gary Duehr's Glitches captures the world through the perspective of surveillance, revealing a warped landscape as technology imperfectly attempts to capture our surroundings. Tall buildings blur and fragment and trees melt into amorphous blobs in this simulation. Glitches exposes the imperfections and failures inherent in surveillance and mapping, questioning the accuracy and reliability of these systems. How do we use technology as a method of capture and control, and how does this captured representation warp our understanding of reality? Duehr's presentation of these pockets of distortion in the form of landscape photography forces us to confront the skewed perceptions of our peripherals.
Lies in stopping explores how the ripples of our actions and relationships have no true end, and our influence upon one another is far from linear. Yuehan Hao uses overlapping imagery and the metaphor of a clock to examine life leading up to death, life after death, and the impact on familial bonds of this profound moment of “stopping.” It reflects on how highly personal experiences of grief and loss influence and are influenced by the external world, particularly when documented and shared through photography. By transforming personal sorrow into public discourse, Lies in stopping highlights the responsibility and effects of our relationships, illustrating the intricate web of human interdependence enduring even after death. The piece invites contemplation on the nature of ends, the preservation of memory, and the potential of documentary art as a way to process loss.
In This Planet is Our Home., Kenji Kojima guides us through a forest declaring “This Planet is Our Home” in twenty-four languages, emphasizing our interconnectedness and collective responsibility. It critiques modern civilization's relentless greed for material wealth, highlighting the need to redefine true prosperity and embrace sustainable living. Just as our actions create ripples extending far beyond their origin, this work underlines the lasting impact of individual and collective choices on our environment and society. Leveraging the infinite replicability of digital art, it dismantles the commodification of art, restoring its connection to viewers. This Planet is Our Home. calls for change, urging a shift in values to ensure the survival of all life on Earth, and reminding us of the weight of our decisions in shaping a sustainable future. Everyone on this planet shares a home.
In Lemon Drizzle, Amanda Loomes wanders the lifecycle of a bag of sugar: a large-scale industrial past of fields, machines, and workers, and a small-scale domestic future of food, laughter, and community. Throughout, the dissonance of industry and home—particularly in communities that rely on these industries for their livelihoods—is emphasized by the mixed sounds of a garden, a kitchen, and a factory and the correlation of bright colors in flowers and children's toys to those of orange-clad factory workers. An unnamed woman follows a cake recipe and unidentified workers follow orders, making everyday decisions according to guidelines set by precedents and corporations. Sugar crystals and plastic trucks against a backdrop of massive sugar silos and machinery prompts questions about the scale differential power brings to decisions: what decisions do we make, what decisions are made for us, and how do we reconcile the world we desire and the world that is being built around us?
Amelia Marzec's Itinerant Signal Institute prepares for a future of increasing climate migration, using open-source technology, sensors, and data to create a new Farmer's Almanac. Marzec records and reports on the developing toxicity that is encroaching on our livable areas. Itinerant Signal Institute is an ongoing project for an ongoing issue. It draws attention to currently populated areas surrounding hazardous waste sites and the risk of becoming uninhabitable, in anticipation of a future where the waste of industry and the consequent climate changes will continue displacing people. The goal of this is not necessarily to cast blame and place responsibility—the climate crisis can be paralyzing in its magnitude and immediacy, and many decisions, such as the creation and clean-up of these hazardous waste sites, are outside our individual control. However, by providing data showing our negative impact on our surroundings and the negative impact our surroundings will then have on us, Itinerant Signal Institute is building a foundation for decision-making: how we can adapt, learn from our history, and survive into the future.
Through the recording and soundscape of waves crashing upon a shore, Kelly Niceley's Sacred Waters 2 brings us to the shorelines of the Atlantic Ocean. A vast body of water full of history, known for its role as the Middle Passage, the waters used to transport millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Using imagery and video from the coast of the United States and the coast of Ghana, Niceley creates a visual connection between these parts of the globe, from West Africa to the Western world. As the waves on both sides of the image which center our focus on the Atlantic Ocean's horizon slowly push, pull, and ripple, there is a subtle state of reflection that it encourages. A reflection upon an ocean, a shore, its waves, and the haunting history it pulls and pushes on every coast it touches.
Sepsis by Zazie Productions commentates on the disconnection running rampant in the current digital age. The video combines human-like audio with hyper-edited video clips that morph incessantly. Just as the ripples in a pond extend outward, the screens multiplying across various media platforms symbolize the expansive impact of our interactions with technology on both our individual lives and the broader world. As we connect at a deeper level to our advanced world, we decouple further from the physical and instead sink into a radical atmosphere where information is handed over to us at every second. Sepsis is a display of small waves spreading and warping to the extent of visual mayhem, creating a perpetual cycle where our representation of the world corrupts our surroundings, and this corruption starts a life of its own on media platforms and within our minds.
Sweet Honey: Rules of Being an Alien by Anna Ren explores how the pursuit of belonging trailed by microaggressions ripples through an individual's sense of self. Following the protagonist's arrival in a new land, the omnipresent narrator declares five rules for aliens, revealing the power dynamics and cultish expectations that continue alienation, and highlighting the responsibility that comes with our connections. Ren utilizes 3D rendering to transport us to a world we do not recognize, placing us within the bittersweet duality of enticing new experiences embittered by exclusion. From this place of discovery, Sweet Honey: Rules of Being an Alien invites us to reflect on our perceptions of community and otherness, and the impact of our rule-bound actions.
P.S. by Patrick Stefaniak is built around identity, art, and change. The title itself plays with the creator's initials and shared initialisms. A generative stream of consciousness is accompanied by randomized particle systems, used in motion graphics to portray complex, often natural phenomena such as fires, smoke, and rain through an array of minuscule representations, all coming together in a simulation of the one effect. Stefeniak uses synthesized soundscapes and this particle system technique to portray a collection of abstract, highly digital effects with varying personalities—soft and angular, explosive and gentle—against a gray, solid background bringing to mind development software interfaces. These feel like tests running behind a creative spout of information stemming from Stefaniak's own mind and sampled authors, a visual and auditory experience of a scrambled mind-map. These elements come together to portray how small particles, pieces of information, and experiences come together to form complex, chaotic systems.