Hover/swipe to clear
—The New Media Artspace Docent Team: Abeha Choudhry, Maya Hilbert, Delilah Medina, Olivia Pan, Shaima Rini
Are we in a time of abandonment or an age of abandon? Reckless Abandon roams within abandonment (relinquished, deserted, forgotten) and with abandon (spontaneous, impassioned, wild). Rediscover what’s been discarded: old files, bricked devices, and corrupted data; sardine tins, death shrouds, and echoes; yesterday’s headlines, extinction, and who we were before. Lose yourself in the freedom of letting go: leaning into the glitch, the doodle, and the off-key; deep dives, rabbit holes, and log rolls; protests, escaping home, and frolicking through fields.
Recklessly, we push forward, shutting down indecision and consequences. Our unrestrained experimentation can be clarity disguised as impulsivity, a refusal of artificial restraints in favor of learning who we are, sharing raw truths, or rebelling against injustice. But it can also be dangerous–acting without awareness of community, environment, or personal well-being. In a moment of broken alliances and state violence, recklessness and abandonment invade our daily reality. Some rules are meant to be broken; others are there for a reason.
Reckless Abandon is an online group exhibition featuring 14 artworks that explore this tension, testing the edge between restraint and release. Using digital mediums ranging from video to userscript to game, the included artists express reckless abandonment of and through identities, environments, authorities, and undertakings. The virtual exhibition site presents its collection like memories in an attic, on a shelf behind a dusty veil that must be scrubbed away. To take a chance, shake the magic 8 ball.
virtual DISCussion by cyber//chiffon (Taylor Elise Colimore + Noren G-H) is a three-part film that explores madness, rage, unwanted attention, and discomfort. The artists portray these overwhelming emotions through visual patterns such as grids, circles, flashing, psychedelic elements, as well as loud, 8-bit audio that travels from one ear to another in a dizzying yet hypnotic dance. The parts portray these emotions using shades of pink, rambunctious texture, and raucous, incomprehensible sounds, yet each brings its own language and perspective. They come together in one, final hurrah, a liberating moment of letting go and allowing oneself to feel the full intensity.
How Not to Drown by Alexander Hahn is an experimental video that dives back into an abandoned project. Inspired by a 1970s Vogue article describing six movements to avoid drowning, Hahn became enamored with the feeling and movement of a body staying afloat–a concept he engaged over decades through illustration, physical experiments, video, and animation. In How Not to Drown, Hahn compiles, reconstructs, and builds upon the remnants of his past explorations, ending on a 3D animation corrupted by a software update, bodies fracturing as they attempt the programmed six movements.
Soiled Dreams by Elle W. Hendrickson creates a simulation of the dream state, which is a mental space where the brain processes memories, emotions, and scenarios. Throughout the video, an overwhelming overlap of sound, imagery, and color washes over the viewer. There are moments of coherence and unity, followed by confusion and discord. Chronology seems absent, yet at the same time, a narrative forges on. All of these aspects mimic the ambiguity of dreams and the uncanniness of liminal spaces.
What did you eat yesterday? by Janice Jin is an experimental short film that reflects on everyday memories through the material remnants of eaten food. The film flips through stills of empty food containers and packaging: ordinary items abandoned after use and slowly forgotten. When daily routines shift, the trail of what we consumed remains behind as a decomposing monument to who we were just twenty-four hours ago. The careful framing and focus on each item contrasts the reckless speed of daily consumption with the quiet memories we leave behind.
Be Happy by Robert Ladislas Derr transforms a simple phrase into a ritual of forced optimism. The dental cheek retractor forces his mouth into a permanent smile as he chants, “Be happy.” The cream symbolizes an ideal—unrealistic, sweet, and tempting. The suffocating Reddi-Wip cream is ingested by Derr as he chants, slowly consuming said “ideal” and eventually seeking it out. The artist states that this could be “the end of something and the beginning of another, whether good or bad.” Is this unsettling performance a semblance of what it costs to be happy?
Rolling Piece by Angelina Laguna utilizes public performance to bring attention to social desensitization and authoritative intervention. In the video documentation, we watch a woman roll along the sidewalk of First Avenue, New York City while pedestrians largely continue with their routines around her. The indifference reflects urban culture, with constant exposure to the overstimulating and the bizarre normalizing both a person rolling on the floor and genocide. Although this performance is a small, quiet rebellion against the expected, it cannot be abided. A third of the way into the act, law enforcement arrives. By contrasting public indifference with aggressive intervention, Laguna critiques societal norms and priorities.
therapy room by Ivana Larrosa explores the artist’s permanent double vision from a car accident through her own voice and simple, white words that pop up across negative space. Each word blends together on a black screen, aligned yet jagged, while Larrosa’s voice echoes throughout the room, overlapping and interruptive. The work forces the user to utilize both hearing and sight in a chaotic, multiplying state, replicating a feeling of nausea, uncertainty, and fear.
Memorial for Bad Jokes by Kathleen McDermott stages mortality as a procession of reckless invention: an LED death shroud blinking a quippy epitaph, a strap-on mechanical drum stick, a screaming shawl, and a wearable fog machine. These wearables live on in a purgatorial fashion show, revived on every playthrough, electric in their fusion of the absurdist and the profound. An accompanying gif series featuring “I Thought It Would Be Funny” peeks into the life of the apologetic death shroud.
Hello - It’s You by Mitra is a visual novel presented through a retro desktop on Neocities. Visitors navigate by opening windows, clicking buttons, and typing in commands while piecing together the story woven through a maze of text, images, and music. Both the story and its format explore memory and how it shapes identity. Short of realtime contact with the artist themselves, the novel is an open book at the edge of performance art, exposing concept art, audience interactions, and instructions. As an ongoing project, Hello - It’s You spans past, present, and future, situating identity as an evershifting amalgamation of memories and new experiences.
A Stabilizing Loop by Aaron Oldenburg is a real-time autonomous software that animates randomized vignettes, layering and arranging them like a kinetic shadowbox before settling into a scene. The vignettes are made up of color-blocked images hand-drawn over Oldenburg's photography collection, including images of friends, family, and extinct animal and plant species. The collisions and overlaps of indistinct figures and objects create a sense of chaos and give a new life to these snapshots of the past. Every loop generates a different result. The visitor can change the scene early, but they cannot stop the loop.
Desire Paths for Wikipedia by Everest Pipkin is a browser extension that tracks and engraves the visitor’s mouse path on Wikipedia pages. A desire path emerges when people refuse the official route, revealing the gap between where we are told to go and where we choose to. As they wander through the thicket of information, the averaged visitor's path wears a soft, rubbed effect on the page, evoking a beaten path or well-loved edges of a book. Each rabbit hole remembers the time we spent falling deeper, even if we forget.
www.blairs.computer by Blair Simmons explores the relationship between digital and human memories. Nested pop-up alerts ask visitors to download and hold onto Simmons’ files, transferring the weight of the files to their drive from her drive. Visitors can cancel—prompting more desperate pleas—or press ok, allowing the unknown download and decreasing the number of stored files by one. With huge amounts of digital data accumulating daily, hard drives can be a safekeep to hold our past memories, but also a tether. Simmons plays with the relief of letting go of digital marks in order to move on, as well as the trust required for digital data exchange.
Photo News by Jody Zellen is an ongoing project on Instagram highlighting headline fragments from lead news stories, snapshots of both global atmosphere and media focus. The posts combine images, often highly saturated and graphic, with overlaid text, provoking unease with the clash between the striking imagery and the often sobering, sometimes distressing, occasionally amusing words on screen. The composite video brings together six years of the project–six years of bombardment by words like “crisis,” “war,” and “hope”–and shows how Zellen’s visual approach has changed year-to-year.
8 Ball Model: 8ball by jtherussian is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.