Title: Inhuman // Alien
Artist: Devin Ronneberg & Ido Radon
Curator: Diane Hau Yu Wong
Date: August 12 to September 30, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday August 12, 12-6pm
In a world where human and non-human relationships are deeply rooted in colonialism and capitalism, popular narratives of the enslavement of non-human entities such as artificial intelligence or the invasion of extraterrestrials eventually lead to future humanity’s downfall. Inhuman // Alien will invite visitors to reconsider their relationship with other beings and step away from narratives that center on the destruction of humankind by emergent technologies or extraterrestrial beings within popular sci-fi. Instead, the exhibition suggests that humanity should foreground relationality and reciprocity in creating and maintaining relationships with other beings. This is done through creating empathy for non-human others and exploring the potentiality of expanding these collaborative relationships with other beings.
At the same time, Ronneberg and Radon’s works will also critically interrogate our relationship with new technologies and their invisible implication of power that continue to contribute to and amplify existing hierarchies within our world. This includes examining the social, political, and ethical entanglements of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, and data collection. This includes the materiality of these beings and technologies. Instead, the exhibition proposes an alternative system in which human relationships with other beings and new technologies can exist in a democratic and transformational way to imagine a more equitable and sustainable future.
About the Artists
Devin Ronneberg
Devin Ronneberg (Hawaiian, Okinawan, European) is a transdisciplinary artist born, raised, and based in Los Angeles, working primarily between sculpture, sound, image-making, installation, programming, engineering, computational media, and Artificial Intelligence. His work is currently focused on the unseen implications of emergent technologies and artificial intelligence, information control and collection, and the radiation of invisible forces.
His work attempts to make sense of the entangled complexity of reality and the ways in which our technological developments affect our perception of our place within it. This focus manifests itself through interrogations of human – non-human relationships, collaboration with artificial intelligence, examination of ideologies dependent on extraction and exploitation, and mediation of the ways in which our tech distorts, dismembers, and disembodies us. Ronneberg’s work explores the potentials of collaborative relationships with artificial intelligence as an opportunity to create systems that extend human capacity for creativity through involved interaction with data
Ido Radon
Ido Radon is an artist and writer whose work is fed by long-term interests in pervasive and diffuse modes of control, enclosures, the social production of reality as conditioned by the abstractions of advanced capitalism, and revolutionary or utopian impulses (experiments in living), all as mediated by various technologies. She’s made solo exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver, B.C), Air de Paris (Paris), Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), Et al. (San Francisco), Jupiter Woods (London), Pied-à-terre (San Francisco), Romance (Pittsburgh), and Veronica (Seattle) and shown work at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, RONGWRONG, the Belkin Art Gallery, and the Henry Art Gallery. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. With family and friends, she makes SOCIETY.
About the Curator
Diane Hau Yu Wong
Diane Hau Yu Wong (She/Her) is a Cantonese-Canadian emerging curator based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish First Nations. She received her BFA in Art History from Concordia University and is currently an MA Candidate in the Critical Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Programming Manager at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has curated exhibitions at espace pop, Art Matters Festival, Nuit Blanche, articule, and Centre A. She was the inaugural recipient of the articule x MAI Curatorial Mentorship in 2020/2022 and the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency program.
Her curatorial practice and research are broadly based on the intersection between technology and new media art, predominantly focusing on the world-building possibilities of different iterations of Futurism, such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and Asian Futurism. She is particularly interested in examining the depiction of Asian bodies as cyborgs and non-humans in science fiction through Techno-Orientalism and the current development of Asian Futurism.
CANTON-SARDINE 