Travis Diehl in Refigured – Review

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Among a spring flurry of museum exhibits related to screen, code and technology, Refigured at the Whitney stands out for its conciseness. The setting of the exhibition may seem vague, the human figure facing technology sometimes borders on a universalized body, but the five works by six artists drawn by in-house curator Christiane Paul from the Whitneys collection maintain a rather narrow focus on physical possibilities. digital. bodies, from statues to demigods to talking heads. In Auriea Harveys Ox (2020) and Ox v1-dv2 (Apotheosis) (2021), for example, a muscular, berobe humanoid called Ox whom the wall tag describes as an avatar of the artist appears three times: a pigmented statuette of 20 cm high, a 3D model presented on a monitor and an AR version pinned nearby and visible via an iPad attached to its base. Notwithstanding the intentions of the artists, Ox exists in the digital and psychic space as a concept, a potentiality, and these different renderings are all concessions to be displayed in a physical room.

In fact, as every struggling new trillion-dollar metaverse company demonstrates, even the state-of-the-art interfaces between the digital and physical domains remain quite clunky (and the hardware here isn’t state-of-the-art) . Ox’s redundancy means there are backups: when the AR is glitched, the statue still works, while the digital scans serve as backup blueprints. (During one visit, the AR model of Ox had been moved across the room from its pedestal and enlarged by approximately 1000%.) Morehshin Allahyaris The Laughing Snake (2019) incorporates both an interactive click-through narrative a monitor first time I’ve been there, but not the second) and a physical model of the titular mythical monster hanging in a corner in front of two mirror panes. The exhibition claims to explore the avant-garde of figuration, but its real problem is to expose: the materiality of the digital, as the artists explore the gap between the way we want to experience virtual worlds and the extent to which infrastructure and connectivity support computers. and monitors, walls and benches, wi-fi and wires allow it.

The QR codes on the labels link to augmented reality models, for example, bringing the floating dots, disembodied nervous systems and mechanized cherubs from Rachel Rossins’ transmedia story THE MAW OF (2022) into the space of the gallery, as seen through your smartphone. There’s also an iPad attached to the wall here, and the disjointed, anti-narrative imagery layers play out on a monitor as well. Circular LED screens suspended in the room seem to filter the video by infrared, showing abstract orange and red and purple gradients suggesting body heat. Obviously, digital bodies don’t have heat signatures the way ours do, although their devices do radiate. This heatmap motif is found in the adjacent work, Zach Blas and Jemima Wymans im here to learn so :)))))), from 2017, a squeaky, associative, three-channel documentary about a failed chatbot named Tay, told by a simplified extrapolation of the AI’s Twitter profile picture. (When Microsoft introduced the bot to social media, it quickly began regurgitating racial slurs and white supremacy arguments and was taken down within 24 hours.) A section of the video juxtaposes what looks like images infrared military drones of people with recordings of first-person shooters, making the subtle connection between high technology and mass murder. The installations that turn the backdrop of trippy eyes, trilobites and puppy faces generated by Googles Deep Dream in its spooky early days seem already dated, but the facts remain: machines amplify human error.

Of course, you can also view the video and AR parts of Rossin, Harvey and Allahyaris’ work on the Whitneys Artport website. Underlying the question of exhibition is concern about the continued relevance of museums. Does my digital copy of a sculpture really need to sit on a museum plinth? Why go to the Meatpacking District to see something you can experience, perhaps even more fluidly, using the screen through which you already experience the world all day?

One answer is context. The main benefit of being there might be how some accidental physical (including electrical) limitations embody us as viewers, like the fact that my iPhone was at 8% battery, my legs were a little sore, he was close to closing time on a Friday, and the three guards were loudly discussing their plans for the weekend. You might think of the physical components of augmented reality and online work as power outage safeguards; or, vice versa, see sparkling AR overlays as gimmicks on top of traditional art forms. Refigured highlights the confusion of these interfaces. Its more complex moments feel like accidents or flaws in the purity of virtual art, but are also, almost blithely, the result of artists pushing and pushing the constraints of the material in a museum.

Mother of All Demos III (2022), a chunky sculpture by an American artist, literally a vintage Apple II computer mostly covered in dirt, sits on a table blocked by museum posts (not part of the work) . Yes, the candlesticks felt necessary, even provoked, because the grainy casing and big, springy keys felt so tactile. Of course you want to touch it and of course you can’t. The work anticipates this tension with a pair of black handprints on the table, a pool of tar on the keyboard. As a cyborg origin story, it’s a bit brutal; as a metaphor for the darkness and bias of machines, she wants a complementary text. In the context of Refigured, the work demonstrates that completely transcending the physical world, even if it were possible, is probably not what we want.

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