The Machine is Working: Yvette James
12 May 2023 - 9 July 2023
Curator:
Artist(s): Yvette James
Location: The Atrium
This exhibition explores the relationship between our bodies and our environments in the information age. With data companies mining our biometric information and storing it in unknown servers around the world, we leave traces of ourselves that extend beyond our immediate spaces. The Machine is Working questions the consequences of this digitization and its impact on our understanding of ourselves.
Through sculptural constructions of warped body parts cast in aluminium paired with unidentifiable liquids, Yvette James’ artwork is a fleshy representation of biometric data mining. Breaking down digital and physical dichotomies, Yvette expresses immaterial machine processes in alien corporeality. As we hurtle blindly into an increasingly volatile information age, it becomes difficult to grasp the ways in which we are exploited via algorithms and data mining. Yvette’s work reckons with themes of digital translation and fragmented bodies, composing a world behind the opaque screen.
As technology continues to advance at a rapid rate, our bodies are no longer the most convenient or efficient means of analysis. The intangibility of data systems makes it difficult to comprehend the gravity of our digitisation, and the silent yet horrific ramifications it has upon the human body. By giving these processes physical form, and by harnessing sci-fi horror archetypes of alien landscapes, this exhibition focuses on the realities and consequences of machine learning.
Through a sculptural and spatial practice, Yvette James creates visceral landscapes expressing the fragmentation of our bodies via digitisation. Exploring contemporary philosophies on the fluidity of our bodies with our environment, Yvette concludes that our data may be likened to corporeal detritus, fragments of both our psychological intricacies and physical form.
Their sculptural work embodies the digital flesh mined from us in public and private spaces, with or without our consent. Digitisation of the world is moving so quickly it becomes difficult to face the ways in which we are exploited via algorithms and data mining.
Yvette's work interrogates how contemporary explorations of our bodies fit into the digital landscape.
The opening night will be held on Friday, 12 May, 6 - 8pm at Incinerator Gallery alongside exhibitions Who’s afraid? by Emilie Syme-Lamont & Safak Gurboga and IN THE RUINS I SEE THE FUTURE.
Online Performance Lecture:
Wednesday, 28 June, from 8pm.
Join artist Yvette James for an online lecture-performance exploring themes of technology, data mining, and fragmented bodies embedded within their exhibition The Machine is Working. The artist will be connecting from Tuscany to initiate the flattening of time zones and spatial echoes on the digital platform, articulating the governance of digitisation will be explored via trans-oceanic communication.
Free, online. Click here for Zoom link.