S ALVAREZ, KÉVIN BRAY, PAOLO CIRIO, JOSHUA CITARELLA JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN, KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING, EVEREST PIPKINK, HADIJAT YUSSUFF

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY OCCUPATIONAL ADJUSTMENTS AND CONSIDERATIONS, EPISODE 6: Ok, Computer

New York: 4 March - 10 April, 2022
Basel: 19 March - 26 April, 2022

PRESS RELEASE
OK, Computer brings together eight artists working with the digital algorithms and interfaces that are redefining the Western body politic. Each of the artists in this exhibition uniquely deals with the political and cultural atomization, fragmentation, recategorization, and belonging that can be found here at the eve of Web3.

While their works portray an array of significant developments in our post-social media relationship to digital technologies, the art on view here is perhaps best unified by the artists’ collective refusal to engage with them as-prescribed. And at the foot of another monumental shift - one proposing a digitized wallet as the essential unit of personhood and that privately-held corporations assume further responsibilities once exclusively borne by governments - ways of seeing through and around its presumptively neutral, high-tech accouterments will be essential.

As author and cultural theorist Sonya Renee Taylor (interpreting author and cultural theorist Terry Marshall) estimates, rich “white supremacist delusion capitalist patriarchy” will continue to offer its imagination for us to live inside. And anyway, "we're what makes it lit.” Meanwhile, the all-encompassing digital overlay It proposes for our collective future is entirely undergirded by the same elements driving what It calls progress for nearly a millennium: hierarchy, death, disregard, and money over everything. So, Taylor and Marshall ask, who’s simulation do we ultimately want to live in?

The methods and forms on view here demonstrate ways that the rest of us might see ourselves through to the next reality.