Description

The main installation on this floor is a skeleton of wall construction and wooden studs that frame 5 metal windows. The windows reference the beautiful, patterned grates that one finds in old colonial homes in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Rather than depicting common geometric symmetries, these mimic the fractured, shattered glass cracks of mobile phones. When one looks through a normal window, you go from one reality to the same reality. When looking through the black mirror, you go from one reality to a second, mediated existence, where the digital divide mashes up all concerns of public and private, data scraping and intrusion, where new insecurities are created and old securities breached.

Titled Cracked Mobile, these works can be said to behave as architectural remnants that hold a mirror to a certain erosion of society.

Whereas normal windows are transparent, these are essentially opaque. One takes a deep dive not knowing which way is the abyss. The maze-like form of the installation hints at this sense of disorientation, a Minotaur’s labyrinth where one may meet a very unwelcoming fate, with no way of turning back. The digital divide grows wider and wider, enabling our darker instincts while submitting to the Matrix. There is no tour guide where innocence goes up against online predators, from deep fake to fake truths, to e-trolls and data mining corporate thug types who now find it even easier to play the Wizard of Oz.

Description from Songs of Singularity Exhibition Catalog, 2023, p.27.