Kate Cooper, Rigged (still), 2014–15. Photograph: Courtesy the artist The surveillance section of the show includes artworks by Chinese artist and hacker Aaajiao, who shows a piece called The Great Firewall of China, where he prints out a list of websites banned in China. “It shows visibility in a world where surveillance is very on our minds,” said Respini.
There’s also a section called Performing the Self, which looks at how we represent ourselves online in comparison with our real lives – specifically in the realm of social media and narcissism.
“It’s about how social media has changed how we understand ourselves,” said Respini. “Many of the artworks here were made before the YouTube era.”
There are pioneering works by Ryan Trecartin, who trail-blazed a fast-paced style of video art in the early 2000s, in a time long before Instagram and Snapchat. Trecartin, who now works alongside artist Lizzie Fitch, creates reality TV-style plots with fame-hungry valley girls and drag queens, showing the shallow side of millennials. Another artist, Kate Cooper, who creates Photoshop-perfect photos of glossy robots, taps into our need to perfect ourselves with face-polishing apps like Facetune, which many use before uploading selfies.
“A lot of the works look at the idealized notions of beauty in advertising,” said Respini. “It questions what it means to be human in a digital age.”
There are also a series of nude photographs by Thomas Ruff from 2000, which are sourced from pornographic website thumbnail galleries, as well as a 3D-scanned plastic sculpture by Fran Benson which features Juliana Huxtable, an intersex-born artist who completed her gender transition after college.
“Juliana was able to find her gender-fluid identity online first before in real life,” said Respini. “It was freedom, performing online before able to do in real life.”
While Bender’s artwork is the oldest piece in the show, it set the stage for a lot of what we see in technology today – even though many artists might not even know her name.
“Bender was not only a pioneer of video art, but in our age of YouTube, she contributed to how we process images today,” said Respini. “She was sharing like Tumblr back before social media even existed.”