God in Reverse: Escaping Capture

God in Reverse: Escaping Capture

03 June–09 September 2020

Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, Canada | Website

God in Reverse: Escaping Capture

God in Reverse overlaps and aligns the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, as narrated pictorially by Pieter Bruegel, with its contemporary reappearance in the myth of artificial intelligence. With the global actualization of AI, the shared experience among humans and non-humans becomes integral as they struggle to combine what they know and the ways of knowing into the tangible and lasting body of machines. The exhibition covers the space between the algorithmic synthesis of flowing information, and the inconspicuous purity of knowledge in action, highlighting what separates communicating from knowing.

By focusing on the intentionally interrupted flow of human knowledge and its peculiar disunities, the exhibition also sheds light on the reluctance of human knowledge to become the captured ghost in the machine and its propensity to dwell instead as its freely floating spectre. The works in the exhibit highlight instances of knowledge, historical and contemporary, fiction and non-fiction, which thus far have been next to impossible to “algorithmicate” within the confines of our existing intelligent technologies. Consisted mostly of various forms of time-based projections, the exhibition attempts to find a new way for reconfiguring the spatial and temporal presentation of moving pictures in the exhibition forms.