In this online lecture and discussion, artist Zach Blas and curator Christiane Paul will consider Blas’s artistic practice and its ramifications for contemporary society under the regime of the digital. Blas uses research-based and artistic practices to scrutinize the relationship between digital technologies and systems of power and the beliefs that they advance. Critical of today’s big technological corporations and their use and abuse of theological narratives and symbolism, Blas extensively considers the fictions, desires, fantasies, histories, and icons increasing in today’s technological language, PR, and mediation. Looking into three of his recent works that include representations of digital divine entities, which deal with judgment (processing), prophecy (prediction), and immortality (the data self), Blas points to both the liberatory potentialities and political challenges of the present posed by the deployment of religious signifiers.

Organized by Noam Segal