Faster, Brighter, Better;
Faster, Brighter, Better;
Faster, Brighter, Better.

Artists and scientists alike wish for a faster brighter better future: more content held by a microchip, faster speed of transmission, a larger audience equipped with smartphones. Technological advancement today promises a pivotal point in the history of art both in production and distribution. At the same time, technology, democratized and popularized by the force of consumerism, seduces art to turn itself into a sensational spectacle.

YveYANG is interested in tech art that opens the frontiers of incorporating art and technology, but shows the artist thinking critically through an art practice that uses technology as a means of facilitation, not an end. For the ninth edition of SPRING/BREAK NYC, YveYANG proposes to present works by Chando Ao, David OReilly, and Wang Ye. Together, these artists provide a tentative answer to tech-based artmaking that transcends consumption by technology, protects its viewer from being consumed by a tech-driven culture of spectacles, and in turn serves as an example of robust tech art.

David OReilly’s Instagram AR filters “SIMULATION” and “It’s Always You” reinvent the purpose of their medium by introducing a narrative. In several scenarios, the user watches an AR representation of the self that looks at a screen, or at another representation of the self. “It’s Always You” completes its story arc within 15 seconds, while “SIMULATION” is an animation consisted of nine fifteen-second-long chapters. Limited to the length of a single Instagram story, each chapter is a version of one’s journey from birth to death. Compressing so many scenarios of AR effects into the 2-megabit limit of an Instagram filter program, OReilly may be the first creator to introduce exteriority and narrative into Instagram filters, and he may also be the first to use social media to distribute his work so widely at such an explosive speed: these filters reached an impressive half billion uses within a week of their release date.

Chando Ao’s “Mirror” installation enhances the quotidian act of looking in the mirror. The viewer sits in front of a digital screen that shows the viewer’s profile, an angle that is normally hidden from the self. When the viewer looks to the side, the reflection is shown on a single-sided mirror, underneath which the viewer’s expression is captured by a Facemoji. For Ao, both the profile and the virtual representation add different reflections that complicate one’s self-recognition. The artist envisions a future when the digital mirror, with its ability to multiply the self, will replace optical mirrors used today. Overtime, “Mirror” would fundamentally change self-perception from a flat physical frontal image to a digitally-represented version of the self, imaginable from all angles. Ao is interested in using technology to map out new ways of looking, therefore helping his viewers participate in a shared prelinguistic experience. As an example, “Mirror,” a tool built with existing technology such as web cams and digital screens, reflects Ao’s desire to invent new ways of relating to the self.

“Ctrl!” is a jerk-off instruction video designed by Wang Ye in the abstinent style. Using universal colors – red background for stop, green for go – and elements – the font is the same as German traffic signs –the artist attempts to zero in on the power dynamic between the instructor and viewer/performer that underlies the fetish genre of pornography that is jerk-off instructions. What gives this video an effect of sensory overload is the added voiceover text. Quoted from Jean Baudrillard’s book Seduction, the intellectual audio text distracts from the philistine visual text of instructions, creating a pressure and tension in the audience that mimic the tension felt by the viewer/performer in a jerk-off instruction video. As the AI voiceover observes, pornography is filled with close-up images of nudity that are an “excess of reality, this hyperreality of things. The only fantasy in pornography, if there is one, is thus not the fantasy of sex, but of the real.” Ironically, by stripping his video of any sexual image, Wang Ye replaces the excess of nudity with the excess of distraction and tension, pushing the viewer to feel the delicate power shift between participants in sex. Wang thus restages a dance on the theme of balancing power in one’s most vulnerable and authentic moments – a dance that is overshadowed and buried by commercially produced pornography and our society’s enterprise of sex.

(Words by Tina Shan)