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Opening Reception: May 15 | 6-9 pm
Exhibition Dates: May 16-23, Tuesday to Sunday 12-6 pm
Artist Talk: May 17 | 2 pm
Examining the intersection of information and communications technology ("ICT") assemblages, the human body, and the natural environment, the medium is the environment asks the following question: How does the digital environment subjugate both the human environment and the natural environment?
Contrary to the notion of immateriality and commonplace imageries such as the cloud, information and communication technologies (ICT), from individual devices to the general infrastructure, are grounded in the material world, ranging from the materials needed for production, to the ongoing energy costs of maintaining the digital economy, to the e-waste that is produced through planned obsolescence and aggressive consumerism. As Baruch Gottlieb (2018) writes, “data is not immaterial […] there is no cloud, only someone else’s computer” (p. 130). ¹
Against the myth of the cloud, which contributes to an emancipatory and utopian rhetoric of ICT, the project foregrounds the materiality that is strategically erased and explores how the digital environment subjugates both human and natural environments through a data-driven fog machine and video installation. A downward video projection depicts the entanglement of the human, the environment, and the digital economy, in particular the abstraction, extraction, and exploitation of the world’s materiality. Simultaneously, fog is produced at the rate of data usage, serving as a proxy of carbon emission and referencing the illusory cloud.
While a former iteration of the project utilized the artist’s personal data of Internet usage, the iteration at VIVO Media Arts utilizes the Internet usage data of the institution itself. Inviting the viewers to engage in the act of content-consumption, the presence of the video is intended to activate the viewers’ digital labour and expose their participation in the attention economy. Implicating the artist, the gallery, and the viewers within the digital economy, these two iterations of the project underscore the environmental impact of our digitized lives, highlighting the materiality of something supposedly immaterial.
1. Gottlieb, Baruch (2018), Digital Materialism: Origins, Philosophies, Prospects, London: Sage.
VIVO is located in the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples in a warehouse space at 2625 Kaslo Street south of East Broadway at the end of E 10th. Transit line 9 stops at Kaslo Street on Broadway. From the bus stop, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight decline. The closest skytrain station is Renfrew Station, which is three blocks south-east of VIVO and has an elevator. From there, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight incline. There is parking available at VIVO, including wheelchair access parking. There is a bike rack at the entrance. The front entrance leads indoors to a set of 7 stairs to the lobby.
A wheelchair ramp is located at the west side of the main entrance. The ramp has two runs: the first run is 20 feet long, and the second run is 26 feet. The ramp is 60 inches wide. The slope is 1:12. The ramp itself is concrete and has handrails on both sides. There is an outward swinging door (34 inch width) at the top of the ramp leading to a vestibule. A second outward swinging door (33 inch width) opens into the exhibition space. Buzzers and intercoms are located at both doors to notify staff during regular office hours or events to unlock the doors. Once unlocked, visitors can use automatic operators to open the doors.
There are two all-gender washrooms. One has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The other is a single room with a urinal and is wheelchair accessible: the door is 33 inches wide and inward swinging, without automation. The toilet has 11 inch clearance on the left side and a handrail.
To reach the bathrooms from the studio, exit through the double doors and proceed straight through the lobby and down the hall . Turn left, and the two bathrooms will be on your right side. The closest one has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The far bathroom is accessible.
Kevin Day’s practice and research, encompassing sound, video, graph, web, and interactive media installations, examine contemporary art’s critical capacity in response to the current socio-political issues of digital culture, negating the encoding, extraction, and exploitation by data colonialism and information capitalism. Informed by philosophy of technology, critical theory, media studies, and digital materialism, his research and practice question the ubiquitous logic of framing the world through information, indicative of an information-based way of knowing. The works resist the extraction and abstraction of algorithmic processes through an insistence on the presence of “noise” in the information-capital complex.
Day was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of British Columbia and is currently based in Vancouver. He has exhibited at venues such as the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), InterAccess (Toronto), Centre CLARK (Montreal), Creative Media Centre (Hong Kong), University of Hamburg (Hamburg), Qubit (New York), and presented his research through the top international platforms for art and technology such as SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and Leonardo. His work had been generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Currently, he teaches digital art in the UBC Bachelor of Media Studies program and the politics of algorithmic and information systems at the UBC School of Information.
Photo by: Ksenia Cheinman
