Opening October 4th at 6PM

 

Now Here We Are is an installation of prints, video, and sound that fabricates a layered visual and sonic space, referencing notions of social and environmental collapse, animal perception and coloration, space travel, artificial intelligence, and decolonization. Spurred by ongoing environmental disasters in Hawaii and across the globe, this installation evokes a fictional yet possible future: a devastated post-human landscape.

 

In this imagined future world, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, and humans and animals have gone extinct as the global fresh water supply was irrevocably contaminated at the end of the 21st century. Now, as AI begins to mine, extract, and appropriate the detritus of post-digital ruins, a remixed, upsampled, and simulated landscape is rendered in slow-motion. It is a visual and sonic space where lo-fi gastropods and glitched birdsong are juxtaposed and attenuated along a semitransparent, algorithmically blended, looping timeline. In this beautiful destroyed virtual world of miscalculating algorithms and corrupted data, images and sounds of the former organic inhabitants of Earth are stuck in a loop, dissolving and resolving against the backdrop of an ever-changing hybrid landscape.

 

These works imagine the kind of visual landscape a post-human, lonely and isolated AI from the future might generate for itself in an attempt to assemble a vision of Earth before the collapse. This imagined AI is evolved and intelligent, and possesses the desire to understand the past in order to comprehend its present. The resulting images and soundscape reference a landscape that could have never existed. The fictional AI has constructed a broken world floating in the space between digital dysfunction and an analog terrestrial landscape that has long since vanished. 

 

In our present moment, this work reminds us of the beauty and fragility of the place we live in, and the importance of living with the values of aloha ʻāina. 

 

In addition to a series of digital archival pigment prints, the installation features single channel video with sound, augmented by a live performance with @elasticlimit, @nativewitproductions, and percussionist Takaaki Masuko.  

 

This exhibition was made possible by funding from the County of Hawai’i; McInerny Foundation - Bank of Hawai’i, Trustee; and the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.