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Watch: Alison Nguyen’s my favorite software is being here Online and In Person
my favorite software is being here, by Alison Ngyuen. (Installation photo: Dario Lasagni) Artist and filmmaker Alison Nguyen — selected for Filmmaker‘s 2018 25 New Faces and a contributor to this Summer’s Pandemic Diaries — is showing new work featuring her Andra8, “a computer-generated woman based on the artist’s physicality.”
As part of her current virtual exhibition at the Hartnett Gallery, i broke my mind at the link in the bio (running through December 18), Nguyen will screen today, Monday, November 23, her new my favorite software is being here, which captures the data-driven emotional rhythms and perceptive swings of her virtual creation. The piece, which is highly recommended, screens free today 6:30 PM Eastern and will be followed by a Zoom artist talk by Nguyen and collaborators collaborators Jonathan Beilin, Scott Kiernan, Tim Bruniges, and Rachel Pontbriand. Click here to register for both.
Writes Nguyen:
Andra8 is a simulacral subaltern created by an algorithm and raised by the Internet in isolation in a virtual void. From the apartment where she has been ‘placed’ Andra8 works as a digital laborer, surviving off the data from her various ‘freemium’ jobs as a virtual assistant, a data janitor, a life coach, an aspiring influencer, and content creator.
The domestic space from which she is constantly surveilled and monitored looks like the inoffensive love child of the results of a ‘Mid-century modern’ Pinterest search, a mental health hospital, and a perpetually sunny L.A. Airbnb. In other words: A kind of antiseptic neoliberal purgatory.
Read more about Andra8, who Nguyen describes as a “modern-day Bartleby… who revolts against the quietly oppressive conditions of her surveilled isolation and refuses to take part in the production and consumption of human data,” in her Pandemic Diaries piece.
Viewers in New York can visit the Andra8 video piece in its physical installation at ISCP in Williamsburg as part of a group show, The Earth is Blue Like an Orange.
The show runs through December 11 and can be visited by appointment by emailing info@iscp-nyc.org. Visitors are limited and number, masks are required and other health and safety protocols are in effect.
