A Woman With the Technology: Film Screening with Ziyang Wu – Silicon Valet
August 20th 2020, 2:00 – 3:30 pm (PDT), 5:00 – 6:30 (EST)
Join us for a virtual film screening of Ziyang Wu's video work, "A Woman With the Technology." The screening will be followed by a short Q&A session with the artist on Silicon Valet's Twitch Channel:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/716428001
"A Woman With the Technology" examines how an individual’s online experience becomes personalized by the Internet algorithm and creates what Internet activist Eli Pariser coined the “filter bubble.” As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural and ideological bubbles.
Wu began by recording his daily social media practice over a period of three months using a series of keywords that represent his interests as initial inputs, including “censorship,” “surveillance,” “trade war,” “Asian experience,” “identity,” “Neocolonialism” and many others, and created an archive. He then created imagery through data analysis such as the frequency changes of the keywords in the form of sketches, diagrams, and spreadsheets.
Through image detection technology, the three-channel video visually presents what information the Internet algorithm “sees” in the archives and how the “filter bubbles” are inter-connected. Finally, he trained an AI Chatbot using all the collected data. Through his conversation with the AI Chatbot whose knowledge equals all the information in the archive, “we” created a video script and Wu made an animated-video based on the script.
About the artist:
Ziyang Wu is a visual artist living and working in New York where he is currently teaching at the School of Visual Arts. Wu earned his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and his BFA from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts.
Ziyang Wu has shown his work internationally in China, North America, and Europe including the solo exhibitions at Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York and CO2 Gallery in Florence, and group exhibitions at the Medici Palace and the Milan Design Week in Italy, the Today Art Museum and the Times Art Museum in Beijing, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, the Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota, the Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art and the Brown University in Rhode Island, the Academy Art Museum in Maryland, The Hole Gallery and Microscope Gallery in New York.
Wu has received numerous fellowships and awards including the MacDowell Colony Fellowship and Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) Fellowship at Alfred University in 2019, Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship by Northern Lights.mn and Jerome Foundation in 2017, the AICAD Teaching Fellowship by Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design in 2016, the Winner of The ROCI Road to Peace exhibition by Robert Rauschenberg Art Foundation and Artsy in 2015, and the Best Creative Award in Milan Design Week – Oriental Design Week in 2013. He is currently an Experiment on Art and Technology Track Member at NEW INC, New Museum.
