The eleven works featured in CONTEXT COLLAPSE undertake a conversation around the
shifting nature
of context in contemporary life and art.
The present is haunted by the permanence of data. To speak in the moment is to know
that that
moment may live forever. Our words may be willfully misinterpreted, or perhaps be
the spark that
ignites a movement. Context is liable to change at any moment, regardless of
original intent. We
retreat to distrust, to inside jokes and opaque language. Groups defined by affinity
give way to
movements of dissent.
The term "context collapse" has been attributed to the research of danah boyd, and
her
observations about what happens when individuals from disparate social environments
find
themselves interacting in an altogether new context. While it was coined in
reference to the
amalgamating tendencies of online platforms, context collapse occurs whenever
differentiation
breaks down.
Origins are obscured and the vertical nature of hierarchies become reoriented into a
chaotic
flatland of asymmetrical symbols. A 3D Scan of a temple is uploaded by an artist and
used by an
ad agency. A meme associated with the alt-right in the US becomes an icon of
resistance in Hong
Kong. Border crises encroach on the stability of imagined geographies.
If language structures the space of locality, what happens in the gaps between global
vernaculars? If one’s audience is unknown, how does one have agency over what is
determined?
Zeynep is a new media artist from Istanbul Turkey. She received her bachelor's degree in
documentary and interactive media from Emerson College and is currently an MFA candidate at
UCLA's Design Media Arts program. Growing up in the politically charged city of Istanbul,
Zeynep's work usually revolves around her culture, combining interactivity with video. She
got her start at LACMA’s Art+Tech lab creating AR installations, then worked at the Sundance
Film Festival's New Frontier Exhibitions and is currently a curator for VRScout.
Graham Akins studio practice revolves around our complicated relationship to reality,
simulation, and how technology mediates the depiction of the external world. Using
photography, video,
3D modeling and sculpture, the artist creates large multi-media installations that play with
notions of
objecthood, the uncanny valley, our understanding of otherness and contemporary methods of
image making.
Recent projects include investigations into the aestheticization of trash, experimental
wildlife
documentaries that explore the quality of our relationships to other minds, and found object
sculptural video
combines that abstract materials into simulated forgeries of themselves.
Instagram
Berfin Ataman was born in Izmir, Turkey. She went on to get her BFA in Theatre design from
University of Southern California and her Post – Baccalaureate degree from School of art
Institute Chicago and is currently getting her MFA in UCLA. She is an artist that creates
sensorial experiences. Her work focuses on humans relationship to movement and space through
her wearables, installations, and other soft, kinetic, sculptures. Her most recent work
questions how we approach the non- human or rather the unfamiliar.
Website
Erin Cooney is an American visual artist based in Los Angeles. She uses video, installation,
and performance to create works dealing with point of view, post-humanism, and ecology. Erin
Cooney’s work has been profiled on NPR’s All Things Considered and CNN. Born in Houston,
Texas, Erin Cooney received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in South
Bend, Indiana. She studied Graphic Design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena,
California, and is currently pursuing her MFA at UCLA.
Website
Ben Lerchin is an artist, activist, and technologist using experimental photographies,
robotics, and language to enact speculative interventions and uncover new political
imaginaries. In their work, digital conversations are recontextualized, landscapes are
reconfigured, algorithms are queered, and all are presented as embodied data.
Ben collaborates widely with artists, designers and engineers, and is currently an MFA
candidate at UCLA Design Media Arts. Their work has appeared at: Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts (San Francisco), B4BEL4B (Oakland), Desert X (Palm Springs, CA), Centro Cultural de
España (Mexico City), and QueerTech.io (Melbourne, Australia).
Website
I create interactive physical experiences.
I received my Bachelor degree in Interaction Design in 2012 at Malmö University Sweden. The
following couple of years I worked on educational projects for Arduino teaching workshops at
universities, high schools and hackerspaces. I moved on as a creative technologist working
with experiential marketing agencies in the US for clients such as Google, Nike and Adidas.
I’m currently an MFA candidate at UCLA Design | Media Arts.
Website
Blaine O’Neill is an artist, designer, and organizer based in Los Angeles. Blaine makes
images and situations that explore improvisation, automation, affect, and failure. Blaine
pursues non-dogmatic and non-productive approaches to working and identifying.
XOXOXOXO
Website
Miles Peyton is an artist based in Los Angeles. His recent work draws from video games and
sculpture and centers on non-human subjects at all scales.
Hirad Sab is a planetary-based media artist and visual director whose work explores the
margins of digital aesthetics, internet culture, and technology. His amalgams occupy a
precarious intersection of culture and the democratic nature of image circulation; an
aesthetic trend that expands and mutates rapidly.
Sab's work has been described as a "simultaneously distant and close,
drawing the viewer in even as it challenges them to look away" and heavily feature
depictions of posthumanist form, figure, and consumption in distinctly digital environments.
The result is in an emblematic and distinguishable oeuvre that resists easy classification.
Website
Dalena Tran writes stories and poetry and adapts them
into virtual spaces. Her practice investigates nostalgic and emerging symbols of
storytelling by combining language, technology, and mixed media arts. Her connection
(/lack thereof) to places and networks shape the momentum of her work. She is often
questioning the phenomenon of memory in it's relationship to setting. Using
the palpability of digital language, she wanders between comprehension, the gift shop, and
an exit wound. Her works have been featured on FLAT Journal, Adult Swim, OFluxo, and
Nowness.
Website
Leming Chon is an artist. She explores visceral experience in nature and society through
fracturing commentary and interrelated structures. Her works invalidate adhering rules of
social events, where the extant fragments present an opacity and suspense perception, and
rearrange these correlative objects into illusory duplicates with itself.
Vimeo