Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas

Kathy Cho, 2024–2025 Curator-in-Residence

the archaic
resonates in the now,
humming under LED lights.
a longing machine,
wears algorithms like skin.
the data of a home
never fully left,
never fully found.

my mouth opens
and spills static:
I’ve never had
an original experience.

Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas features Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Zainab Aliyu, Rindon Johnson, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, Rebeca Romero, and Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit—who consider how the formation of collective identities takes place utilizing technology and the internet. How does it feel to encounter the friction and slippage between prevailing ideas of “what your inherited cultural heritage should be,” and the illusion of choice created by interacting with algorithms to access niche communities? These personal and collective experiences, mediated by our relationship to technology, serve as metaphors for how we can store, access, and deploy our memories to process and generate new contexts.

The artists in Close to the Clouds use multiple approaches to expand the idea of “digital diasporas.” Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s And yet my mask is powerful Part 1 is installed in a darkened green room, lit solely by a three-channel video projection. The video follows the artists and young Palestinians, wearing Neolithic masks from the West Bank and surrounding areas, which have been hacked and 3d printed, to sites of wreckage. The artists write that the work “...confronts the apocalyptic imaginary and violence that dominates our contemporary moment.” The non-human life forces seem to have continued on, contributing to counter-mythology for a future memory. Their work is a similar exploration of historical time and the imaginary to Rebeca Romero’s The Sower, flanked on both sides by a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing. A feminine entity is depicted playing the “Kawra”, a ceremonial horn inspired by trumpets of the Mochica civilization in what is now Northern Peru. This work is a continued study by Romero in drawing from existing historical artifacts to reimagine alternative futures.

Aliyu’s Hovering (or, suspended between arrival and departure), staged in the video room, consists of a two-channel video and a helipad. The artist situates technology within a diasporic imaginary to explore how machines mediate the conditions of displacement. The videos and design of the helipad consider the fallibility of collective memories, buried infrastructures, and latent histories. Aliyu notes that “the helipad points to the aerial logics of surveillance embedded in how we remember and observe, positioning hovering as a structuring logic of visibility.”

Aliyu’s aerial work echoes Johnson’s Now you tell me…, a work comprising five simultaneous livestreams of airports worldwide. It implicates the viewer in the everyday surveillance of displacement and relocation. Placed opposite is Johnson’s suspended rawhide work, Naked hegemonic behavior, why is the world so different from what we thought it was. Here, Johnson continues his exploration into the byproducts of animal bodies, specifically cow rawhide as medium, asking what is left of a body—its traces, imprints, and consequences. The work also meditates on trade, symmetry, harmony: how these concepts and practices often cannot hold themselves together, and when it ruptures, where the imprints form.

Johnson’s works act as bookends to the exhibition. A final site-specific work placed near an exposed whitewashed wall,We never live the same day twice reflects upon Nebraska’s current relationship to the global exchange of information, material, and goods, specifically the state’s status as a quiet economic powerhouse that often has a co-dependent relationship with China. The tiles were produced collaboratively between the artist and a manufacturer in Kunshan, a city near Shanghai: at first remotely, then the final stages of production in person. The color is achieved using soybean dyes and stamped with leather to mimic the real texture, reiterating the broader implications of this tile as perhaps functionless and vulnerable, while acting as miniature abstractions.

Sun and Guhit’s installation Leg's Artificial Land Services brings the site-specificity home to Bemis Center. At the foundation is a recording of the artists’ performance on the second day of the exhibition. As the exhibition continues to unfold, the system listens, learns, and generates—only to listen, learn, and generate again, unnecessarily complicating what was already complete. As the installation listens and observes the space and its visitors, the system performs an erosion rather than an accumulation. The chain-link fence dictates how bodies are permitted to move through the physical space, while the commercial grade fans are mapped directly to the GPU’s cooling system, activating when the algorithm begins training or generating. As visitors traverse the installation, the artists make the operations of an AI system perceptible as it unfolds—revealing its internal rhythms, biases, and constraints—rather than presenting only the flattened output that typically stands in for artificial intelligence.

Finally, looking inwards to our individual selves, McCarthy and McDonald’s software-based performance Voice in My Head, asks visitors to opt into replacing your inner monologue with AI. It calls into question “how natural versus synthetic each person’s thoughts actually are.” An office pod, usually seen in corporate office settings, is found in the middle of the exhibition and could easily be missed, but actually serves as an individual onboarding site for this work. The series of prints near the pod titled Seeing Voices, are images generated based on phrases spoken in previous live sessions of Voice in My Head.

Close to the Clouds is an invitation to oscillate between the physical and the digital, through durational mediums and a poetic interpretation of time. The artists consider how media and communications shape our sense of self as we move through various places. Across the exhibition one will encounter various sites from the site-specificity of Omaha, Nebraska to airports, islands, and ruins afar, ranging from real to immaterial spaces. By way of ancestral mythologies, current memories, augmented inner monologues, and imagined futures, the artists bring us closer to understanding how technological clouds affect our interpersonal relationships.