Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas

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, all who consider how collective identity formation 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 collaborative installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme is a counter-mythology to existing ruins. While Rebeca Romero sculpture alludes to a constructed alternative future where a fictional revolutionary civilization thrives. Zainab Aliyu’s video is complemented by a physical landing pad within the gallery, with sculptural elements positioned in the room as functional compasses—”quiet meditations on the (im)possibility of using the master's tools.” Rindon Johnson’s simultaneous live-streams of airports worldwide implicates the viewer in the everyday surveillance of displacement and relocation. And his site-specific sculpture is a deep exploration reflecting Nebraska’s current relationship to the global exchange of information, material, and goods. Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit’s performance “traces the various temporalities of generative technologies—activating a live, site, and audience-responsive installation.” Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald’s collaborative artwork is “a software-based performance where your inner monologue is replaced with AI.” Visitors to the exhibition can choose to participate in training the inner monologue with their own voice, calling into question “how natural vs. synthetic each person’s thoughts actually are.”

The exhibition includes durational mediums and a poetic interpretation of time, an invitation to oscillate between the physical and the digital. The artists consider how media and communications shape our sense of self as we move through various places. Throughout the exhibition you’ll find various sites, real and immaterial—from the site-specificity of Omaha, Nebraska to airports, islands, and ruins afar, by way of ancestral mythologies, current memories, augmented inner monologues, and imagined futures.