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—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 collaborative installation is a counter-mythology to existing ruins, connecting speculative futures with the recent past. Their work is a similar exploration of time and the imaginary to Rebeca Romero’s sculpture, which 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.”

Aliyu’s aerial work echoes Rindon Johnson’s simultaneous live streams of airports worldwide, which implicates the viewer in the everyday surveillance of displacement and relocation. Johnson’s additional site-specific work is a deep exploration reflecting Nebraska’s current relationship to the global exchange of information, material, and goods. Bringing the site-specificity home to Bemis Center, Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit’s performance traces the various temporalities of generative technologies—activating a live, site, and audience-responsive installation. Then, looking inwards to our individual selves, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald’s software-based performance asks visitors to opt into replacing your inner monologue with AI, calling into question “how natural versus synthetic each person’s thoughts actually are.”

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, both real and immaterial. From the site-specificity of Omaha, Nebraska to airports, islands, and ruins afar, the artists bring us closer to understanding how technological clouds affect our interpersonal relationships, by way of ancestral mythologies, current memories, augmented inner monologues, and imagined futures.