ABOUT THE GALLERY

TRANSFER is an experimental gallery that explores simulation and expanded practice. The gallery was founded in Brooklyn in 2013 to support artists making computer-based artworks, by installing solo exhibitions of experimental media art. In 2016 the gallery shifted to focus programming on solo exhibitions from women refiguring technology, and began traveling a new virtual exhibition format called the ‘TRANSFER Download’. In TRANSFER’s seven years, the gallery has produced over 75 exhibitions of experimental media art, including international exhibitions, pop-ups and art fairs. In 2019 the gallery relocated from Brooklyn, New York to Los Angeles, California.

Join TRANSFER on the last day of SPRING/BREAK LA for a VERY LARGE screening powered by Eastside LED. IN EXCESS OF REALITY is a survey of video work about the mass hysteria of contemporary culture – the anxiety of proliferation, and abundant pressure of facing the machine, and the mania of accelerated cultures. The works in this selection feature CGI techniques ranging from shiny renders to raw footage collaged with chaotic resolution – depicting AI Kittens that rule the world, leaking bodies, smoothly modeled avatars, post-anthropocene visions, and other-worldly landscapes rooted in new relational aesthetics of the virtual.

IN EXCESS OF REALITY

Cassie McQuater, Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds (2019)
Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds is a re-imagining of the surrealist story “The Debutante,” by artist Leonora Carrington, in which a young woman exchanges places with a hyena, masked in a suit of human skin, for her societal debut. Extravagant dresses made of anatomical parts, fragmented planes of glass, and pastel-pink lights swirl in pastoral landscapes populated by undulating fluorescent flowers, strange monsters and deconstructed birds that paint the sky. Music by Kelly Moran. (Duration: 04:32)

Carla Gannis, The Garden of Emoji Delights (2014)
In The Garden of Emoji Delights, Gannis reimagines Hieronymus Bosch’s 16th-century masterpiece with animated characters and emojis for the digital era, experimenting with new ways of redefining identity and its forms of representation, both virtual and physical. By replacing religious vocabulary with secular and contemporary digital symbols, Gannis reconstructs the powerful iconography at the core of Bosch’s landscape in The Garden of Earthly Delights. Her stunning, pop art 2.0 digital collage explores and critiques consumerism and modern society through the three emoji-fied realms of Eden, Hell, and Earth. (Duration: Looped)

Pinar Yoldas, KittyAI (2016)
Set in the year 2039, this 3D animation depicts a future where an artificial intelligence in the form of a digital kitten becomes the first non-human governor. Rising to power after a period of profound social upheaval caused by climate change, population displacement, and political turmoil, Kitty AI was able to offer the populace comfort, care, and stability when the human politicians fell short. With her superior networked intelligence and the enhanced affective capacities of a kitten (Kitty AI is able to love up to 3 million people), she is able to tend to her citizens on a personal as well as a bureaucratic level—she can manage the city’s budget and make sure your children get to school safely. The film offers a humorous yet critical exploration of automated governance, more-than-human forms of intelligence, and affective computing, a field of research and development that builds systems and devices designed to recognize, interpret, simulate and influence human emotions. (Duration: 12:18)

LaTurbo Avedon, Interlude (2020)
In the opening of LaTurbo Avedon’s Interlude, strobing pixels pulsate to reveal the outline of a humanoid avatar. The figure is fragmented and transparent, appearing as a triple exposed negative. This animated figure is flanked by two rigid ‘fates.’ Facing away from each other, their gazes don’t meet until each faces inward, creating an infinite mirror. The imagery in Interlude evokes the visage of Janus, Roman God of beginnings and endings, transitions and pathways, looking both to the past and to the future. For Avedon, who exists only in digital form, Janus appears to represent the infinitely re-iterable nature of virtual being. As Avedon’s image stares into the shiny black mirror of the screen, she sees all of the past and possible future iterations of herself expanding limitlessly into a horizon written in binary code. (Duration: 07:47)

Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, The 3D Additivist Manifesto (2015)
The 3D Additivist Manifesto is a project that blurs the boundaries between art, engineering, science fiction, and digital aesthetics. Blending elements of science fiction with poetic, revolutionary gusto, The Manifesto forcefully questions the contradictions of living under technocapitalism. Produced by Allahyari and Rourke in the form of a text and video (shown here), the Manifesto provides a list of ingredients for fabricating new realities. 3D printing technologies promise to become a common material language, allowing anything that can be stored as a digital template to be realized as long as one has the necessary matter. The 3D Additivist Manifesto calls for artists, activists, designers, scientists, and critical engineers to accelerate the 3D printer and other Additivist technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. (Duration: 10:11)

Eva Papamargariti, but for now all I can promise is things will become weirder (2018)
But for now all i can promise is that things will become weirder combines CG animated sequences, text, sound and filmed extracts. It addresses the ambiguous sense of numbness that is provoked by the current stream and rhythm of reality. Information and facts are perceived and absorbed as a palimpsest of imbricated fragments, images, sounds and events that are floating between blurred boundaries, creating a paradoxical amalgam of extravagance and often an uncanny feeling. Hierarchies of value and meaning collapse and get rearranged continuously. (Duration: 12:21)

Amina Ross, Specular Cry (2020)
Amina Ross creates simulations in order to explore their own relationship to their body and feelings. Screening for the first time in the USA is a new short film titled Specular Cry which the artist describes as ‘a release in the darkness’. Amina sculpts with simulated fluid dynamics to reveal parts of self that aren’t always visible. Specular Cry is an imaging of an interior world as it escapes the body. (Duration: 01:11)

After the screening, TRANSFER Founder Kelani Nichole, and Director Wade Wallerstein (Founder @SiliconValet) discuss themes in the films, and share insights about the emerging market for simulation in contemporary art.

PRESS CONTACT ## Kelani Nichole: director@transfergallery.com