Umeå University's logo

F.N.S.X. @ History of the Future" exhibition is currently opened in Cloud Art Museum til 25 Aug, 2022. Four artists, Fei Jun, Daniel Shanken, Peter Nelson and Xu Yibo, are invited to participate in this exhibition curated by Janet Fong. The exhibition attempts to explore more possibilities on the correlation between physical spaceas and virtual spaces. It also takes the historical perspective of a microhistory[ “In the 1970s and 1980s, microhistory provided a revolutionary new perspective… its focus was not on what a specific person looked like at a particular moment… it could serve as a clue leading us to the ‘culture’ of a society, and its various linked systems” Sarah Maza, Thinking About History, p.303-307. ]: it attempts to study, against an art history context of object-and-space field, what possibilities the four participating artists can bring to the narrating images, objects, and spaces created with the visual tools of new technology. Each work exhibited can be seen as a medium with its own characteristics and historical temporality, and individual art histories can be seen as the trajectories of different visual presentations. This exhibition, interpenetrated with three perspectives —space correlation (空間關聯時態), hypermaterialities (超)物質性), visualizations and narrative (視覺化敘事)—depicts the influence that the four artists’ works may exert on the future of artistic exploration, and reflects the possibilities and opportunities brought by digital technology and virtual space to the research of art history.

The Pits is a new installation by artist Daniel Shanken that descends through tiers and levels: the pit in your stomach, in the ground, and in your brain. It uses eating as a crux, imagining the digestion, assimilation, offloading, and onboarding that occur when giving yourself to be devoured by technologies or entities with their own agency and agendas.

The work shifts between different perspectives—human, non-human, pizza box, and microwave—exploring the pleasure and horror of willingly opting in and zoning out.At the center of the installation is a conversation pit constructed in the gallery, allowing you to physically enter the work. Video projections, created using bespoke software, extend the room with predictive zooms and pans through artificial latent space. The work moves through bodies and places, navigating the relentless extraction of thought and resources, the replacement of cognition with corporate agents.

"The Suck" imagines the diffractions in perception caused by offloading cognitive tasks onto AI algorithms. It blends AI-generated videos, created with custom tools, that transform real footage with predictive zooms that fold into themselves. The video explores how intelligent systems translate reality and alter our view of the world through the aberrations caused by their artificial lens. Using anecdotal scenarios and fantasy interviews, it examines how these tools, with their corporate-infused agency, integrate into personal realities, ultimately moving us towards the 'enshittification' of experience.

The Cascades is a solo exhibition and multi-channel installation that brings together an ongoing series of work by artist Daniel Shanken. The installation focuses on networks of information that run in the background of our lives, filtered and curated by intelligent algorithms that push bias and dissonance. 

Incorporating live content feeds from multiple sources online such as YouTube videos and comments, internet radio, Google Image search, Reddit, and Twitch, the work builds an environment that fluctuates with incoming content scraped from the internet in real-time. Custom-trained machine learning algorithms respond to and alter the work, while offering insights through laser-projected text. Using randomness derived from physical sources such as radioactive decay and atmospheric noise, material is shuffled and displayed in unpredictable combinations that are never the same. This is in contrast to most search engines and hosting sites that control content and information through tailored interfaces that often exclude voices hidden in the noise.

The installation creates a spontaneous environment that allows viewers to enter through interfaces other than the normal internet screen space confronted on a daily basis. The work reflects the remnants of discarded technological production, oversaturated media landscapes, data centres, landfills, and mining tunnels. It draws on the intangible data-points, AI algorithms, and rendered objects often encountered in the periphery.

The Cascades was developed through research conducted during Shanken’s completed PhD with the Contemporary Art Research Group (CARG) at Kingston University’s Centre for Practice Research in the Arts (CePRA). 

DEEP BORE revolves around a data center raised flooring formation that operates as a stage to view a live-generated, never-ending borehole projected onto the floor. The hole is perpetually digging through to a virtual environment that acts as a liminal space, or bridge, between the physical site of the gallery, its surrounding environment, and a realm of virtual and real-time content. This includes live browser updates to the Reddit homepage, GAN-generated objects and images from a GAN trained on tools and technologies throughout human history, and other items that materialise, float, and fall into the void on the screen.

The installation is interested in drawing a spontaneous environment that allows viewers to enter through interfaces that are site specific rather than the normal screen space we encounter on a daily basis. The visual material reflects the remnants of human technological production, prehistoric caves, and rare-earth mining tunnels. There is a direct reference to data mining, crypto mining, and data centers that have sprung up around the world. The installation creates a space of reflection on the intangible data-points, machine learning algorithms, clouds, and rendered objects we often encounter, touching on their real world presence and effect on the environment, consciousness, and culture.

SOURCE is a hand carved granite slab with a built-in custom computer. The computer reads a Geiger counter which measures radioactive particles emitted from the granite and the surrounding environment in real-time. The decaying material manipulates a moving image platform, influencing how content is drawn from a database and live-scraped from the internet, building animated sequences that fluctuate and feedback, along with the sound of the clicking Geiger counter.