Erin Gee Tag

Dyscorpia 2.1 Online Exhibition

I was invited to contribute my video work Machine Unlearning (2020) as a part of the Dyscorpia 2.1 online exhibition

DYSCORPIA 2.1 is an online exhibition that responds to ideas of THE BODY AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE TIME OF COVID – 19 organized by Marilene Oliver at the University of Alberta.

DYSCORPIA is a project conceived and developed by a core team of researchers at the University of Alberta that came together to share their research and ideas about future of the body and technology. Together, they coined the term DYSCORPIA to describe the uncanny feeling we are increasingly subjected to as are called to relearn to use our bodies are a result of new digital technologies such as smart phones, automated cars, contemporary medical devices and digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa. This led to a series of collaborations and interdisciplinary projects that are central to the Dyscorpia exhibition.

Network Music Festival

NMF // SOUND WITHOUT BORDERS

July 17, 7:45pm BST (London) // 2:45pm EST (Montreal)

Erin Gee and Jen Kutler: Presence (2020). Streaming music performance for networked biodata and transcutaneous nerve stimulation devices.

Info:

The fourth Network Music Festival will take place online 15-18th July 2020.

Exploring innovative digital music, art and research which investigates the impact of networking technology on musical creation and performance practice, Network Music Festival presents cutting edge musical performances, workshops and discussions.The Network Music Festival took place 2012-2014 at the heart of Birmingham’s (UK) creative community. Responding to the move to online music making during the 2020 global pandemic and with increasing concern in artistic communities about the climate emergency, the festival is returning for a global fourth edition, which will take place entirely online 15-18th July 2020.

The main theme for 2020 is communities near and far. As many people find themselves socially distant, the importance of community is not diminished, but rather transformed. People rely on sound to bridge physical gaps, from singing or applauding out their windows, to connecting with others online.  Our connections, then, are either intensely local, or virtually borderless. We stay in touch with friends and neighbours, but also find that collaborating across the world is not harder than collaborating across town. In this year’s festival, we want to celebrate and strengthen the musical communities people have built with networking tools, as well as exploring the aesthetics, performance practice and technologies around topics such as web-streaming, multi-location performance, collaborative music making environments, accessible and sustainable performance practice and more.

NYC Remote Music Hackathon

I have been invited with Jen Kutler to present the open-source technologies behind our first collaborative work Presence (2020) as part of the NYC Remote Music Hackathon. As part of this workshop we will walk through the various technologies we are using, which include open source hardware and software, in order to allow fellow hackers and makers to create their own wild togetherness apparatuses.

For more information please click here for the event website , otherwise you can check out the live streaming video links below! We are presenting our work at 4pm EST.

 

 

Web Residency: Saw Video

I have been selected alongside three other residents for Saw Video’s Stay At Home Internet Residency.

I am especially pleased to have the opportunity to collaborate with Jen Kutler on a new work for telematic sound and video during the course of this residency.  We are having an insane amount of fun creating feedback systems for music and biodata that integrate transcutaneous nerve stimulation over web sockets.

Over the course of five weeks (April 29th – May 29th), we will meet via zoom/hangouts to discuss readings, media, and art making. Individual web-based studio visits with national scholars, curators and artists will be had, and we will diffuse the artists’ works on May 28th. Please sign up for our newsletter here, and follow us on social media for more information on artists’ diffusion scheduling!

Erin Gee To the Sooe exhibition image

Review of solo exhibition – Canadian Art

To the Sooe” is my first solo exhibition in a major Canadian institution, curated by Tak Pham at the MacKenzie Art Gallery . I am happy to announce the exhibition was recently reviewed by artist and curator Lauren Fournier and published in Canadian Art. This is my first solo exhibition in a major Canadian institution and I am thrilled by the positive response from critics.  The exhibition closed early due to COVID-19, which is noted elegantly by the reviewer:

“Erin Gee’s “To The Sooe” reflects on the valences of emotional life in a post-internet world, gesturing to the many resonances between humans and machines in a time when the humanity of algorithms, data and screens might seem at odds with the complexities of feeling. Having visited the exhibition just weeks before the gallery’s temporary closure due to COVID-19 physical distancing measures, I am now struck by how prescient the work is in this moment of quarantine and self-isolation, when, for most of us, our primary means of communication, intimacy, and connection with others is through technology.”- Lauren Fournier

Click below to read the full review on Canadian Art.

Erin Gee

Well Now WTF? Online Exhibition

Museums are closed. School is cancelled. The world is shut off and we’re stuck indoors. All the bread has been sold and Twitter has lost its mind. Fox News is killing off its own demographic. While everything is cancelled, why not have a show?

In spite of everything, Silicon Valet is pleased to present Well Now WTF?, an online exhibition curated by Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, and Wade Wallerstein featuring 80 artists with moving image practices opening April 4, 2020 from 8 to 10 pm EST.

URL for the exhibition: https://wellnowwtf.siliconvalet.org

With everything going on, we ask ourselves: Well Now WTF? We have no answer, but we do know how to make GIFs. We can come together and use the creative tools at our disposal to build a space for release outside of anxiety-inducing news cycles and banal social media feeds. As co-curator Lorna Mills suggests, “Why masturbate alone, when we can all be wankers together?”

Well Now WTF? is available online at wellnowwtf.siliconvalet.org. The exhibition will be free and open to the public, with a $5 suggested, pay-what-you-wish entry that gets redistributed to the artists contributing work.

The exhibition will be accompanied by essays by Wade Wallerstein and Seth Watter.

Participating artists: A Bill Miller, Ad Minoliti, Adrienne Crossman, Alex McLeod, Alice Bucknell, Alma Alloro, Andres Manniste, Anneli Goeller, Anthony Antonellis, Antonio Roberts, Ben Sang, Benjamin Gaulon, Carla Gannis, Carlos Sáez, Casey Kauffmann, Casey Reas, Cassie McQuater, Chiara Passa, Chris Collins, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Claudia Bitran, Claudia Hart, Clusterduck Collective, Daniel Temkin, Devin Kenny, Don Hanson, Dominic Quagliozzi, Elektra KB, Ellen.Gif, Eltons Kuns, Emilie Gervais, Erica Lapadat-Janzen, Erica Magrey, Erin Gee, Eva Papamargariti, Faith Holland, Geoffrey Pugen, Guido Segni, Hyo Myoung Kim, Ian Bruner, Jan Robert Leegte, Jenson Leonard, Jeremy Bailey, Jillian McDonald, Kamilia Kard, Laura Gillmore, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Lauryn Siegel, Libbi Ponce, Lilly Handley, Lorna Mills, LoVid, Mara Oscar Cassiani, Mark Dorf, Mark Klink, Maurice Andresen, Maya Ben David, Molly Erin McCarthy, Molly Soda, Nicolas Sassoon, Nicole Killian, Olia Svetlanova, Olivia Ross, Pastiche Lumumba, Peter Burr, Petra Cortright, Rafia Santana, Rea Mcnamara, Rick Silva, Rita Jiménez, Ryan Kuo, Ryan Trecartin, Santa France, Sara Ludy, Sebastian Schmieg, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Stacie Ant, Sydney Shavers, Terrell Davis, Theo Triantafyllidis, Tiare Ribeaux, Travess Smalley, Wednesday Kim, Will Pappenheimer, Yidi Tsao, Yoshi Sodeoka, and more to be announced

Media: Well Now WTF? has been discussed in The Japan Times, Canadian Art, CBC, and Art Forum

Artist Project Toronto

?Project H.E.A.R.T. (Holographic Empathy Attack Robotics Team)? (2017) made by Erin Gee in collaboration with Alex M Lee is featured as part of the Telegenic booth at Artist Project Toronto. Our booth is just left of the entrance (can’t miss it) and is part of a sponsored exhibition with six other exciting new media artists.

Much thanks to EQ Bank, Telegenic, Radiance VR, and House of VR for sponsoring and organizing the exhibit. ☠️

 

to the sooe @ Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, NY

Love & Sex Show: Sweet Nothings

Special Event | Friday, February 14, 7–10 pm

My work with Sofian Audry to the sooe (2018) will be featured as part of  The Love and Sex Show: Sweet Nothings at Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Arts Centre in Buffalo, NY. This edition of the annual event focuses on sound and voice, featuring my audio work on a set of wireless headphones that can be worn throughout the gallery, as well as film installations and kareoke and performance by Thirza Cuthand, Jess Dobkin, Caroline Doherty, Lauren Fournier, Erin Gee, Dina Georgis and Sharlene Bamboat, Desiree Kee, Hope Mora, Michael Robinson, and Wayne Yung.

Review: Akimblog, Canada

The first review for my solo exhibition To the Sooe at the MacKenzie Art Gallery is here!  To the Sooe is on view until April 19th in Regina, Canada.

“Gee delivers the output in ASMR style through role play and a sound performance that leave you both mesmerized and tingling to your core. The sterile white walls and scientific jargon of the exhibition texts should not deter you from this immersive and sensory experience. Gee’s complex communication configurations require your time, patience and an open mind.” -Alexa Heenan, Akimblog

Click here to read the full review

Machine Unlearning

Vision calibration from Machine Unlearning (2020).
Photography by Elody Libe. Image courtesy of the artist.

2020

In Machine Unlearning, the artist greets the viewer and slowly offers them a unique neural conditioning “treatment”: sonically reproducing the unraveling outputs of an LSTM algorithm as it “unlearns” through whispering, moving backwards in time through its epochs of training.

This aural treatment is couched in a first-person roleplay scenario that grounds the viewer through a series of simple audio visual tests. At no point is the neural network technology “seen” – it is instead performed by a human interlocuter, translated into affective vocality and whispered text. The algorithm was created by media artist Sofian Audry, and trained on the text of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847). This novel was chosen in part because of its richly poetic syntax, but also for its feminine vocality and conceptual themes of love and intergenerational trauma. Machine Unlearning is a novel combination of neural network technologies and the popular internet genre “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” or ASMR. ASMR is a social media genre that has developed largely through massive social media metrics in the form of upvotes, clicks, comments, subscribes, and likes in response to audio visual stimuli that creates feelings of mild euphoria, relaxation and pleasure. ASMR fans online seek out specific video content that causes the physiological reaction of “tingles” – tingling sensations across the skin, a mild body high, or simply a means of falling asleep. Gee considers ASMR as a form of psychosomatic body hacking. By combining machine learning with ASMR, Gee draws parallels between cutting edge autonomous/non-conscious algorithms and the autonomous/unconscious functions of the human body. Just as ASMRtists use specific sounds and visual patterns in their videos to “trigger” physical reactions in the viewer, machine learning algorithms also unconsciously respond to patterns perceived through limited senses in order to develop learning (and unlearning) results. The artist’s emphasis on whispering the textual outputs of the algorithm as it slowly “unlearns” allows the listener to grasp the materiality of machine learning processes at a human level, but also a subconscious level: allowing one’s body to be mildly and charmingly “hacked” through soft and gentle play.

The use of the word “intelligence” in the metaphor of AI focuses on higher functions of consciousness that algorithms do not possess. While algorithms have not meaningfully achieved a humanistic consciousness to date, today’s algorithms act autonomously on sensory information, processing data from its environment in unconscious, automatic ways. The human brain also responds unconsciously and automatically to sensory data in its environment, for example, even if you are not conscious of how hot a stove is, if you place your hand on a hot stove, your hand will automatically pull away. These unconscious, physiological actions in the sensory realm points to an area of common experience between algorithms and the human.  For more explanation of these ideas, take a look at the work of postmodern literary critic N. Katherine Hayles in her 2017 book Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious.  In this way I wonder if the expression “autonomous intelligence” makes more sense than “artificial intelligence”, however like posthumanist feminist Rosi Braidotti I am deeply suspicious of the humanist pride that our species takes in the word “intelligence” as something that confers a special status and justification for domination of other forms of life on earth.

Credits

Photography and videography by Elody Libe.

Production Support: Machine Unlearning video installation was produced at Perte de Signal with the support of the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the exhibition To the Sooe (2020) curated by Tak Pham.

The roleplay performance was developed during my artistic residency at Locus SonusÉcole Superieur d’art d’Aix en Provence and Laboratoire PRISM.

Custom LSTM Algorithm created by media artist Sofian Audry

Video

Machine Unlearning (2020)
Videography by Elody Libe

Gallery

This work was first developed as a performance that debuted at Cluster Festival, Winnipeg in 2019.  During live performance, each audience member dons a pair of wireless headphones.  The performance allows the audience members to see the ASMR “result” of the performance for camera, simultaneous with the ability to see my “backstage” manipulation of props and light in real time.