Reconnecting… By All Means
router.gallery is presenting "Reconnecting… By All Means", an exhibition and performance by Alice Yuan Zhang as part of transmediale Vorspiel 2023
router.gallery
Vorspiel Festival
About the event
As part of transmediale & CTM Vorspiel 2023, the router.gallery is presenting "Reconnecting… By All Means", an exhibition and performance by Alice Yuan Zhang.
Reconnecting… By All Means (2023) by Alice Yuan Zhang
Opening performance at silent green
The contemporary networked world runs on metal, blood, fuel, and water. This material weight is obscured by a constant immaterial flow of zeros and ones, with only the dead device to bear witness. What is a human to do? Can you grieve a circuit board without an afterlife? Can you trace your breath through a web of server nodes? Can you stretch an ethernet cable into an umbilical cord? At Panke Gallery, a local router ponders its position. It quietly hosts a static webpage of hallucinations into communication ports and signals. Visual poetics corrode its usual computational logic into an affective material study of all that 'routes' across the ecosystemic body. Offering no single storyline but a broadcast of seeds, artist Alice Yuan Zhang alludes to other technological imaginaries beneath the geopolitical wastelands of linear progress.
After the presentation at silent green Kulturquartier on the occasion of the transmediale Vorspiel opening, the router will lead a technological grief procession in the form of a walking audio broadcast from silent green, a former crematorium, to panke.gallery, where it will be installed for the rest of the exhibition period. Curious participants are welcome to join this 10 minute activity to metabolize reflections at the pace of bodies in motion together.
On the opening night on Friday, 20 January at 21:30 we will meet in front of the router in the garden of silent green to beginn the grief procession. You are invited to bring any used, broken, or obsolete devices (reasonably sized) to the procession. We will dispose of them in designated ways after the show's end. Please RSVP if you would like to participate, so we get a sense of headcount.
About the Artist
Alice Yuan Zhang 张元 is a media artist, researcher, and cultural organizer currently based between Berlin and Los Angeles. Her transdisciplinary practice operates on cyclical and intergenerational time. Along the peripheries of colonialist imagination, she works to bring technology down to earth by devising collective experiments in ancestral remembering, interspecies pedagogy, and networked solidarity.
Alice is a founding steward of virtual care lab, 2022 DWeb fellow, recent research resident at 0x Salon, Creative Wildfire artist, resident artist at CultureHub, and community member of NAVEL and Trust. She has taught Media Studies for Performance at Sarah Lawrence College, facilitated a study group on Digital Matterealities, and hosted lectures, workshops, and other learning engagements across academic institutions including CalArts, Harvard, Duke, NYU ITP, and University of Toronto, arts institutions such as Goethe-Institute, Iowa PS1, and MAK Center, and independent cultural initiatives like SFPC, Tiny Tech Zines, SOFTER, and M20.