Screen Blues
Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image, Philadelphia
April - June 2023.
Solo show curated by James Britt
Photos by Roni Aviv
TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image is proud to present Screen Blues, a solo exhibition by artist Liliana Farber. The exhibition presents a selection of work that explores the implications of living in a planet drowning in data. Through shattered digital imagery, Farber portrays fractured worlds that cannot be grasped.
The work derives from digital images of the oceans generated by Google Earth, a geographical information system (GIS) that renders 3D representations based on pictures taken by satellites. Farber recontextualizes these images using several processes to expose the malleability of computational photography. She uses open-source software, artificial intelligence, and custom code to complicate the relationship between fictional and real spaces, optical illusions, and data collections, calling into question our trust in GIS and the images they produce. As the virtual landscape becomes increasingly mediated by images, emptiness and artificiality remain.
1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia
February - May 2020.
Solo show curated by Park C. Myers.
1708 is pleased to present Proximal, Distal, Adrift, an exhibition of new work by Liliana Farber. This exhibition will be comprised of autonomous software, performance documentation, video, mobile applications, prints, and text. Farber looks to cartographic histories, storytelling, and machine learning algorithms to develop novel under standings of how contemporary culture engages with data at scales that are human, global, and computational. Proximal, Distal, Adrift inquires: How does internet infrastructure perform and for whom? How does navigation online remain personal (human) while happening through biased algorithmic networks and operating on un known servers? How do information technologies insinuate trust and validate truth?
The platforms and infrastructures that shape the media landscape are also the site of Farber’s artistic practice and output. She uses Google Earth and machine learning networks as sources for navigation and manipulation in the video work Anonymous and the digital print series Terram in Aspectu. A custom smartphone application, Blue Vessel, invites visitors to write anonymous stories by selecting words from Robinson Crusoe. And an autonomous server, located at 1708, send a signal to random servers across the planet –adrift across fiber optic cables–awaiting response to be logged by a thermal printer throughout the exhibition’s duration. Adrift is a performance between machines taking place in the underground channels of internet infrastructure. Proximal, Distal, Adrift unveils the geopolitics, colonialism, and capitalist endeavors that big data and machine intelligence covertly embrace.
Proximal, Distal, Adrift does not eschew the human subject; the title references the very human body that is affected by these technologies. Proximal and distal in anatomy refer to the distance of something to the center of the body –is it nearer or farther? Adrift is unattached and unsupervised, leaving all three parts in a flux of relative location and connection.
Faron Santander, Porto Alegre, Brazil. October 2023 - February 2024. Curated by Mbaraka Group.
Darwin: Origins & Evolution" features works by contemporary artists, iconography, and collections from Brazilian and international institutions. It explores research prior to Darwin, his studies on domesticated species, the relationship of his theory to time, his journey aboard the Beagle, and his visit to Brazilian lands.