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.
Center for Book Arts, NYC
April - June 2022. Curated by
Anthony Tino and Shahar Kramer.
Participating artists: Michael
Rakowitz; Mina Shoaib; Hardworking
Goodlooking; Jumbo; Matjaž Tančič;
Mindy Seu; Betsy Damon; Liliana
Farber; Irmak Canevi & Marie
von Heyl; Abie Franklin; T.
Shanaathanan; Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing,
& Zeng Xiaojun.
Anthony Tino and Shahar Kramer curated the work of fifteen artists for the exhibition Beyond Codex: Living Archives, which envisions archiving as a method to reimagine the potential of publishing. The exhibition focuses on strategies of the artist as researcher, highlighting the importance of archives and archiving as records of history, and as evolving spaces for inquiry and discourse.
As a beginning, rather than an end, the living archive extends the notion of its application beyond a preservational position; rethinking the power structures of the archival system and its presumed authority as an institution of itself.
Beyond Codex: Living Archives is a meditation on the crossing and diverging pathways between personal narratives and public records, as well as the notion of accessibility within organized systems. From family records to online indexes, Beyond Codex includes works that challenge the conventions of publishing and archiving, while generating needed space for often-times under-recognized cultural heritage and texts.
