Refamiliarization: Day 1
Wednesday, September 29
12–1pm
Curator tour for BCNM community, led by Justin Berner and Julia Irwin
430pm
Official exhibition opening with light refreshments
530–7pm
Performance
The Estate of Our Friend Sylvia, Ziv Schneider and Bethany Tabor
Schneider and Tabor will preside over an NFT estate sale auction for the recently-deceased virtual Instagram influencer, known mononymously as Sylvia. Please do join us as we celebrate the very full, yet brief life of this virtual personage and bid on the rights to her delightful, digital belongings.
7–8pm
Screening
Composite Tests: Retrieval by Robert Rapoport, MILK by Hyun-min Ryu, and Corporate Personhood Symposium by Rudolf Lingens
Three short films that deal with questions of automation and digital personhood: Robert Rapoport’s Composite Tests: Retrieval meditates on machine learning and digital surveillance; MILK by Hyun-min Ryu offers a playful exercise in human endurance against everyday forms of nonhuman sensing; Rudolf Lingens’s Corporate Personhood Symposium presents a dark, farcical take on constructing identity in digital, late-capitalist society.
About Refamiliarization
A century ago, Viktor Shklovsky introduced the concept of “defamiliarization” to describe art’s revolutionary potential. Facing a world beset by habituation, automatism, and alienation, he proclaims that art “exists so that one may recover the sensation of life.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has effected a thoroughgoing sense of defamiliarization — even the most quotidian habits have become strange. It has awakened a reflexivity in our relations to the objects of everyday life, making us more aware of the clothes we wear when leaving the house. Simultaneously, though, the domestic sphere has become the site for further habituation to technologies that imperceptibly extract value from our every utterance and gesture. While some seemingly intractable institutional norms may have been temporarily interrupted, others have been fortified. A sustained moment of emergency, the pandemic obliges us to assess what must be recast and resisted and what, if anything, may be recovered with care.
Refamiliarization brings together works of art — from performances and installations, to videos and sculptures — that speculate on and give form to new versions of what could be “familiar.”
You can read more about the series at the Refamiliarizaton exhibition home page here. You can also check out the Refamiliarization website here.