News/Research

ATC Revisited: Stephanie Syjuco

15 Apr, 2014

ATC Revisited: Stephanie Syjuco

The final ATC talk of the semester on March 31st was a huge success as new Art Practice faculty member Stephanie Syjuco presented “Lossy: On the Politics of Networked Flows and Degraded Systems.”

Stephanie discussed how her artwork capitalized on the notion of lossy, taking advantage of the flow and speed lossy materials often provide, as well as the moment we recognize what has been lost.

For example, in Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy), Stephanie had people crochet versions of their desired designer handbag and then photograph themselves with the item. The objects exhibited lossy as they were replicated in a cheap, homemade fashion, and provided a fascinating economic and political critique on the capitalist system in the process with their diffuse method of communication, so different from normal manufacturing, top down hierarchical structures.

Similarly, her Raiders: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A_____ A___ M_____) displayed a version of object lossy as Stephanie downloaded publicly available images from online databases of Asian arts museums and re-assembled the collection by printing the items and adhering them to laser-cut wood backings, so they appeared as degraded versions of valued cultural objects. Once more, this lossy allowed Stephanie to question how we construct and appropriate culture, and our own colonial relationships.

Meanwhile, in Free Texts: An Open Source Reading Room, Stephanie delves into digital copyright and open source culture when visitors are invited to pull tabs from a wall of flyers that advertize URL’s to download a copy of a text – mostly illegally uploaded by anonymous file sharers.

As Stephanie noted, much of her work deals with finding the ghost in the machine, of the ectoplasm her art.

We are thrilled by the response we received to ATC 2014, and look forward to another stellar season in 2015.

Check out the great photos of Stephanie's talk below: