Upcoming Events
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March 17th, 2022 | 5PM PDT | 8PM EDT
"believe in us but not too much" Exhibition Opening on Twitter Spaces
Join us on Twitter to celebrate the opening of Silicon Valet's first gallery show! We'll be live with the artist, Adrian Pijoan, and a number of special surprise guests.
Past Events
January 27, 2021 | 9AM PST | 1PM EST | 11PM GMT | 12AM CEST
Conversation w/ LOT RESIDENT 10 Commonolithic -- Gasmask VR, Virtual Protest, and Digital Activism
Wade Wallerstein will be in conversation with LOT RESIDENT 10 Commonolithic, talking about his monumental project Gasmask VR. Gasmask VR creates the situation for viewers to fabricate their own tool of protest using materials that come-to-hand. Viewers can use the presence of their body and mind to explore the social, spatial, material and political dynamics of exercising the inalienable right to demonstrate.
Commonolithic is currently seeking support for Gasmask VR on Kickstarter. Participatory rewards are available at various tiers of support. Please check out the campaign and consider contributing if you can.
Head to Silicon Valet's Twitch Channel for more information.
About the artist:
Commonolithic considers how images become objects, bridging the gap between lens-based practices and a sculptural concern with the imaginative dimension of materiality. Through sculpture, print and virtual reality artworks, Commonolithic develops spatial and material experiences from digital image sources. The work addresses the contemporary moment as one of a politics of time bleeding into a politics of space.
Born in England, Commonolithic (Watson) has an MFA in sculpture from Concordia university, Montreal Canada. His work has been exhibited in New York, USA (Flux Factory, Art Helix), London, Manchester and Bristol, UK (Hackney Wicked, Cornerhouse Micro-commission, Plan 9), Helsinki, Finland (Cable Factory), Medellin, Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Aarhus, Denmark (Spanien 19c), in Montreal where he is based (Sporobole, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Stewart Hall Gallery) and online in the Wrong Biennale 2019/20. Commonolithic was artist-in-residence at Sporobole Centre en art actuel, Sherbrooke CA and The Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin, and was the recipient of a Research and Creation grant from Canada Council for the arts and a Grant for the arts from Arts Council England.
January 29 - February 1, 2021 | Daily 3PM EST | 6PM EST | 11PM GMT | 12AM CEST
"Drowning In My Sleep" Augmented Reality Video Art Screening w/ Nathan Harper
Join Silicon Valet LOT RESIDENT 11 Nathan Harper as he takes over Silicon Valet’s virtual parking lot. While select portions of his new work, “Drowning In My Sleep” will be shared via our Instagram channel, the entire film will be screened daily on our Twitch Channel.
In his work, Harper explores the materiality of images through regular experimentations with the relationship between physical and digital realities. After appropriating and reappropriating digital files, Harper reconstitutes them either in physical reality with dirt or virtual reality with 3D modeled objects and simulated environments. Harper attempts to uncover how reality shifts alter both our perception and inherent quality of these images, and how they might contribute to an egregore, or “collective group mind.”
Head to Silicon Valet’s Twitch Channel to tune in. More info on our website.
About the artist:
Nathan Harper is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Florence, Alabama. He is a graduate candidate at the University of North Texas pursuing his MFA in New Media. His work has recently been included in international virtual exhibitions with the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art and The Barcú Virtual Art Fair in Columbia. His interests include semiotics, hyperreality, and digital identity.
September 4th, 2020
Virtual Opening for Dismal Sessions 001-021 (online exhibition)
Europe: 7:00 PM BST / 8 PM CEST
Americas: 7:00 PM PDT / 10:00 PM EDT
Swamp angels:
Body Drift, Never Worse, Terence Sharpe, RJM Vanderheyden & Emilie Ruitinga, IZEY, Sol Bailey-Barker, Alexandra Koumantaki, Mark Leckey, Amy Cutler & Graham Dunning, Crisis, Kid Xanthrax, An Trinse, Gerard Carson, Billie0cean & Sol Ring, ¥€$Si Perse, Michelle Hannah, Lexxi Doomer (whiterose), Thomas Yeomans, SWARMM, Agnese Cebere, Anna Mikkola & Pekka Airaxin
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Dismal Sessions is an ongoing series of dank mixes, fermented visions, sacred texts, trash vector collect calls, ambient occlusions, cursed ASMR, sublime leaks and bad datasets; an ecstatic content collapse. The Dismal Sessions are audio-visual artefacts by various visual artists, musicians, DJs, avatars, producers, machines, sprites, poets, homies, and more. This virtual exhibition brings together the first 21 Dismal Sessions. It is a sprawling underground festival in which to immerse; a thick tangle of uneven and combined heresies in which to lose yourself.
Emphasising the murky boundaries between platform-mediated realities, the diverse range of practices represented in the Dismal Sessions ferment a post-digital conspiracy. Shiny renders clang dissonantly against deep-fried aesthetics in multi-modal works whose variegated roots reach towards cataclysmic and sometimes blasphemous understandings of contemporary culture. Built upon the long and fractalized histories of countless subcultures, subreddits and subterranean secrets, the Dismal Sessions sprout from the disasters and dissociation that define being in the world today.
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Most Dismal Swamp is a project that operates at different scales and registers; through multiple and simultaneous dimensions. It is an art platform, a social media account, a mixed reality biome, a curatorial MMORPG, a party, a forecasting laboratory, a miasma, a fiction, and a record label.
Most Dismal Swamp invokes the swamp as a conceptual model for understanding and navigating our present mixed reality paradigm. Simultaneously solid land and fluid water yet also neither, swamps embody a topology of muddy indistinction, and the horizonless territory of context collapse. They engender a taxonomic heresy that disallows easy separation and parsing of solid forms. This is significant for understanding a contemporary condition that has supplanted the teleology of modernity and the fragmentation of postmodernity with the entangled simultaneity of multiple, nested logics. A mixed reality paradigm that blurs, combines and superposes fact and fiction, nature and culture, technology and occult, virtual and real, authentic and synthetic, liquid and solid, science and mysticism, self and other, dry silicon and wet biology, online and offline, human and nonhuman... From these fetid recombinations, a night science of swamp angels and dank enlightenment emerges and flourishes like moss across the cold stone of modern ruins: globally variable synaesthesia intensifies!
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New Art City is a virtual exhibition platform for new media art with a focus on copresence and experiencing digital art together in its native format. Shows are real-time multiplayer and accessed using a web browser, with no need to register, install extra software or enter any personal information. Using built-in tools to manage artworks and room layouts anyone can create a show and hold a virtual exhibition online.
August 13th, 2020 | 11am PST
VRChat Artist Talk w/ Lot Resident Carson Lynn
For Silicon Valet's first ever event in virtual reality, we're hosting a conversation with Lot Resident Carson Lynn. As a of his Residency, we will have a discussion followed by an afterparty within a new, custom space in social virtual reality platform VRChat that the artist built using digital assets from his recent major installation "I Want."
To RSVP for this event, shoot an e-mail to info@siliconvalet.org. Then, add Unhappens and MissJuicy as friends on VRChat to be invited into the space on the date.
VRChat is free, and works on both headsets and desktop computers. To download, make sure that you have Steam installed. You can access VRChat as a free download via the Steam store.
While space in VRChat will be limited, the conversation will also be livestreamed to Facebook & our Twitch Channel.
About the artist:
Carson Lynn is an artist based out of Southern California who through the usage of digital materials, sublime landscapes, and exploration within gamespaces, creates artworks as a queering of heterocentric photographic conventions and game systems. Carson is working towards receiving his MFA from @artcenteredu with a projected graduation in September 2020. He received his BFA in Photography and Imaging, also from ArtCenter, in 2015.
Through his expansive yet highly focused practice, Lynn deconstructs and recontextualizes virtual and interactive spaces. With a heavy emphasis on the traditions of machinima, his works — which exist as videos, digital stills, collages, interactive game spaces, generative programs, physical prints, soundscapes, and more — generate entirely new phenomenologies born from familiar and highly popular virtual experiences and digital assets. These intimate and profoundly personal reimaginings offer safe & queer-friendly spaces outside of the misogynistic, homophobic, and hyper-masculine environments stereotypical of popular gaming culture.
Carson Lynn took over Silicon Valet's Instagram account from August 1st - 2nd.
August 20th, 2020 | 2pm PST
"A Woman with the Technology": Film Screening with Ziyang Wu
Join us for a virtual film screening of Ziyang Wu's video work, "A Woman With the Technology." The screening will be followed by a short Q&A session with the artist on Silicon Valet's Twitch Channel.
"A Woman With the Technology" examines how an individual’s online experience becomes personalized by the Internet algorithm and creates what Internet activist Eli Pariser coined the “filter bubble.” As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural and ideological bubbles.
Wu began by recording his daily social media practice over a period of three months using a series of keywords that represent his interests as initial inputs, including “censorship,” “surveillance,” “trade war,” “Asian experience,” “identity,” “Neocolonialism” and many others, and created an archive. He then created imagery through data analysis such as the frequency changes of the keywords in the form of sketches, diagrams, and spreadsheets.
Through image detection technology, the three-channel video visually presents what information the Internet algorithm “sees” in the archives and how the “filter bubbles” are inter-connected. Finally, he trained an AI Chatbot using all the collected data. Through his conversation with the AI Chatbot whose knowledge equals all the information in the archive, “we” created a video script and Wu made an animated-video based on the script.
About the artist:
Ziyang Wu is a visual artist living and working in New York where he is currently teaching at the School of Visual Arts. Wu earned his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and his BFA from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts.
Ziyang Wu has shown his work internationally in China, North America, and Europe including the solo exhibitions at Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York and CO2 Gallery in Florence, and group exhibitions at the Medici Palace and the Milan Design Week in Italy, the Today Art Museum and the Times Art Museum in Beijing, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, the Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota, the Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art and the Brown University in Rhode Island, the Academy Art Museum in Maryland, The Hole Gallery and Microscope Gallery in New York.
Wu has received numerous fellowships and awards including the MacDowell Colony Fellowship and Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) Fellowship at Alfred University in 2019, Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship by Northern Lights.mn and Jerome Foundation in 2017, the AICAD Teaching Fellowship by Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design in 2016, the Winner of The ROCI Road to Peace exhibition by Robert Rauschenberg Art Foundation and Artsy in 2015, and the Best Creative Award in Milan Design Week – Oriental Design Week in 2013. He is currently an Experiment on Art and Technology Track Member at NEW INC, New Museum.