Almost Human

The technologies developed in Silicon Valley have intrigued and inspired artistic experimentation for generations, and today, pave a way toward the future. Almost Human: Digital Art from the Permanent Collection highlights the ways in which contemporary artists use the materials and forms of digital and emergent technologies.

When machines mimic corporeality and language, or offer alternative virtual worlds beyond our bodily experience, technology challenges our understanding of human subjectivity and embodiment. Through a range of media—from custom computer electronics to virtual reality, and early robotics to artificial intelligence—artists in this exhibition explore themes of empathy and difference, the body, perception, adaptation, and the logic of electronic and biological systems. Their works consider how technological tools like video game design, computer animation, and surveillance mechanisms reflect and shape our humanity.

Drawn entirely from the permanent collection, Almost Human features recent acquisitions and artworks made in the last three decades, including Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s landmark sculptural sound installation Listening Post (2002–06), which turns chatroom dialogue culled from across the web—read out loud by a computer-generated voice and displayed in a dynamic algorithm across 231 screens—into a six-chapter composition that is rhythmic, textured and at turns eerily melodic. New acquisitions include Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks for You (2016), a tablet-based augmented reality simulation that endlessly self-evolves, like a virtual ecosystem; and Jacolby Satterwhite’s Domestika (2017), the artist’s first virtual reality work.

Other artists in the exhibition include Andrea Ackerman, Jim Campbell, Petra Cortright, Zara Houshmand and Tamiko Thiel, Tony Oursler, Alan Rath, Jennifer Steinkamp, Diana Thater, and Bill Viola.

Leveraging its important media collection, SJMA is a leader in regional arts education that promotes the intersection of technology and the arts. This exhibition provides the primary resource for educational programs in the 2019–20 school year, reflecting revised national arts education standards that have recently added media art as a new guideline for shaping student learning and achievement in today’s multimedia society.