Martine Syms: Neural Swamp

This exhibition is the first in the United States to feature Martine Syms’s newly commissioned multichannel video installation, Neural Swamp. Marking the artist’s most ambitious experiment in machine learning technology to date, Neural Swamp embraces the strategies of sport, cinema, and surveillance to investigate what it means to be Black and a woman in a hyper-digitized world.

Created for the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, Neural Swamp builds upon the artist’s research into machine systems and the ways in which structures of power control our lives, inform our behaviors, occupy our minds, and shape how we see the world. Conjuring the legacies of Afrofuturism, Cyberfeminism, and the Black radical tradition, in this new work, Syms uses complex computer algorithms to challenge the gendered and racialized politics of images and the systems that allow for their production and consumption.

This exhibition will also feature four additional videos from Syms’s Kita’s World series that further elaborate on questions of race, gender, and labor. In these works, Syms creates an immersive environment in which being human is inextricably linked to the impact and interruptions of systemic failure and technological innovation.

Syms is the second recipient of the Future Fields Commission, which supports groundbreaking new work in film, video, digital media, sound, and performance by leading artists of our time. The Commission is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy.