Are you living in a computer simulation?

How human lives are shaped and structured by simulations and imagined realities.

Opening Friday 28 June 6pm-8pm
Talk Saturday 20 July 4 pm

29 June – 27 July 2024

With
Roy Ananda
Horse
In Her Interior (V Barratt and Francesca da Rimini)
Danny Jarratt
Ash Tower
Suzanne Treister
VNS MATRIX

ROY ANANDA
Roy Ananda is a visual artist, writer, and educator practicing on Kaurna Country (Tarndanya/Adelaide Plains). His objects, drawings, installations, texts, and videos variously celebrate popular culture, play, process, and the very act of making. Since 2001 he has exhibited prolifically around Australia and since 2004 has lectured in drawing and sculpture at Adelaide Central School of Art. Ananda’s solo projects have included A is for Anvil (2006) at West Space (Melbourne), The Devourer (2013) at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, and Slow crawl into infinity (2014) at the Samstag Museum of Art (Adelaide). His work has been included in such significant survey exhibitions as Primavera (2004) at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), the Australian Drawing Biennial (2004) at the Drill Hall Gallery (Canberra), and the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds at the Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide). In 2017, Ananda completed a post-graduate research degree at the University of South Australia with a specific focus on the intersection of pop-culture fandom and contemporary art practice. He is the subject of the 2021 South Australian Living Artist Publication, published by Wakefield Press.

HORSE
Horse likes carrots and oats and long walks on the beach. Horse is comprised of many different parts, notably Gilbert Garden and Freya-Francezka Holfeld. Horse believes in the power of peace, love, unity, and respect. Neigh!

IN HER INTERIOR
V Barratt and Francesca da Rimini formed In Her Interior (IHI) in 2015 to co-create texts,
and mixed media and performance works for site-specific installations. As two of the
four co-founders of cyberfeminist art group VNS Matrix (est. 1991), Barratt and da
Rimini have contributed to global critiques of gender and technology for decades.
Unfaithful followers of constraint-based experimentation across various art traditions,
IHI’s work often involves generous accomplices including local land custodians, sound
artists, birdwatchers, sculptors, ceramicists, writers, philosophers, gleaners. Projects
have manifested online and in galleries, performance venues, repurposed industrial
settings, academic environments, and zines—in Graz, Hobart, Canberra, New York,
Helsingør, London, Berlin, Adelaide, Byron Bay, Sydney, and Melbourne. Collaborations
and commissions include The Sirens’ Syrinx, 56k calls from the undernet in the 1990s;
CryptoCunterie: Each Rock a Word; Tell me what you see outside; The Sorrows of the
Mulloway; This Platform Life: a command line memoir; Tender Alembicians Suite; Mary
had a little alembic; Xenoblood; Third Life: Xenokin and queer morphologies in
LambdaMOO; Into the Gyre: Technomancy for Meme Lords and Data Witches;
Interruptions, iterations, intimations and peregrinations; mMyth is is; The Darkening:
Language lined with flesh lined with language; B.A.B.S.; echolalia: golden iterations;
Hexing the Alien; Cryptocrystalline, and Songs for Skinwalking the Drone.
https://www.inherinterior.net/

DANNY JARRATT
Danny Jarratt (b. 1990 Kaurna Land, Adelaide) is an emerging queer digital artist exploring installation art. His work reflects a keen interest in the intersection of pop culture, queer theory and resistance.

ASH TOWER
Ash Tower (he/him) is an artist/researcher based on Kaurna Country. His materially-diverse practice investigates contested knowledges by making objects which draw together disparate cultural histories into conversation. This often features themes like the history of architecture and technology, archaeology, subcultural communities, and science fiction. He has shown work nationally, including the churchie (IMA, Meanjin), Studios 2022 (ACE, Kaurna Yerta), Via Purifico (Pig Melon, Boorloo). In 2024 he received an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship to study at the British School at Rome.

SUZANNE TREISTER
Suzanne Treister (b.1958 London UK) studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982) and is based in London and the French Pyrennes, having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin. Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Utilising various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour, Treister’s work has engaged with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert forces at work in the world. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

VNS MATRIX
Australian (Adelaide/Tarntanya) feminist art collective VNS Matrix emerged in 1991 to challenge the male-dominated culture of technology and cyberspace. Their installations, happenings, posters, games, and manifestos explore the sexual, political, and aesthetic dimensions of gendered relationships with technology. They coined the term cyberfeminism to capture their radical vision of empowerment, embodiment, and resistance in the digital age. Notable works including A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century have been widely translated and circulated. Their legacy continues to manifest, inspiring new generations of artists and activists. VNS Matrix is Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and V Barratt.

All photos: Sam Roberts