Videos
Mary Flanagan
2022
Time-based media installation comprised of 2 video projectors, 2 screens, and oil paintings on canvas
A Commission by Moody Center for the Arts for Fall 2022 exhibition, Urban Impressions
In this commission, I use my typical approach of machines as collaborators and imagine feminist futures of places and cities. Three oil paintings are shown alongside two videos: one featuring the generation of images created to explore the theme, and a second pursued in a massive collaboration with Rice University students as they contributed images through a campus-wide call for work that is intended to add new contributions of student voices throughout the lifespan of the exhibition. The images in the paintings are snapshots, moments of transformation and metamorphosis, frozen in time, mid process in a sequence. They are not results of a process, but rather, moments in the process.
As someone who has always questioned any hard distinction between the natural and the artificial, I seek to move beyond these binaries towards envisioning forms of future interdependence. For Urban Impressions, I used AI systems to render imaginings of speculative architectures. I intentionally add into the training the work of female architects to inform the hypothetical nature of the process. I compute the images, produce a video of the process, and create paintings, capturing snapshots in mid-creation. In a way, I act as a medium for the results the AI produces, rendering the images into paintings (oil on canvas) that form a secondary loop in the collaborative process between artist and machine. These architectures become a feminist voice in the obscured domains of AI.
Some theorists note that the notion of the “technosphere” — a combination of technological, geological and the non-human– is actively shaping the planet as we know it and acts as a mediating force between the materiality and consciousness of life and non-life on the planet (1). The technosphere is not simply the realm of information technology, however; it takes on physical properties as well, like the biosphere. In this view, technology is integrated, omnipresent — woven into the complex web of systems that link raw material, built environments, agriculture, communication, transport, financial markets, governments, people and culture (2). What better way to collaborate across these divides than to collude with AIs to create novel feminist futures?
My approach is multifacted, and my use of various media forms a nest or a network around the ideas for the work. What would an ancient tree merged into a downtown office tower look like? How might these two forms complement each other and sustain each other? What if women were the sole architects from this point forward? How would the anthropocene facilitate the merging of traditionally separate forms of knowledge, moving away from binary, Cartesian-style categorization?
In the anthropocene, such mergers between natural and artificial construction by humans and machines can serve as non-cynical, even utopian visions of hope.
The installation not only explores the juxtaposition of nature/culture or nature/human-made, but also temporality: influenced by my meditation practice, the work also explores different temporalities embodied within the metropolis. The student-contributed images stream by in a flurry, while my video moves more slowly.
Special Thanks to the Moody Center, the Rice Humanities funding body, and Lavender Juma, assistant.
Citing 1) Peter Haff (2012). “Technology and human purpose: The problem of solids transport on the Earth’s surface.” Earth System Dynamics 3: 149–56; and 2) Peter Haff (2013) “Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well-Being”, Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 395, pp. 301–309.
Exhibitions
Screening/Events: the video along has shown at the Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival, 29 November 2022, Los Angeles and Toronto; Cannes World Film Festival Semi-Finalist, 27 October 2022; Rome International Movie Awards, 4 October 2022; Experimental Category, Swedish International Film Festival, Arvica Sweden, 10 October 2022; Official Selection, Best Shorts Competition, 20 September 2022; Experimental Indie Short Fest, Los Angeles International Film Festival, 21 October 2022; Berlin Indie Film Festival Best Experimental Film of the month award September 2022; Hong Kong World Film Festival Best Experimental Film, October 2022; Avalonia Festival of Short Films VII, Best Experimental Short, 5 November 2022 Jacksonville Florida; Vienna International Film Awards, Vienna, Austria, Honorable Mention, 11 December 2022; Animation Marathon 28-30 November 2022 (online); Honorable Mention of WSXA Amsterdam, International Awards 2022; Wildsoundfestival Canada, 17 January 2023 Climate Shorts.
“Urban Impressions” Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston TX, 16 September – 17 December 2022
Press
- Silverman, Dwight. “If You Can Type It, You Can See It: Text2image AI Turns Words Into Pictures,” Houston Chronicle, 20 October 2022
- Artist Spotlight, “Metaphysical Reclamations,” Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, September 2022
- Elliot, Amber. “15 artists explore the concept of a modern metropolis in ‘Urban Impressions’ on Rice campus,” Houston Chronicle, 19 September 2022
- Gerbich-Pais, Herbert. “Moody’s new exhibit deconstructs the built environment,” The Rice Thresher, 13 September 2022