Séance Fiction

Curated by Kevin Wu

Artists: James Beckett, Beatrice Glow, Chia-wei Hsu, Huanzhe Hu, Zai Nomura, Iris Touliatou

April 14 - 27, 2022

Consider an unlikely symbiosis: a spirit possessing a machine. As the former’s will overwrites the latter’s programming, the apparatus is now blinking morse codes with its LED lights and vocalizing itself through intercepted radio signals. Contact has been made between our reality and the forgotten past—or is it a long-abandoned future? The spirit remains elusive and unnamable, but through this symbiosis, its virtual influences are given shapes, sounds, and scents—a material presence. And the machine, finally free from the burdens of calculations and extractions, finds itself in the strange landscape of memories and dreams.

The exhibition Séance Fiction is a project of invocation that reimagines the possibilities of technology as a medium. In a more literal sense, some of the featured artworks attempt to grant agency and voice to the deceased or the “supernatural.” On a more abstract level, the artworks, through speculative technologies, propose ways to reconcile with the spirits of lost pasts and futures—cosmologies, ideologies, faiths, and aspirations crudely swept aside to make way for capitalism’s advance—and to fulfill their potential. 

Beatrice Glow’s Mannahatta VR (2016-2019) employs virtual reality technology to render visible an alternative, thriving Manhattan that is enchanted by Indigenous cosmology. Huanzhe Hu’s Cyber Sculpture (2019) features a micro-ecosystem built with recycled computer parts, which enables a cohabitation of living organisms and artifacts. Iris Touliatou’s Emotional Infinity (2016, ongoing) manifests a spectral, affective economy of gift, exchange, and debt through an ensemble of second-hand fans and replicated keys. James Beckett’s Most Notable Car Deaths (2017), a bricolage memorial for a perished computer architect, foregrounds the entangled dreams and ideologies that have lingered with the supercomputer. Zai Nomura’s Echoes (2020, ongoing), drawing inspiration from traditions that associate life with water, repurposes an ink-jet printer to conjure the likeness of deceased loved ones. Chia-wei Hsu’s Spirit Writing (2016) presents the artist’s playful attempt at restoring a Taoist deity’s dismantled temple through ritual and digital technologies alike. 

Ultimately, Séance Fiction aspires to suggest cures to an impasse that results from our disconnect from the past and disbelief in the future. To this end, it reorients technologies to become vessels and conduits of the radical spirits of the “no longer” and the “not yet.”