is at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York until 5 February
According to the exhibition鈥檚 introduction, 鈥淒reamlands explores the ways in which artists have used the moving image to articulate technology鈥檚 dramatic influence on how we see and experience the world.鈥� Visiting the show less than a week after the surprise US presidential election result, as the media dissects the way everything from fake news stories on Facebook to wildly impacted the vote, it鈥檚 hard not to see its message as a warning.
Bruce Conner鈥檚 haunting Crossroads (1976) serves as a stark reminder of how easily context and emotion can be manipulated. This montage of declassified military footage of a US nuclear bomb test at the Bikini atoll in 1946 is edited so the vast plume of water caused by the underwater detonation never seems to end, dwarfing and consuming the flotilla of ships watching it. Set to an ethereal electronic soundtrack by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley, the piece hypnotises the watcher with its beauty while being simultaneously horrifying. It is a disturbing example of how thin the line can be between art and propaganda, and how familiar symbols of human aggression, cruelty and destruction can be framed as spectacle through film and music.
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Other pieces explore how our interactions with simple artificial intelligence and bots might shape our perception of reality. One is Philippe Parreno鈥檚 tiresomely titled With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of Life (2014), which runs on two screens. The first shows a visual simulation of John Conway鈥檚 Game of Life, a self-replicating model of cell growth. The other screen bombards the viewer with a strobing selection of hand-drawn images of moths and fireflies. The result is an assault on the senses that blurs our definition of what is real and what is artificial.
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A second example is Ian Cheng鈥檚 Baby feat. Ikaria (2013), which is composed of three chatbots talking endlessly to each other, their interactions animated through computer-generated swirls and shapes. The bots, originally designed for online customer service, are speaking nonsense here, but the animations lend their conversation a strange, self-consistent logic. As concerns emerge over how social media bots were used to promote and broadcast messages during the US election, it鈥檚 hard not to wonder how artificial agents can manipulate our sense of logic and reality.
In the game
Looked at from this angle, the standout work in Dreamlands is Hito Steyerl鈥檚 Factory of the Sun (2015). To view the work, you must enter a dark room lit by a neon, Tron-like grid, meant to represent the kind of motion-capture stage used by Hollywood studios. Sitting in reclining deckchairs, the audience watches a huge screen showing a film made up of fake news reports, military drone footage and 3D animations. It鈥檚 all edited together and presented as though you are playing a video game 鈥� or have found yourself inside the game itself. Scores, rewards and progressions through levels are laid on top of a story of refugees, online celebrities, protests and drone assassinations. In an often cartoonish tone, Factory of the Sun delivers a powerful, dystopian message about how social media have reduced our political reality to a video game-like experience.
Dreamlands is big. Visitors could lose themselves for hours in its darkened spaces and screen-lit hallucinations. Those wanting an escape from the pressures and angst of the outside world may wish to look elsewhere, however. For all the exhibition鈥檚 playfulness and neon glare, its takeaway messages are painfully apposite. Be aware of how easily your perceptions can be manipulated. Technological dreams can flip into nightmares in a second. Stay awake.
