"...Electric Op suggests we recognise patterns of interference in the material as well as social conditions of bodies, software and hardware. Laura Splan's Squint (2016) is a greyscale Jacquard-loom tapestry of abstract wave forms that are based on her own facial expressions, recorded via facial electrodes. The data appeared as wave patterns that she then used as the basis for her weaving process. The loom's historic relevance to computing gets woven into a narrative of developments linking body and technology....The performativity of such works, reactivating our generally pacified interactions with media, calls for an awareness of the myriad forces that impact how we see, think and move. Electric Op presents a genealogy for digital art distinct from the art, design or new-media lineages that are now well established. The show’s cybernetic phenomenology challenges a Newtonian cause-and-effect worldview, proposing a more complex system of relations and perspectives increasingly relevant to the tangled ecological, political and technological situations we face globally..."
