Nature

Excerpt from interview with artist and GUI/GOOEY curator Laura Splan

. . . What I was interested in with GUI/GOOEY was looking at digital and technological representations of the biological world. And particularly in the intersections of the computational and the organic. I work in a lot of different materials and media that is really inspired by conceptual underpinnings. So I wanted to use this idea of GUI/GOOEY to explore connections between the Gui materiality of biology and graphical user interface in technology. So it was, you know, kind of a playful connection in terms of the title. So I’m really interested in how these, kind of virtual representations of organic or biological worlds, influences our understanding of them. And so this first exhibition, people are exploring everything from interfaces to interactivity, to aesthetics of delay, progress bars, glitches, and artificial intelligence, and connecting that to the gooey elements of the biological world, which is a lot of maybe visceral or, you know, kind of drippy animation . . . The work in the exhibition just presents a lot of really exciting ways to kind of reconsider how technology affects our understanding of nature and our constructions of nature. So if we think about, you know, what we call biology, or science, we often think of them as these fixed entities. And if we think about the way that they're represented, we think of those representations as fixed and factual. And, in fact, the tools and technologies that we use to represent the biological world and to construct nature are actually very subjective. And that opens up a lot of really interesting possibilities for artists to, to kind of play with that as material in and of itself, to play with that subjectivity as material, or even to kind of imagine new possibilities through technology, for what nature is, or what nature could be, in terms of our construction, our cultural understanding of it . . .