BRANDON TAY

Curated by digital curator Rafi Abdullah, Form & Agency marks Brandon Tay’s inaugural solo exhibition. It introduces a fresh body of work that delves into the material nature of the digital realm. The exhibition features five 3D-printed sculptures and an immersive gallery environment that offers live simulations from virtual ecosystems, which can also be accessed online. The exhibition operates on three levels: the physical sculptures in the gallery, the virtual components of the artworks, and an interactive game simulation. These layers operate both independently and in connection with one another.

Central to the exhibition are five dynamic ‘agents’ embodied in 3D-printed sculptures, each embedded with screens, sensors, and networking capabilities. These sculptures symbolise various forms of intelligence, such as adversarial neural networks, natural systems, blackboxing, cybernetic decision trees, and reinforcement learning. Together, they transform the gallery into an interactive space where visitors can observe the behaviours and evolution of a dynamic environment populated by chimeric hybrid lifeforms, all realised through game-engine technology.

Accompanying the sculptures is a real-time livestream projection that depicts a digital environment where these agents exist as conceptual entities within a memetic ecosystem. This projection provides context for the agents in their simulated habitat. The exhibition as a whole treats the sculptures as gateways into the internal world of potential non-human entities, hinting at alternate dynamic systems and novel ways of comprehending intelligence.

Operating in conjunction with the exhibition proper, a collaborative wikipedia has been constructed and can be accessed publicly, expanding on the worlds in which these anomalous objects have arrived from, open to the public as a portal to co-create and manifest the potentialities of unresolved futures.

https://form-and-agency.fandom.com/wiki/FORM_AND_AGENCY_WikiForm & Agency invites you to engage with the interplay between art and technology, encouraging you to explore new avenues of understanding intelligence and expanding your perception of digital art’s possibilities.

PARALLEL PROGRAMMES

(M)across Cultures - Session #3 - Forms & Agencies, with Brandon Tay and Bogna Konior

Date: Saturday, 16th September 2023, 1 - 3pm
****Venue: NTU CCA, The Screening Room, Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
Limited seating available. RSVP at https://tinyurl.com/FormAndAgencyTalk

The conversation will unpack the premises of the exhibition, straddling thematic considerations across the individual and relational aspects of and between agencies and sentience. The session will end with a discussion of the Japanese anime television series Parasyte (Madhouse, 2014).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media Arts department, and co-director of AI & Culture Center at NYU Shanghai. In 2023, she is a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid. Her work on digital culture, philosophy of new media, and posthumanism has been presented internationally, recently including the Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, e-flux, and the Ljubljana Biennale.

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