My studio practice is based in how behavior is manipulated by designed physical and social environments: like how a city can be designed for its residents to be happy, or how a crime boss uses language to maintain power in a criminal hierarchy. I create fictional satires of these environments, attempting to extract specific phenomena or behavior from the people, objects, and things that occupy them.

My research lies in between histories of media, technology and globalization. I investigate these themes through performance and sculptural installations. Specifically, my practice is focused on objects that are produced from global circuits and their embedded codes, encompassing both the technological and sociological. Through excavating the history of objects designed for a specific utilitarian purpose, I expose the foundation on which they are built.

It is important to investigate the flows of what is considered “mundane” due to what it reveals about society. A nation’s values are deeply embedded in how society’s economic structure which encompasses class, ability, gender, race and sexuality.

Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism refers to the purest form of capitalism as the information society. Today, this wealth of information is in excess, considered as “junk.” The “junk” of information found in common-place objects, such as the satellite and shipping container, reveals present society’s organization of power and culture. Focusing on American history, I question the foundation of this exchange by dissecting its embedded sociological and technological codes. I am interested in probing these systems because if we understand a system, we can see what is missing and imagine it differently.

Jeffrey Charles Stanley | JCS is an artist whose multimedia practice incorporates video, performance, and found and made objects which presents critical statements about sociopolitics, mass media, and the art world. While contained in those worlds, JCS will often use internal, sometimes dreamlike, logic bound by literal, metaphysical, liminal, and ethical zones. Based on an interest in Situationist and phenomenological aesthetic theories (e.g., media aesthetics), Stanley investigates the art and media landscapes with dynamic humor and emotion. JCS adds, stretches, and re-purposes media until it starts to lose shape, all in an attempt to change the viewer’s perception of social archetypes and cultural artifacts.

My work explores intersubjectivity and interpersonal relationships in the technophilic contemporary society. I’m fascinated by the ways human to human relationships mutate via the virtual, with and through smart objects. This could be two people in neighboring rooms, across the world, or sitting next to each other, with a smart object between them there is no longer just two pulses. My practice is largely thinking and writing about these experiences and relationships. After a while this turns into expression in a visual, digital, narrative, and experiential form. I gravitate towards writing, video making, installation, and at the moment find it important to treat files like objects too.

My ideology stems from technology, and how it serves as the lynchpin for the relationship between regulation and aesthetics. Each of these three fields are in constant flux, progressing into new territory while referencing the past. I look at the structures that formulate and dictate the trajectories for law, technology, and aesthetics, and how they disenfranchise those without power or status. My work, which is often collaborative, tries to vocalize the concerns of the marginalized while undermining language oppressors use to demean them. My process often illuminates contradictions and complexities in public policy, legalese, and corporate strategy, allowing those who are negatively targeted to appropriate these tools and subvert the systems that tries to suppress new forces of power.

My work explores ordinary, overlooked facets of life and makes them a little larger and a little more important. I use video and performance to examine the small parts of everyday life. My life is mostly not-dramatic and only occasionally exciting. I like exploring that and finding the banal things that we all have in common and then making weird, short stories out of that. I use video and performance to bring these stories to life. I find it meaningful and cathartic to make hay out of the small things.

Diane Zhou lives and works in New York. Through painting, embroidery, comics, drawings, gifs, and web browser-based collages, she makes visible the cultural and psychological implications of her relationship to cuteness, consumption, and feelings of geographical rootedness, as informed by her existence within the loosely defined “Asian diaspora”. She focuses on objects and landscapes drawn from personal experiences, history, and pop culture. The coexistence of these real and fictional subjects in her work is an analog to the unbounded gooey feelings of desire, connection, and alienation that underpin categories of racial/ethnic identity, and the way those feelings tend to leak out of neat categorizations. She hopes to create new ways for culturally un-tethered diasporic individuals to find common ground that goes beyond geographical/biological roots, and to bring more complexity into our conceptions of identity.