MA Curatorial Practice presents a virtual discussion with artist Zach Blas and curator Christiane Paul about the artist’s work and its ramifications for contemporary society under the regime of the digital.

Blas uses research-based and artistic practices to scrutinize the relationship between digital technologies and systems of power and the beliefs that they advance. Critical of today’s big technological corporations and their use and abuse of theological narratives and symbolism, Blas extensively considers the fictions, desires, fantasies, histories and icons increasing in today’s technological language, PR and mediation. Looking into three of his recent works that include representations of digital divine entities, which deal with judgment (processing), prophecy (prediction) and immortality (the data self), Blas points to both the liberatory potentialities and political challenges of the present posed by the deployment of religious signifiers.

Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving images, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction. Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor of Media Studies at the New School, New York.

Talk

The Algorithmic State: God Is AI

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