Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL) and Revolve (revolveavl.org) are pleased to present REDIRECT, a group exhibition curated by Suzanne Dittenber featuring artists Conrad Bakker, Victoria Bradbury, Ben Duvall, Janna Dyk, Benjamin Grosser, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, and Jorge Lucero.

Redirect is an exhibition that critically or philosophically engages with technology, each artist examining the web, social media, mobile devices, or other contemporary technology with a calculated sense of intentionality or caution.

Ben Duvall, a Brooklyn based artist and writer, challenges the notion of things living forever on the web. His Anti-Archive project involves a year where he daily erases all content on his website, replacing it with new content. Jorge Lucero’s work also exerts control over access with his project “Slow Instagram.” Images from Instagram are seen through a haze, obscured by a circular spinning icon due to Lucero’s delayed internet connection.

A similar austerity infiltrates Ben Grosser’s project “Safebook,” a browser extension that, when installed, hides all images, text, video and audio on the site. Empty containers that formerly held content prompt questions: Can Facebook become a safe place? At What Cost? Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s project “Firewall” likewise exposes inherent risk in our technological systems. The not-for-profit socially engaged research and interactive art project compares Google searches in western nations with Baidu searches in China. The results create a space for conversation about internet freedom, censorship and disparities of access.

Workarounds of another sort are employed as artists use analog means to replicate or integrate high-tech frameworks. Conrad Bakker creates carved and painted sculptures representing damaged smartphones with affected screens that provide a subtle critique regarding human dependence on technology, specifically the use of handheld screens to interface with the world. These painted sculptures of defunct devices are themselves awkward representations that fall apart visually, in turn producing a space for (re)considering our relationship to technology. Victoria Bradbury’s work Electronic Ginseng 2.0 is a sculptural ginseng that uses Arduino and custom electronics to sense viewers. The digitally fabricated leaves, stems, and roots move or startle when a viewer approaches the sculpture and hand crafted aspects hide technological underpinnings.

Janna Dyk’s work reminds us of a time before our posting-frenzied present. In 2009, Dyk enacted a project entitled “21 Days,” asking 36 people from 6 countries to send her both an image and a text for 21 days resulting in 756 “spaces” where an image representative of the individual’s life and mental space that day was shared. Participants remarked that the experience was personally transformative. This project stands in contrast to the angst surrounding similar activities on social media today. Her installation of these images marks the 10th anniversary of the project, highlighting changes in our digital social habits over the last decade.

Redirect investigates our contemporary digital lives from various perspectives but always with a lens that looks deeper than the surface treatment. Unsearchable former content, spotlights on web censorship, crystallization of load times, and the physical manifestation of unseen systems come together to create a meditation on our present-day technological attachments.  

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville is the newest part of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network of artist-run spaces and joins locations Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. We are a platform for artists that is curated and organized by a group of artist-volunteers. Our mission is to create the physical, mental, and emotional space for artists to show their work, meet, and exchange ideas on their own terms. TSA GVL will specifically focus on connecting the art communities in Greenville and the greater Southeast to the global art world. TSA was founded in 2009 in Philadelphia and is a 501c3 non-profit organization. For more information please contact greenville@tigerstrikesasteroid.com.

Conrad Bakker
Victoria Bradbury
Ben DuVall
Janna Dyk
Benjamin Grosser
Joyce Yu-Jean Lee
Jorge Lucero