The technologies developed in Silicon Valley have intrigued and inspired artistic experimentation for more than three decades and, today, pave a way toward the future. Almost Human: Digital Art from the Permanent Collection is a year-long installation that highlights the ways in which contemporary artists use the materials and forms of digital and emergent technologies—from custom computer electronics to virtual reality, and early robotics to artificial intelligence. The exhibition features recent acquisitions and works made in the last three decades that experiment with technology’s tools and systems.

Leveraging SJMA’s important media collection, the Museum is leading regional arts education that promotes the intersection of technology and the arts. This exhibition will provide the primary resource for educational programs in the 2019-2020 school year, reflecting new national arts education standards that added media art as a new guideline for shaping student learning and achievement in today's multimedia society.

Exploring themes of empathy, the body, perception, and systems logic, artists in the exhibition include Andrea Ackerman, Jim Campbell, Ian Cheng, Petra Cortright, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Zara Houshmand and Tamiko Thiel, Tony Oursler, Alan Rath, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jennifer Steinkamp, Diana Thater, and Bill Viola.

Some artists explore how people interact with technology and, in turn, how technology affects the user. In Jim Campbell’s Self- Portrait (with Disturbances) (1991–92), the artist’s digital self-portrait appears to return the viewer’s gaze from within a

television monitor. Blurring the lines between subjective and objective modes of perception, his image is distorted by the viewer’s own body movements recorded with a video camera and seen as shadowy “disturbances” on screen—the viewer momentarily becomes a part of the work. Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks for You (2016), a recent acquisition to the permanent collection, is a “live simulation,” that begins with basic programmed properties but is left to endlessly evolve like a virtual ecosystem through states of chaos, perfection, collapse, and recombination.

Using video game design, other works in the exhibition transport us beyond real time into virtual fantasy spaces. Jacolby Satterwhite’s Domestika (2017), another recent acquisition, immerses the viewer in an underground gay night club in Brooklyn. Experienced in virtual reality, this queer, safe space presents a world of infinite possibility. Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand’s single- player video game Beyond Manzanar (2000) overlays the histories of Japanese American internment and the experiences of Iranian Americans threatened with mass deportation during the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, all within the confines of the Manzanar concentration camp.

Still other artists use technology to bring us closer to the medium itself, disrupting the boundary between the apparatus and the viewer’s experience. Despite their mechanical appearance, Alan Rath’s robotic sculptures are uncannily human; they pulse, vibrate, breathe, and wiggle. Like bodily surrogates, they remind us of our increasingly close corporeal relationship to technology. Jennifer Steinkamp similarly draws on the relationship between object and viewer. Steinkamp’s Fly to Mars (no. 1) (2004) is a hyperreal digital animation of tree moving without beginning or end through the cycles of the seasons.

Rather than immerse the viewer in a narrative world, the tree’s abstract movement mimics our own bodily experience of living, breathing, and dying. It awakens sensations of our physical being in relation to the projected image.

From game design to surveillance technology, television to computer animations, Almost Human presents a range of mechanisms and media exploring how technology reflects and shapes our humanity.