Only Human at Mana Contemporary
29 April - 2 June ‘18
NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator, presents Only Human, an exhibition at Mana Contemporary, which showcases the work of the first cohort of NEW INC artists participating in the artist-in-residence program at Nokia Bell Labs. Three former NEW INC members, Sougwen Chung, Lisa Park, and Hammerstep (Jason Oremus and Garrett Coleman), collaborated with Nokia Bell Labs researchers to produce new artistic projects inspired or enabled by Bell Labs technologies. As the culmination of this residency program, the exhibition brings together three projects by the artists created over the last year during their residencies.
The three projects in Only Human are focused on themes of human-computer collaboration and intersubjectivity, the nature of interpersonal relationships in a digitally mediated world, surveillance and power dynamics in a technocratic society, and the inevitable compromises that define our symbiotic relationship with technology. Each work strives to experiment with new artistic forms while also offering a speculative take on our existing social structures and the potential implications of emerging technology.
Despite their strong focus on emerging and future technologies, at their core, each of the three projects is ultimately striving to uncover and highlight qualities that seem innately human—such as empathy, intuition, and unspoken forms of communication like gesture, touch, rhythm, and motion. The works consider what distinguishes human nature from the tools that we create, while also serving to underscore that even these tools are inherently a part of us, as they are also a product of our own imaginations.
ABOUT MANA NEW MEDIA PROGRAM
Established in 2016, the Mana New Media Program (NMP) is a community-based platform dedicated to supporting the next generation of new media artists. Through ongoing support in Mana’s two-million square- foot campus, the program aims to foster innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship, and present exhi- bitions and programming at the intersection of art and new media technology.
ABOUT NEW MUSEUM
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one- room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
