Artificial intelligence, surveillance mechanisms, and communications infrastructures contour the essence of our world and how we experience daily life. Often made invisible, as if they were always naturalized aspects of our collective existence, these technologies inevitably inform the way we present ourselves, engage with others, and view the world beyond our immediate vicinity. In Behind the Cloud, artists explore our relationships with digital technologies and interrogate various systems of control through a wide array of media: programming software, crowdfunding sites, video, photography, algorithms, sculpture, printmaking, and social media.

Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez explores how social media and other digital communications allow us to connect virtually across varying degrees of distance and often in fragmented ways, fueling complicated notions of diaspora. Everything is connected through Google Earth, as Liliana Farber’s works imply, linking the corporation’s insatiable thirst for data, the precision of machine learning, and the historic obsessions and violence of early colonialism. Using data collected from 3D lidar scans of a youth detention center in Lansing, Michigan, Dan Paz & Aviva Avnisan map the architecture of the facility from the outside in, gesturing towards the history of panoptic surveillance. Through an analysis of contemporary pop culture, specifically Hollywood movies depicting Black people, Dennis Delgado’s work underscores the role of facial recognition, corporate surveillance apparatus, and predictive policing as it affects Black people and activist groups more broadly. Their artworks consider how these technologies routinely mine and sell our information to the highest bidder, abstracted as terabytes of data hosted on offshore server farms, mirroring other architectures of incarceration. The work of Michael Menchaca approaches this question through memetic aesthetics, using satire to heighten the absurdity of racial profiling, for-profit detention centers, and the hyper-militarization of the US/Mexico border. Also incorporating a sense of humor, Steffi Faircloth’s work destabilizes the authority of the border through the sensorial memetics of ASMR. Adán De La Garza analyzes the nature of surveillance and enacts a “subversion of authority through the aesthetics of authority.” As an act of refusal, De La Garza uses a GoPro or a mock surveillance camera to monitor and block the vantage point of ubiquitous surveillance technology that watches us passing through TSA security or on the street. Bahareh Khoshooee’s constantly evolving sculpture, Everchanging Facade, layers projected images pulled from her Instagram––many of them referencing trends and objects of desire rooted in Iranian culture––onto an ever-changing sculptural form that is gestural and intuitive, playing with the idea of the “cloud.” Maximizing on white liberal guilt during the 2016 US election, RaFia Santana’s multimedia project #PAYBLACKTiME was a radical redistribution of wealth in the form of free Seamless/GrubHub meals for Black and Brown people, paid for by white people through crowdfunding organized by the artist, appropriating platforms like PayPal to do so.

In our age of information, corporations and government bodies fuel their empires through data mining and collection in order to keep tabs on citizens and target them with algorithmic advertising. The artists in Behind the Cloud examine, in divergent ways, how these technologies feel omnipresent and an inescapable byproduct of participating in everyday life. They also underscore how these technologies work in tandem with the agendas of corporations, governments, and other systems of control. These artists offer an awareness of the system we exist in while encouraging us as viewers to question, delve deeper, and activate our own individual and collective responses.