Fragility Between Worlds | IA Gateway
Opening reception: June 17, 6 – 8PM
Gallery hours: June 18 – 19, 11 – 6PM
How did one of the most ephemeral phenomena in nature—the cloud—come to symbolize our data, documents, digital-selves, and intimate memories? When did clouds begin to stand in for physical data centres and undersea fiber optic cable networks? Per theorist John Durham Peters, “the cloud is a huge PR achievement for the IT industry, but it is profoundly deceptive.”(1) Fragility Between Worlds investigates the misnomer that digital clouds are just as ethereal as the ones floating in the sky, when in reality, they are materially dense and environmentally extractive.
To investigate this contradiction, four artists from differing backgrounds in textiles, video, fabrication, and new media come together to visualize the cloud's supposed immateriality through decidedly material means: a kinetic sculpture. Delicate fabric panels float in mid-air, fixed from the gallery walls to a central, twisting motor. White and gauzy, the textiles undergo cycles of tension and release. Atmospheric projections cast shadows across the sculpture, revealing translucent FDM 3D-printed patterns fused to the textiles that reference undersea fibre-optic cables which move our data across continents.
This mix of materials and fabrication techniques is purposely precarious. In particular, the motor, sourced from e-waste, often stalls due to its deteriorated form. In our daily lives we imbue trust onto machines and data centres with the expectation that these systems will remain dependable; yet in reality the digital cloud is just as physical and fragile with the ability to fracture our information. As Susan Leigh Star suggests, infrastructure tends to be invisible until it breaks down.(2)
The piece is an accumulation of artistic perspectives, conversations, and ways of knowing. It is a partnership between artists learning from one another’s practice, by creating a shared cloud of synergistic knowledge. Parallel to the themes behind the piece, the collaborative art-making allows something invisible (a concept, an idea), to become material (a sculpture). As Peters notes, “Clouds have always meant an agglomeration or amassing of materials.”(3) Working in a community art space like InterAccess, invites us to imagine alternative ways of exchanging information, beyond uploading data to a server.
About the Artists
Fragility Between Worlds is a collaboration between four artists working across distinct and varying practices.
Amelia June Ferguson is a textile researcher focused on material weaving, embroidery techniques, and deconstructivist philosophies.
Asucena Di Giovanni is an artist and engineer who builds machines beyond her control to study how people interact with them.
Christina Dovolis is an interdisciplinary filmmaker and geographer who examines how our built environments shape community and identity.
Lauren Warrington is an artist and researcher interested in how technological, virtual, and material systems articulate the poetics of diasporic subjectivities.
About IA Gateway
The InterAccess Gateway (IA Gateway) program facilitates low-barrier, no-cost access to gallery space for new media artists within our community. Gateway is an entry point; the term refers to network gateways, telecommunication devices that allow for the flow and translation of data between separate networks, an apt metaphor for the responsibility of organizations to provide resources and support to the artists in their community. IA Gateway was first held in 2024.
(1) Peters, John Durham. "5. Cloud" In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture edited by Benjamin Peters, 61. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400880553-007
(2) Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” The American Behavioral Scientist (Beverly Hills)(Thousand Oaks) 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326.
(3) Peters, 55.