Intercession
Hessel Museum of Art
Apr 5 - May 25, 2025

Intercession, curated by Audrey Min, features a new 3-channel installation of Faith that has been restructured and rewritten for the times.

Intercession considers a spirit that seems to animate the digital devices that help us participate in pleasure, social life, ethics, and politics. Despite—or perhaps because of—the intimacy of this human-computer partnership, digital technology often seems to act as if by magic or prayer.  

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Humankind has harnessed the profoundly expansive capacity of computers through touch interfaces such as the mouse and keyboard as well as AI assistants like Siri, trained to mimic human behavior. Intercession examines the spooky ways in which interfaces exert their presence on the functions they help articulate—the exhibition’s title refers to both the act of mediation and the Christian practice of praying on another’s behalf. Vacant architectures and virtual automatons haunt the exhibition: an antagonistic chatbot, a conversation with absent participants, a thwarted attempt at coherence by generative AI, and a megachurch seen through the eyes of its livestreaming apparatus. Their uncanny animacy recalls forms of religious or mystical thought and experience that existed long before the emergence of digital technology. 

Artists: Lois Bielefeld, Ryan Kuo, Harris Rosenblum and Theresa Faison (for Transcendence Creative), Viktor Timofeev

4.5.25