Solo For Smartphones (2022)
Contact High, 2022
Presented by Gertrude Contemporary Glasshouse & Performance Review
Curator: Anador Walsh
Contact High is interested in the transference that occurs between performers and audiences in the gallery and is a celebration of our newly regained ability to be together, performing and spectating.
Solo For Smartphones is an emerging body of work considering dissociation, derealisation and the body’s rapidly transforming relationship to devices, screens and networks at the cusp of the AI singularity. Setting up parameters for novel encounters between bodies and devices, this work invites narratives in which devices have increased agency, yet still rely on human bodies and labour to enable that agency. As we hurtle towards a fully-automated future, how will our feeble human meat-sacks slot into new systems of meaning, production and desire? Solo For Smartphones projects a fantasy in which people and devices subsist in a heightened symbiosis and the devices we carry with us daily are given a chance to roam — partially untethered from the whims of their carriers.
Photos: Keelan O'Hehir