Conceived of as a response to the 2016 exhibit ““Witness” at New Westminster’s New Media Gallery. this project, “Witnessing” is a series of three processing artworks developed by students at the Critical Media Arts Studio at SFU’s School of Interactive Art and Technology (SIAT) in the IAT 810 New Media Class. Witnessing is exhibited at the AHVA Gallery at the Audain Art Centre as part of the “Under Super Vision” Symposium.

The web-based projects all address the thematic issues raised in the Witness exhibit, that of human machine communication and mutual surveillance. Each work is presented in an online archive, and they all demonstrate the uneasy marriage of our shared technological fears and desires.

Paired with each processing project is page in a pamphlet Zine (shown above); imagined as a future archive of humanities’ attempts to communicate with an all-seeing machine. The projects document how a contemporary machine might learn of our thoughts, memories, languages, and visions.

The project website is available here.

The publication based on the zine and the student projects will be held in the New Media Gallery’s permanent library collection as well as a web-based archive forthcoming in the new issue of The New School’s Immediacy Journal.

Turner, Hannah, Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, Frederico Machuca, Jo Shin and Xavier Wu. 2017. “Witnessing.” Curated and Edited by Hannah Turner and Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda.