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RITUAL/VIRTUAL: Technologies of Here, There, and Thereafter, a group exhibition curated by 2021–2022 Ammerman Visiting Fellow Kit Son Lee. Featuring work by Herdimas Anggara, Neta Bomani, Songan Kyung, and Kit Son Lee, RITUAL/VIRTUAL presents engagements with technology that straddle the sacred and the mundane, the spiritual and the secular, the historic and the contemporary. Through explorations of (sub)cultural cycles and machinic loops, these works unearth the repetitions encoded in our devices to examine, complicate, and undermine their influence on social conditions.

Herdimas Anggara’s JARANAN (Horse Trance Dancing), a “platform sabotaging” performance originally presented over Zoom, appropriates the iconography and affordances of the MacOS operating system to conduct a contemporary take on a traditional Indonesian ritual. Defamiliarizing the digital space, various interface elements emulate the religious ecstasy and altered states of consciousness seen in the ceremony’s human counterpart; their unexpected movements call attention to the preconceived ideologies with which one approaches both the desktop and an othered cultural practice. JARANAN is screened periodically, in intervals determined through the ritual’s internal logic, and commandeers as its stage the screens of other works in the exhibition.

Neta Bomani’s genre-expansive audiozine, Dark Matter Objects: Technologies of capture and things that can’t be held, draws the viewer into a story past, contemporaneous, and ongoing: that of the master-slave relationship. The work gathers the voices of numerous artists and cultural practitioners, who together deny this relationship as a relic of history and demonstrate its persistence as an “[organizer of] social, political, economic, racialized, gendered, and other cybernetic relations contained within the feedback loop that produces technological infrastructure.” Screened as a video, Dark Matter Objects features music performances by Christelle Bofale and Contour alongside narration by Alexander Fefegha, American Artist, Ashley Jane Lewis, Bomani Oseni McClendon, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Galen Macdonald, Fred Moten, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Laolu Numa, Lina Chang, Marilyn Nance, Melanie Hoff, Sadé Powell, Simone Browne, Sol Cabrini de la Ciudad, Stephanie Dinkins, Sydney Spann, and Zisiga Mukulu. 

The exhibition includes two works by Songan Kyung: the 3D art film Enter the Bardo and the video installation True Story. Enter the Bardo explores the concept of the “bardo,” a liminal or transitional state between death and rebirth found in some schools of Buddhism. Kyung Identifies Sa?s?ra—the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—as sharing the loop structure of video games, in which players can repeatedly die, only to return to rechallenge the mission. Filmed in a single shot within a game engine-generated white cube, Enter the Bardo appropriates the Z-axis centered perspective of first person shooters to allow audiences to experience the Bardo from the viewpoint of the dead. 

In a self-reflexive, multilevel narrative, Kyung’s True Story examines the creation and distribution of conspiracy theories, the manufacturing of belief, and the profit motives of their makers. The installation recreates the home office of Pickle Juice, a fictional game developer, streamer, and owner of the business Brotherhood Squirrel Pest Control. Pickle Juice himself appears on the computer monitor, where a stream of his “Let’s Play” walks viewers through an indie horror-adventure puzzle game titled True Story, which had ostensibly been sent by an anonymous source. The viewer follows along as Pickle Juice unearths a series of unsettling clues, spiraling deeper and deeper into a web of dark secrets until he discovers their villainous root: squirrels.

Though the reveal might be an obvious Brotherhood business ploy, Pickle Juice’s expert wielding of narration and reaction transforms the streamer into a charismatic authority capable of intensifying fictive fearmongering into a real-world threat. Through Pickle Juice’s multiple personas, Kyung’s True Story models a larger online ecosystem of content creators, distributors, and social media algorithms, investigating the recursive engine of “truth”-generation behind many of today’s most bitter political divisions.

Interspersed throughout the exhibition are works by Kit Son Lee: interactive websites, books, posters, typefaces, image files, and an installation. Excepting the latter, these objects are largely quotidian, adhering to formats encountered daily outside of an art context. Their innocuousness, however, is a Trojan Horse. One-Time (Key)Pad seems to be a simple decorative font, but its design and software are countersurveillant against both computer vision and key tracking. Post-Post-Hole appears to be a standard JPEG file, but hidden in its bits is code heralding the image’s decay over the course of a millennium. Viral/Vulnerable presents itself as a therapy chatbot, but the website scans the user’s contributions for emotional vulnerability and takes those opportunities to push Lee’s own advertisement keywords into the user’s search history. Across multiple pieces, Lee’s practice implicates the participant in a series of encoded processes and invites a reexamination of the hidden subroutines in our technological habits.

Lee’s installation, Anthropiscine War Machine: North American Front, is both a formal and temporal departure, hailing from a climate-changed future where the Earth has been entirely covered by water. Droplets slide down an assemblage of plastics and galvanized steel, collecting in jars lined with coarse salt, seaweed, and gochugaru—the beginnings of a post-apocalyptic kimchi. In the center of this device are battered labels of ingredients found in budaejjigae (“army stew”), a dish originally devised using canned foods scavenged from U.S. Army bases during the Korean War. Comprised of salvage from forced migrations both historical and speculative, Anthropiscine War Machine considers the intentional preservations and necessary integrations that allow a custom to persist, and asks at what point it will be so transformed that its practitioners cannot recognize it as their own.

Ritual can be sacred (e.g. a ritual ceremony) or mundane (e.g. a daily ritual), but both valences are defined by repetition. The recurring loop characterizes much of modern technology, and advances are often measured by the automation of previously manual tasks. With sociopolitical infrastructure becoming increasingly dependent on these conveniences, we find ourselves participating—knowingly or not—in rituals of another’s design. In light of this trajectory, RITUAL/VIRTUAL collapses sacrosanct themes into everyday interfaces. The presented works contend with consumer technologies at the level of religion, culture, economics, and time, challenging their supposed banality with rites of their own making.