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Installation view of TISHAN HSU’s “Liquid Circuit” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2020. Photo by Jeff McLane. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Hammer Museum.
What is a “Liquid Circuit”? At Tishan Hsu’s show: orifices within a primordial flesh-colored sludge, contained within the rigid parameters of screen-shaped panels.
TISHAN HSU, Auto-Immune, 1988, ceramic tile, compound, acrylic, stainless steel, rubber on wood, 101.6 × 114.3 × 228.6 cm. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong.
Look at Reflexive Ooze (1987) and calm down. Your brain glitches and tells you it’s a face. Computers and humans have this in common.
Maybe you are disturbed by the perspectival collapse of Auto-Immune (1988). Tiled clinical surfaces collide improbably like an operating theater reflected in a funhouse mirror.
TISHAN HSU, Reflexive Ooze, 1987, ceramic tile, vinyl cement compound, oil, acrylic, alkyd on wood, 149.2 × 149.9 × 20.3 cm. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum created a program called ELIZA, a rudimentary chatbot designed to reflect the user’s input and ask follow-up questions. People couldn’t stop talking to it. Tech writer Pamela McCorduck, in this 99% Invisible episode on ELIZA, surmised that “we feel free to open ourselves to what we think is a nonjudgmental machine.”
Remember Tron (1982)? That film where Jeff Bridges gets stuck inside a computer and fights programs?
If you got stuck inside a software world with Caroline Polachek, it would look like this:
GIF from Chairlift’s “Amanaemonesia” music video: 5 min 12 sec. GIF by Peter Chung for ArtAsiaPacific.
If you could dissolve and resurface in a post-human form, would you do it? In the second you stop to consider, 100 billion neurons fire within the circuitry of your skull.
“Free Association” is a glimpse into the chaotic mind of an ArtAsiaPacific editor, featuring a healthy sprinkling of fun facts and pop culture arcana.
“Amanaemonesia” was written by Chairlift (Caroline Polacheck, Patrick Wimberly) and appears on the album Something, Columbia Records / Young Turks, 2012.
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