ALT ESC IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE "DSL ALTARS" - AN INSTALLATION FEATURING WORKS BY THEODORE DARST AND MASAMI KUBO ON VIEW AT SPRING/ BREAK 2018.

DSL Altars

Theodore Darst and Masami Kubo

“Humans are the reproductive organs of technology” - Kevin Kelly

We imagined “the stranger” as technology, an infiltrator and an intermediary. We thought of the development of a new language, a new culture, new set of rules, a new realm. This other is unpredictable and malleable; it is a tool, a friend, a lover, an enemy, a faith. It exists simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Kubo and Darst approach technology as an external and internal conciliator - it becomes the common ground between their visual language and the semantics behind it.

Theodore Darst is a New York City-based sculptor and new media artist. Darst will build an installation featuring new works based around his video piece “The Tourist: This Machine Makes Fascists,” and his “Cult Trash” series. Darst compresses digital architectures and fantasy-reflecting realities into a string of visuals and game. Technology becomes the mediator - people become avatars, aspects of culture become digital subcultures, real becomes virtual, external becomes internal. The machines repeat “relax” and “chill out,” and we as a viewers oblige, because in this version of reality we have made shrines out of the machines and their voices combine with ours. He confronts us with a sequence of symbols and phrases, all feigning to fuse together to form a semblance of a meaning.The digital plain is fed information by reality, creating a nurturing and shrine-like plain made perfect for escapism.

Masami Kubo is a Brooklyn-based installation, performance and virtual reality artist. Kubo will build an installation featuring a physical stage for her 3-D virtual platform and video piece "Figure 3.0: Do cyborgs dream in red and white?" - a play on Philip K. Dick’s novel. In her video she discusses abstraction of various architectural topics and various forms of presentation values and satire within political ideologies, pop culture, and her cult upbringing with The Unification Church via a virtual slideshow presentation. She extends the virtual space into real space, by altering the physical environment and building out a replica of what is seen in the headsets. This division line creates an ambivalent barrier between real virtual, where a digital concept is pulled out into the real world. In a way it is a physical shrine built for her technological idea. Her discussion of her faith and cult become secondary in nature to the overshadowing factor of her moving herself out of the physical realm into the virtual.