Detroit-based artist, musician, and educator Mother Cyborg (Diana J. Nucera) debuts a series of quilts that references our relationship to digital technologies, data-mining and security in the age of the Internet. Using bright colors, geometric shapes and patterns, Crafting our Digital Legacy opens up analogue and tactile spaces that invite audiences to reflect upon our collective relationship with internet technologies, identity, legacy, and the future. Mother Cyborg draws from over 15 years experience as a community organizer in Detroit, MI where individuals gained access and agency to (re-)build their neighborhoods, and run their own Internet service providers. In this exhibition, Nucera expands her artist self through fiber works where she addresses critical issues of surveillance, data collection, the redaction of love to likes, and the complexity of identity within it all.
Mother Cyborg states, “This work aims to return a sense of wonder and magic to all of us, and rekindle the awe we may have first felt when using a geolocating star map, or being able to video call a person across borders. Crafting our Digital Legacy looks at the way in which art can unpack how living at the whim of invisible wifi connections, engaging ‘power cycling’ (turning on and off) computers and phones to ‘fix’ them, modern experiences of technology run the gamut from resigned faith to proselytizing zealotry. In our weariness of the state of technology, we fail to notice that the ‘same’ data, taken from all of us, has the power to rewrite and mutate the prior century’s worst inequalities into a blueprint for the future. These psychedelic quilts mesmerize while spotlighting surveillance tactics embedded within society bringing into focus the information and questions we should be asking of the future.”
Curated by Srimoyee Mitra.