Collective Digital Care

Group Exhibition of USC Media Arts + Practice IML400 Class

Curated by Qianqian Ye
Artists: Daisy Bell, Jay Borgwardt, Katie Chan, Jacob Pettis, Mahira Raihan, Asha Rao, Emma Sykes

What is collective, what is digital, what is care in reconfigured spaces? How can we use code to express and embrace, revolt and rest?

This exhibition invites visitors to experience the web-driven artworks and artistic research of coders and collaborators in Media Arts + Practice’s IML 300 and 400, as we investigated hypernarratives and networked justice (300), cybernetic gardens and other-worldbuilding (400). Along the way, we reconsidered technical approaches to multi-user experiences; interactivity; software libraries; and the aesthetics, protocols, and languages of the web itself.

Collective Digital Care gathers our strength, gathers us together, gathers the digital harvest of code seeds and data packets planted at the start of an uncertain, unprecedented year. It is a record of time spent together and apart, time spent adapting and nurturing, time spent tending and weeding, time spent learning and imagining the kind of interconnected networks we want to hold us together as we emerge, reconfigure, bloom.