Current Exhibitions

Slip into the world of Lorna, a fictional, middle-aged woman too obsessed with TV to leave her apartment. Sit in Lorna’s chair and use her remote control to choose her fate in an interactive video. Thirty-six user-selected paths lead you through the character’s grim desires and glossy distractions. 

Lorna (1979–84) is regarded as the first interactive video artwork ever created and was originally produced on laserdisc. This was the most advanced video technology in the early 1980s, which the artist customized beyond its normal functions. A video game of life’s choices, Lorna represents the crossroads we face in our digital era: is technology liberating or alienating? 

Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941) has been called a “prophet of our cybernetic condition” by the New York Times. Working in San Francisco since the mid-1960s, she developed digital alter-egos like Lorna to investigate how new technologies extend the body and psyche into virtual space. Her high-tech, interactive artworks predicted many of today’s concerns with digital culture, including camera surveillance, online identities, artificial intelligence, and gene editing.

Judy Chicago (b. 1939) is a groundbreaking American artist who has worked to bring greater recognition to women in the visual arts. Chicago’s 1971-72 video Women and Smoke, California documents a series of performances that Chicago choreographed in the California landscape.

Combining colorful bodies and smoke bombs to create paintings off the canvas, the scenes conjure the power and mystery of ancient goddess rituals, an important reference for feminist artists who wanted to reclaim a male-dominated history of art. Said the artist, “It softened everything. There was a moment when the smoke began to clear, but a haze lingered. And the whole world was feminized—if only for a moment.”

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s 2016 digital artwork People on the Fly makes its US debut at Art House in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This interactive installation attracts a virtual swarm of houseflies to a visitor’s captured image using the artists’ custom swarming algorithm. With this algorithm, only bodies in motion will invite the flies.

Insect swarms provide artificial-intelligence researchers with models for understanding how lifeforms make decisions on a particle level, as a swarm thinks cooperatively, without a dominant leader. In this way, a swarm communicates through networked intelligence, a theory called emergence. Software algorithms designed to simulate biological systems can learn from swarm behavior, producing digital data that, in turn, may implicate genetics, social order, and creativity.

This artwork is in a constant state of creation. Leo Villareal programmed Particle Field to generate a live, ever-changing composition. Its custom code is vital to the artwork’s identity and experience.

Villareal invokes with his triptych the sacred power of Renaissance altarpieces and the expressive energy of twentieth-century color field painters and performers. The artist said of his digital abstraction, “I wanted to make something that feels like it has existed for a long time using a very contemporary use of technology.”

Villareal produces the world’s largest outdoor light installations in which LEDs are treated as networked pixels across steel bridges and riverbanks. For his monitor-based artwork Particle Field, Villareal made use of the latest advance in display technology, the OLED screen, capable of individual cell illumination and the deepest black levels yet invented. Villareal’s algorithm pushes gigabytes of data across twenty-four million combined pixels in a choreography of orderly chaos.