Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
Maria Cynkier
Empathy Loading is a transdisciplinary online art project inquiring into affective relationships between humans and networked non-humans. These emotional connections are the objects of speculation in the works of Friendred, Elisa Giardina Papa, Vishal Kumaraswamy and Marie-Eve Levasseur, who each submitted a creative ‘proposition’ in response to these themes. Calling on artists working with machine sentience and the intricacies of the web, the project incorporates their responses to the potential of empathy, which the curators posit to be a vehicle for taking care of the relationships between humans and networked non-humans. The artworks reflect upon the interweaving of the synthetic and organic worlds, and the emergence of new forms of caretaking and caregiving. Participating artists have confronted machine agency, explored the ethics of invisible labour and some have even embodied what it feels like to don a second skin in an effort to better understand human-machine empathy.
One submission, by Vishal Kumaraswamy, was chosen to be developed further into the project’s main online commission. Through the development of Swaayattate (Autonomy) (2020), an immersive narrative framework split into three distinct chapters, the artist explores the difference between machine and human desire. Following these strands, he arrives at a point where they intertwine and asks what it is really that constitutes sentience itself, focusing on the commonalities between the organic and the mechanical, in effort to dissect the point of contention within their relationship.
Speculating on the potential of alternative systems of care for and with technology, all artists’ responses, exhibited on the Empathy Loading website, invite consideration of meaningful interactions between humans and machines by developing new forms of intimacy. Launched on 15 June 2020, the website also features alongside artworks, a curatorial statement, newly commissioned creative text by poet and programmer Allison Parrish, artist interviews, recording of commissioned artist Vishal Kumaraswamy in conversation with Zarina Muhammad and a list of references invaluable to the curatorial process. Amina Abbas-Nazari’s speculative listening experience ‘Multiphonic Connections’ is available to view here.
Empathy Loading, curated by students from the Royal College of Art MA Curating Contemporary Art, is a part of 2020 Graduate Projects in partnership with Furtherfield. It is being displayed as part of Furtherfield’s 2020 programme Love Machines, which explores how technologies of production and control might be reprogrammed to address the health and wellbeing of humans and machines. Empathy Loading is curated by Maria Cynkier, Jiayi Du, Sakhi Gokhale, Eve Miller, Vanessa Wang, Haseeb Ullah Zafar and Huanzhi Zhang.
Maria Cynkier is an independent curator and writer working in the fields of art, technology and digital culture. She thinks of curating as a collaborative storytelling practice enabling critical dialogue. Her work is framed by post-anthropocentric approaches to communing and constituting, emphasising the entanglement between social and material technological conditions.
In her graduate dissertation, Curating networked art for social change, she considered the importance of curatorial collaboration, activism and infrastructural fiction to curating practices engaging with networked art. As part of her research, she inquired into curatorial commoning as a methodology of engaging with networked culture, curators' role in facilitating resistance towards hegemonic narratives as well as the potential of decentralisation to develop new infrastructural models in the arts.
For her graduate project, Maria co-curated Empathy Loading, an online commission developed in partnership with Furtherfield. The project speculated upon the future affective relationships between humans and machines through the exploration of non-human consciousness, communication and alternative systems of care.
Maria has recently curated User Preferences, an online pavilion for The Wrong Biennale 2019-20, which explored contemporary conditions of usership and affiliated with MoCDA (Museum of Contemporary Digital Art). Prior to her time at the RCA, she studied History of Art and Art-World Practice at the University of Glasgow and Christie’s Education London.
