Xinyu Vanessa Wang

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 labor 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, co-curated by Maria Cynkier, Jiayi Du, Sakhi Gokhale, Eve Miller, Vanessa Wang, Huanzhi Zhang and Haseeb Ullah Zafar 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.