In today’s AI-driven world, increasingly organized and shaped by algorithms that track, collect, and evaluate our data, the question of what it means to be human has shifted. Uncanny Valley is the first major exhibition to unpack this question through a lens of contemporary art and propose new ways of thinking about intelligence, nature, and artifice.

Artists and Collectives On View

Zach Blas
Ian Cheng
Simon Denny
Stephanie Dinkins
Forensic Architecture
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann
Agnieszka Kurant
Lawrence Lek
Trevor Paglen
Hito Steyerl
Martine Syms
Zairja Collective

Hito Steyerl, "The City of Broken Windows," 2018. Video installation, single channel HD video, color, sound, 6 min. 40 sec. "Unbroken Windows," 2018: single channel HD video, color, sound, 10 min. Environment: broken glass window, painted plywood panels, vinyl lettering, wood easels. Installation view, Castello di Rivoli, 2018. Image courtesy of the Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photography by Antonio Maniscalco

With nearby Silicon Valley driving the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI arrives as the first major West Coast museum exhibition to thicken the discourse around AI through a lens of artistic practice. Rather than trafficking in speculative fantasies, the exhibition looks at current applications of AI to redefine the coordinates of the uncanny valley. It builds on contemporary metaphors from the technological imagination—the digital alter ego, the model of swarm intelligence, the data-mining algorithm—to propose a new visual vocabulary for describing the relationship between humans and machines.

Several works in the exhibition concern forms of collective intelligence—in both nature and culture—that inform or define the design and mechanisms of AI. Ian Cheng’s BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–2019) translates this idea into a virtual life-form in the shape of a snake that responds to both its internal programming and to input from its audience. Agnieska Kurant’s works in this exhibition incorporate crowdsourced information and labor that together point to the new economy of “ghost work” fueling many AI platforms and devices.

Simon Denny’s sculpture and relief works critique the humanitarian and ecological costs of today’s data economy, particularly the destructive environmental practices used to create sleek AI-based objects like Amazon’s Echo. The Zairja Collective’s intricate collages also concern mining—both of physical resources and of data. Overlaying images of firing neurons with open-pit designs sourced from mining corporations, their works in this exhibition invite viewers to consider the relationship between the two subjects.

The independent research agency Forensic Architecture uses spatial methods and machine learning to investigate human rights violations around the world. Their work in this exhibition includes a group of algorithmic models developed to scan online images for objects used in such crimes. Invested in humanitarian causes, the group is equally concerned with exposing the ways that machine learning can be exploited and misused, particularly in the types of offenses they investigate. Trevor Paglen also takes on the myth of neutrality in machine learning. His They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead . . . (SD18) (2020) consists of a large gridded installation of more than three thousand mugshots from the archives of the American National Standards Institute. The institute’s collections of such images were used to train early facial-recognition technologies—without the consent of those pictured.

Hito Steyerl’s video installation addresses applications of AI that reinforce social and economic inequality and the potential counterforce offered by communal and artistic acts of resistance. Martine Syms’s interactive, video-based work presents an avatar of the artist named Teeny, which viewers can communicate with via text message. Teeny’s assertiveness and self-absorption position her as an “anti-Siri,” says Syms, and upend the expectation of gendered obedience perpetuated by AI-based assistants.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker (2019) gives viewers the opportunity to glimpse their digital alter ego—the trail of data they have created online—while urging them to take control of their data profiles. The intersection of identity, subjectivity, and technology is also the subject of Stephanie Dinkins’s ongoing series of conversations with Bina48, a robot created by Hanson Robotics that lacks any understanding of race and gender. Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s film Being Human (2019), created in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, questions the philosophical foundations of humanism in the age of AI simulations known as deepfakes. Lawrence Lek similarly considers the ways that AI technology is rendering the distinction between humans and machines more permeable in his sci-fi-inflected film AIDOL (2019).

Finally, Zach Blas’s video installation serves as a portal, both literally and metaphorically, into Silicon Valley’s corporate culture—the other uncanny valley of AI. Considering the widespread use of nootropics, or “smart drugs,” he highlight the ways that tech companies invoke counterculture ideas to support corporate goals.
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This internationally acclaimed exhibition, organized by Tate Modern, celebrates art made by Black artists during two pivotal decades when issues of race and identity dominated and defined both public and private discourse. The de Young’s presentation includes a focus on Bay Area artists whose work promoted personal and cultural pride, collective solidarity and empowerment, and political and social activism.

Honoring the incredible legacy of Black Power in the San Francisco Bay Area, the de Young museum is hosting a line-up of programming and partners tied to celebrating this landmark exhibition. Featuring renowned artists, performers, musicians, activists, civic leaders, and others, these programs welcome special guests from around the Bay Area to bring Black Power to the forefront.

In addition, the de Young museum is offering free admission to the entire museum, including free entry to Soul of a Nation, for all visitors on four Saturdays throughout the run of the exhibition.

The Fine Arts Museums is home to one of the most important collections of Turkmen carpet weavings in the United States. The foundation of this collection was solidified by a major gift of Central Asian carpets and textiles from Caroline and H. McCoy Jones in the early 1980s. The Joneses’ gift put the de Young on the map of the international rug-collecting world, and in the years following, two other major collections of Turkmen weavings were donated to the Museums, namely that of Wolfgang and Gisela Wiedersperg, who gifted their collection in 1997, and that of George and Marie Hecksher, who began gifting rare textiles to the Museums in 1999.

A small, focused exhibition, The Turkmen Storage Bag will showcase approximately nine storage bags representing five subgroups. The exhibition will take advantage of the intimate space in the T. B. Walker Textile Education Gallery to present a refined selection of the finest examples of these portable storage bags, in order to highlight the similarities and differences between the different groups’ weaving techniques and rendition of the gül motif. The exhibition serves as an introduction of the varying styles to novices, while appealing to connoisseurs with prime examples both from different subgroups and from Bay Area collectors.

This exhibition is included with general admission. Become a member and see it for free!