SAIC Booth at EXPO Chicago
The show has a healthy serving of ATS students, alum, and faculty - among others.
April 13-16, 2023
Booth #435
“Soft Tissue; Hard Wire”
In 1969, the pathbreaking artist Sonia Sheridan established a department of Generative Systems at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Emphasizing an open, ever-changing, and decentralized curriculum, Sheridan focused her students on the artistic implications of ideas transformed through the integration of flesh, art, and technology. She taught students how to repurpose, recombine, and steer relationships with industry. An institution filled with artists and scholars, SAIC embraces the curricular process as a study of science, art, and technology. Coursework, artistic affiliations, and conversations scrutinize “natural” systems, command language and its political outcomes, and articulation of bodies. We study lifeways anew while “life” has become fully saturated with proprietary technology that is poised on an exploitation of indigenous techniques and resources. Our practices therefore foster emerging and communal orientations to art and technology. Soft Tissue; Hard Wire invites the viewer to contemplate technology through just a few of the many directions from which it permeates our lives. Should we find ourselves cemented in the present, the exhibition suggests that we move forward and backwards through time to consider our influence on technology, and technology’s influence on Earth’s inhabitants.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) features work from the following current students, alumni artists, and faculty at this year’s EXPO Chicago: Nick D’alessandro (BFA 2023), Juan Eduardo Flores (MFA 2023), SlimeVolt: Yousif Alzayed (MFA 2024), Ben Glass (BFA 2023), Yimei Zhu (MFA 2024), and Ryan Garvey (University of Chicago), Xin Yang (MFA 2024), Janelle Dunlap (MFA 2021), Jungwoo Lee (MFA 2022), Shawn Decker (Sound) and Jan-Erik Andersson, Eduardo Kac (ATS), Dakota Mace (Visiting Grad Advisor), Andrew S. Yang (Liberal Arts), and Video Data Bank titles by Edward Rankus, John Manning, and Barbara Aronofsky Latham (AlienNATION), and Eduardo Kac (Natural History of the Enigma). Organized by Graduate Curators Korina Hernandez (MFA 2024) and Amanda Mendelsohn (MA 2023), Assistant Professor Lee Blalock (ATS), and Professor Delinda Collier (Art History). For more than 150 years, SAIC has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers, and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranked among the top programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries and state-of-the-art facilities.
