Human Machine Fellowship 2023
Vita
HSURAE is an artist and educator based in New York. Their practice embraces the concept of latency within nature and its artifice. Instead of working to reveal or accelerate, they find small pleasures in the indeterminacy that latent space and latent knowledge offers. A sort of photogrammetry of the universe from inside Plato’s cave. Their artistic medium, like their self, is never pure object, never pure subject; ranging from hot glass to fibroblasts, passports to fecal sports. Their research often converges in metaphysics, science and technology studies, nonhuman intelligence, food, fibers, critical race studies, interplanetary justice, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. They hold a Master of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT, and currently teaches at The New School and NYU.
Residency
This project seeks to build a neural network (NN) that categorises things based on differences instead of similarities. I call this an empathy machine, based on the paradox that confines empathy, the paradox of difference and similarity. (And their constitutive paradoxes: self/other, interior/exterior, subject/object, mind/body, visible/invisible, life/death, light/dark, masculine/feminine…etc) Studies have shown that empathy is more fluid when the other resembles ourselves, and more solid when they appear different.