Continuing through May 22, 2026
In Christine Tamblyn’s early interactive computer work “She Loves It, She Loves It Not” (1993), we enter through an image of the artist’s mouth. The image is vivid — at once bodily and computational — and issues a simple directive: click on my mouth. What follows is disarmingly serene: a menu of twelve labeled flower petals, each serving as a point of entry. Having crossed that first threshold, the interface feels liberating. The flower appears modest, yet each petal opens into its own sequence, unfolding a field of possibilities. Clicking becomes a way of moving across fragments, between images and texts, and through multiple narrative paths. Developed in the early days of personal computing, the work proposes a form of interaction that still feels current: a structure that gently organizes experience. That structure serves as the exhibition’s guiding metaphor.
Guest curator Tanya Zimbardo adopts this model of interaction as a curatorial armature, organizing the exhibition less as a fixed grouping than as a system of branching relations. Spanning several generations, the artists include Anxious to Make (Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez), Ahna Girshick, Asma Kazmi, Jill Miller and Kathy Wang, Judy Malloy, Jenny Odell, Genevieve Quick, Abram Stern, and Tamblyn. Their works can be read as nodes within a non-linear mapping of art and technology since the 1970s. This approach carries particular resonance given its setting in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Within this structure, the works resist settling into a stable historical narrative. This refusal aligns with Tamblyn’s broader practice as a cultural critic and media artist, particularly her use of the CD-ROM format to construct electronic “writing collages” that draw from disparate sources: science fiction, comics, computer magazines, and writing on robotics. Her focus on the exclusions embedded within technological culture — especially the marginalization of women — finds a parallel in the work of Malloy, a pioneer of electronic literature.
Malloy’s “OK Genetic Engineering Briefcase” (1991) is a hand-painted suitcase that recalls Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-valise” (1935–66), which housed miniature reproductions of his past works. Malloy reimagines this format through a fictional corporate persona: the president of a company tracking developments in genetic engineering. Through this construct, she produced experimental word-image reports and distributed materials — matchbooks, boxed instructions, and other ephemera — circulated by hand and by mail. The project operates simultaneously as critique and infiltration. As Malloy notes, it enabled her to gain access to industry spaces, mailing lists, and technical discourse otherwise closed to her.
By contrast, younger artists engage similar concerns under markedly different conditions, shaped by networked systems, platform economies, and AI. In some cases, this results in a critical reframing through the appropriation of corporate language or the construction of speculative alternatives. In others, the continuity is less assured, as the scale and opacity of contemporary technologies complicate the intimate, user-driven structures that underpinned earlier work. What emerges is not a seamless lineage but an uneven one, in which methods and questions recur in altered form.
Quick’s video “Cel Bell” (2023) imagines a speculative telecommunications network connecting a global, multilingual Asian diaspora. Drawing on the history of San Francisco’s Chinatown Telephone Exchange (1894–1949), staffed by women who memorized thousands of names, occupations and addresses, the work reframes communication as both labor and infrastructure, highlighting the human systems that precede and complicate today’s digital networks.
Odell’s “Neo-Surreal” (2017), created during a residency at the Internet Archive, is a series of 36 digital inkjet prints drawn from imagery in 1980s BYTE magazine advertisements. Through processes of extraction and recombination, Odell reveals the latent absurdity and the faintly sinister logic embedded in early promotional visions of computing.
A similar engagement with the language of technological culture appears in “Missing Objects Library” (2023) by Kazmi, Miller, and Wang. Presented as a speculative archive, the installation assembles collaged images that oscillate between the familiar and the estranged: a mime holding a hardwood computer printer; an early home computer adjacent to cows resting beside a lake. Accompanied by a seamless, corporate-style audio narration, the work produces a subtle disorientation, positioning us less as observer than as a subject within an implied system of classification and interpretation. Berdugo and Martinez’s collaborative project Anxious to Make extends this disorientation with humor through “Bitcoin Futures” (2018). By inserting quarters into a General BYTES ATM, viewers receive printed “Bitcoin Futures” prophecies — accompanied by the claim that they are “99.99% correct.”
One work that fits less comfortably within the exhibition is Girshick’s “Bias Reflector II” (2025). While the mirrored surface invites a degree of self-reflection, its patterned visual field — intended to prompt awareness of perceptual bias — reads instead as a distraction, diffusing rather than sharpening our attention.
Stern’s installation extends the exhibition’s inquiry into systems of knowledge and mediation, turning toward the infrastructures that shape how information is processed and understood. His recent video “Introduction (for CT)” (2026) makes visible a process of close study and emulation, working directly with Tamblyn’s digital artifacts alongside related archival material connected to his mentor, Margaret Morse. More than referencing Tamblyn’s work, Stern highlights the conditions of its transmission and reinterpretation, suggesting that participation is shaped not only by choice, but by the systems through which knowledge is preserved.
Tamblyn described her use of Macromedia Director as a subversive strategy, one that enabled fluid movement between spoken and written language, multiple tones, and competing narrative registers. Her critical attention to corporate-driven technology, along with her early engagement with robotics as “harbingers of artificial intelligence,” finds resonance in several works on view. Contemporary artists address these concerns through varied approaches: appropriating the language of advertising and promotion, interrogating the logics of technological industries, or proposing speculative platforms grounded in alternative values. While these affinities are not always described in the gallery texts, they emerge through the exhibition’s broader structure. Within Tanya Zimbardo’s curatorial framework, this structure — first encountered in Tamblyn’s “flower” — recasts the exhibition as a field of relations set into motion.
