Inherent vices exist in every medium and good art grapples with them, even uses them to its advantage. Difference Machines at Wrightwood 659 assembles art that addresses prevalent biases in technological “new media” and the possibility of using these biases to bring about change. Seventeen artists self-referentially harness their technologies of choice—databases, artificial intelligence, social media, algorithms—to test whether humanity’s new tools aggravate or erase the chasm between those with power and those without. Some are hopeful, using alternative online spaces to create utopian communities free of real world injustices. Others expose the biases that inevitably shape new tools created by humans in power for those in power. The exhibition is postmodern but not complacent, urging viewers to take action against injustice with a sense of poetic urgency.

Installation view of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s “WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, 2020”. Photo taken by author.

Many artworks touted interactivity as their innovative feature. They are pastiches that replicate existing technologies inviting the activation of viewers. A choose-your-own-adventure game by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley displays different outcomes for players when they click on one of three buttons that identify them as “Black and Trans”, “Trans,” or “Cis.” I clicked on the “Cis” button and was shuttled into a cyberpunk labyrinth à la The Matrix, in which the souls of forgotten Black trans people repeatedly chant “WHO DID YOU BURY UNDER THIS EARTH.” After clicking more buttons admitting my privilege and going past more forking paths, the game’s narrator encouraged me to be an ally. The game takes the neon graphics and autotuned voice acting of the 1970s to show how the classic genre of text RPGs has the radical possibility to create alternative spaces for marginalized people.

Another notable “interactive” installation is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Levels of Confidence. A facial recognition camera feeds the viewer’s image into an algorithm that compares it with photographs of 43 Mexican children who went missing, then reports a percentage of similarity between the best-matching child and the viewer. Watching its repeated futile attempts, we realize that technologies like facial recognition are only accessible to a privileged few, not to communities like the children in question. Other memorable interactive artworks included A.M. Darke’s riff on the game “guess who?,” which features the many alter egos of Kanye West. Another is Mongrel’s Heritage Gold, a simulation of an early 2000s Photoshop interface that allows the user to alter a person into different races Heritage Gold. Most of these participatory videos and webpages do not attempt to look polished: videos have shoddily animated characters that move like The Sims and possess autotuned voices, embracing indie and kitsch. They give the illusion of a not-yet-complete world, open-ended enough for the viewer to construct themselves.

However, while these artworks have a DIY aesthetic and invite the viewer to participate explicitly through instructions, they are only pseudo-interactive. Brathwaite-Shirley’s game presents the player with the illusion of many options, but ultimately the plot only forks four or five times, with three choices presented at a time. The player follows the set path and does not truly have “free will” despite being told to actively be a better ally. In Levels of Confidence, the viewer gets their photo taken but is not invited to contribute to the GitHub code that Lozano-Hemmer has made available publicly. The artwork is self-contained and not generative. In almost all cases, the physical installation—the carrier of power—consumes and controls the viewer who is passively entertained. While the artists reflect on the very tool they use to create, they do not hand it to the viewer to try on for size. The artworks do not present the viewer with the agency to create or participate on the same level as the artist under pseudo-interactivity.

At first, the show’s critique of technology through pastiches of old forms of “new” media (oxymoronic indeed) seemed trite—“raising awareness” of political issues can only go so far without proposing solutions. The reluctance to fully lean into interactivity was cowardly. Postmodernism is not the answer for good activism. Replacing white characters with black characters in alternate universes does fulfill the fantasy of a world where everyone has the power to self-determine but does not seek to change the otherness of Black people existing in this world. Power diffuses in the maze of pop culture references.

Installation view of Skawennati’s “She Falls for Ages”, 2017. Photo taken by author.

However, after seeing the throughlines of the entire group show, the aforementioned “flaws” became more intentional, even quite smart. The question that is central to the exhibition is the age-old “Can the master’s tools be used to dismantle the master’s house?” All sixteen artists included in the show answer: “no.” Their technologies—big data, AI, algorithms, mass surveillance, social media, and even video games—are the brainchildren of powerful individuals and serve them only. They contain racist, sexist, transphobic, classist, and colonial biases for this very reason. So unless marginalized people create new tools (of technology) aka the means of production, they can only replicate the injustices within these existing media. In this show, the artists found rebellious ways to use these technologies but ultimately resort to recreating them to point out the original sins they inherently carry.

Therefore: it makes sense that the lack of real interactivity is purposely frustrating. The artworks advertise interactivity, giving the player an illusion of power, while true power is within the artworks themselves or with the artists who harness these tools. This move echoes the fact that, in real life, these technologies champion individual empowerment and revolutionary creativity, but do not afford true agency.

The artists prove Audre Lorde right when she said “[the master’s tools] may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” The futility and powerlessness that envelop the viewer because of the pseudo-interactive technologies in Difference Machines suggest more radical approaches to making true change in the real world.

The epiphany came to me at the end of the exhibition as I watched the main character of Skawennati’s animation She Falls for Ages descend through magical realms in the sky: the creation of new tools has to occur outside the gallery, in the real world. What has to be done is not the imagining of various futuristic alternate realities or harnessing the good in these existing technological media, but real action.

Make new tools of your own.

Jiahe Wang