“What does it mean to be human in a digital world?” That question is the focus of the new exhibition at Georgia Tech, “Extension of Self.” Curator Birney Robert is using art to promote STEM accessibility in a new show on view through Oct. 14, with the promise of another next year. Birney Robert joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom along with Noura Howell, one of the featured artists and a professor in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech.
“This exhibit ‘Extension of Self: What it Means to be Human in a Digital World’ was really inspired when I read a quote in one of Sherry Turkle’s books… about a woman not knowing where her laptop began, and she left off. So that got me thinking about our cell phones and thinking about how many numbers do you have memorized? Do you use GPS when you drive around? What about all the photos that cell phones hold? …and just thinking of this digital technology as an extension of ourselves, and kind of like our second brain,” said Robert.
She went on, “That was the prompt to all these six artists working at the intersection of art, science, technology, and accessibility, and realizing that there’s so much great digital technology out there, with assistive technology and medical technology. However, there are also harmful developments in digital technology, such as surveillance, or reducing us to various data points that are gathered based on our search history, that might promote normative behaviors which might not fit into our complexities and our multiplicities of self.”