Still from “The Funeral” (2023) by Faith Holland, single-channel video, sound, 5 minutes - Courtesy of the artist and Microscope

Microscope is very pleased to present “Death Drive,” the first solo exhibit at the gallery of works by New York-based artist Faith Holland, featuring new sculptures, videos, and digital prints, including several employing AI learning techniques.

With a title playfully appropriated from the psychoanalytic theory advanced by Freud, Holland in “Death Drive” speculates about what a decay process for technological devices might look like both physically and virtually, “by sparking an AI system’s imagination.”

In a new series of sculptures “Death Doula,” the artist addresses the ecological impact of discarded technological equipment on this planet, where certain components are expected to take longer than one million years to decompose. In the sculptures, which are displayed within transparent acrylic cases, Holland pairs various devices such as a broken laptop, tablet, or cell phone with different species of living mycelium, otherwise known as food mold.

Inspired by the feminist historical repurposing of the kitchen as studio, the artist first cultivates the molds within her home refrigerator. Overtime, the molds continue to grow and shift colors on the devices. Eventually, it is expected that they will dry and enter an inactive state, unless, as the artist muses, they manage to initiate a process that causes the devices’ materials to deteriorate.

For a series of dye sublimation on aluminum prints titled “Artificial Intelligence Forced to Confront Its Own Death,” Holland gradually trains an AI system to “grow” mold, under the proposition that “by teaching an AI system to reproduce mold, it could prepare the technology to imagine its own, organic death.” Several selections from the highly varied and colorful images represent a range of both the AI’s failures and its more successful attempts, from those resembling precious metals, microscopic entities, and even abstract paintings to others that most viewers would perceive as actual pictures of mold.

Thousands of images generated by AI through the system above inhabit the single-channel video “AI Mold Garden.” Over the course of the two-minute work, the depictions of mold slowly join together according to the growth patterns of fungi before coalescing into a composite image. The surprising abundance of red hues within the imagery is the result of the machine mistaking strawberries for mold.

With the five-minute video “The Funeral,” Holland returns us to reality. Addressing the nature of our relationships with our own technological equipment, she performs a Jewish funeral for her dead phone and buries it in her backyard. A time-lapse GIF reveals the decay and molding of the flowers placed around the phone, which appears to remain unaffected by the natural processes.

“Faith Holland: Death Drive” opens Thursday May 18th and continues through Saturday June 24th. Opening Reception: Thursday May 18th, 7-9pm. For further information please contact the gallery at [email protected] or by phone at 347.925.1433.

Faith Holland is an artist whose multimedia practice focuses on gender, intimacy, and technology. In works that exaggerate our physical and embodied relationships to technologies, Holland uses equal measures of humor and tenderness in sculpture, performance, video, animated gifs, and net art works. Previous solo exhibitions include at TRANSFER (New York/Miami) and at L’Unique (Caen, France). She has also exhibited at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and DAM Gallery (Berlin). 

Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times UK, Elephant, Hyperallergic, Broadly, and The Observer. She has been a NYFA Fellowship Finalist in Digital/Electronic Art, an artist-in-residence at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and Harvestworks, and a finalist for Fotomuseum Winterthur’s Post-Photography Prototyping Prize. She is the recipient of a 2021 New York State Council on the Arts grant. Faith Holland lives and works in New York, NY.