153 ½ Stanton Street New York, New York 10002
[email protected] +1 617 678 4440 www.kaimatsumiya.com Wed – Sun 12- 6 pm “RESET” Group Exhibition Opening reception: Wednesday, February 6th, 6:30 – 9 February 6th – March 10th What kinds of art would survive in the event of an environmental apocalypse? What new kinds of art would emerge? How would our very definition of “art” change if the figurative reset button were pressed on the world as we know it? Our current group exhibition, “Reset,” explores these questions, imagining the gallery as a post-apocalyptic, dystopian laboratory in which ostensibly permanent laws of nature, technology, and culture can be reconfigured. The spirit of machines has been indispensable in rendering, modifying, and even destroying societal norms and laws, and art is certainly not immune to its consequences. The historical avant-garde was inextricable from the technological and industrial developments that defined their world, with the early French modernists referring to their own works as ‘machines’ suggesting both mechanistic dynamism and un-utilitarian creativity. The useless machine is essentially a reset button— built solely to turn itself off upon being turned on, thereby setting the process anew. The late Marvin Minsky, once a researcher at Bell Labs Inc., devoted his career to two principal pursuits: making strides in the development of artificial intelligence and building “the most profoundly useless things” he could think of. These two projects may seem incongruous, but for Minsky they became intimately intertwined through one of his best-known inventions, the “useless machine.” For Minsky, the most advanced artificial intelligence would be capable of the most intimate, intelligent, private, and quintessentially human act, suicide.