Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman brings together sixteen artists working with digital animation, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to examine the relationship between humans, other species, and the earth: Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam, Jacolby Satterwhite, Saya Woolfalk, Marina Zurkow, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and others.
The exhibition is organized into three sections: a biological and ecological perspective on extinction and interspecies entanglement, a psychological register of guiding avatars and machine-generated figures, and an ontological turn toward ancestral belief systems read through new technology.
Marina Zurkow's Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) runs as a real-time generative software animation on a 146-hour cycle, so the piece never repeats the same sequence of images twice. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's The Substitute renders an extinct northern white rhino through algorithmic modeling trained on archival data of the species, placing a machine-generated animal inside an empty white room. Both works treat the machine's output as a stand-in for something no longer directly observable, whether a vanished species or a landscape cycling faster than a visitor can track.
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