“A collage of Caucasian actors in roles as emotionally complex robots, AIs and cyborgs. [The installation] questions who is granted the privilege of humanity and emotional depth in these techno-futuristic landscapes.”
Tag: installation
WHITE ROBOT TEARS
“Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.”
Finite Horizon
An amalgamated skyline of Asian futures imagined by white filmmakers. Sourced from sci-fi movies and television shows that depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world overtly marked with elements of East, Southeast, and South Asian architecture.
ALOHA, BOYS
An installation that collages white men outfitted in Hawaiian shirts while vacationing in future foreign lands.
TANG RAINBOW
The 21-foot long mural Tang Rainbow is an array of non-Asian actors outfitted in Chinese-influenced costumes across 50 years of science fiction cinema and television.
FOR ORNAMENTAL PURPOSES
A 3-channel video work shows us how koi are used to embellish the scenery in Hollywood sci-fi. GIF-ified, they are glitches of techno-Orientalist fantasies
SYMPATHETIC WHITE ROBOTS
An installation that “compiles stills from films that marshal empathy for AI agents who are coded as white and humanized through their association with whiteness […] Suparak’s media archaeology interrogates imaginaries of AI”
TROPICOLLAGE
Short looping video that collages footage from 30 years of futuristic sci-fi movies and television shows that employ a fetishized tropics trope.
ASIAN FUTURES series
Series of projects, performances, and texts on how white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people. A visual analysis of 60 years of mainstream science-fiction cinema.
A Subjective, Contextual History of Washington, D.C. Pro Basketball
A history of the team and how it intertwines with civic issues, particularly: gun laws and violence, business and labor, real estate and gentrification, race, and class.
Goals
An installation superimposing the goals of six major sports, creating an actual-scale “color field” abstraction.
SYRACUSE MOUNTAINS
A full-scale graph / “mountain range” mural charting the snowfall in Syracuse over the last half century, and mounds of deicers which “melted” as winter outside progressed and visitors inside took away samples.
IN ADVANCE OF SNOW
Interactive project inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade “In Advance of the Broken Arm.” As a munificent reversal of this historic Dadaist work, the display is rendered useful again, allowing visitors to borrow the commercially made tools from an art gallery in the deepest winter months.
Astria Suparak 