Repost @somad.nyc This server also serves looks. The static and kinetic sculptures in Keith Lafuente’s “Acts of Service” zero in on many versions of service—culinary, military, volunteer, sexual, and religious—and is deeply informed both by Filipino hospitality traditions and how colonial history has shaped global inequality. On view through December 18th; stop by during gallery hours, Monday through Friday from 12-6pm.
Keith Lafuente @keith_lafuente
“Waiter (Kain Na!)”, 2025. Felt, fabric, poly-fil, wig, plastic eyes, vintage table, artificial pineapples, metal tray, artist’s shoes, motor, plywood, PVC, acrylic, aluminum, steel, 3D printed plastic parts, J-B Weld, enamel, foam, hardware, power supply, 8.5 x 8 x 3.5 ft.
Photography by @flaneurshan.studio
Video by @meicenmeng
Diana Gheorghiu / Whatever Remains Unchanged Is Already Dead / 3D animation, Projection / 00:09:08 / 2024
@diana_gheorghiu
We’re living in the age of neurological disorders. According to Byung-Chul Han, depression, ADHD, borderline, and burnout will mark the 21st century (The Burnout Society, 2010). We are anxious, scared for our future. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley describe it as “allergic to ourselves, to our own hyperextended body” (Are We Human?, 2017). The business of Doomsday bunkers is booming. Gheorghiu imagines this life, connecting the bunker with the MRI-scanner. The magnetic pull digs into our organs. As you go inside something, that something dives into you.
Survivors move around and exercise. Something is not right. They neglect mental and visceral health, disintegrate: ‘bodies without organs’ (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1983). Bodies can’t speak, only cancers perform. They are attracted to the MRI magnet, which becomes a time machine, propelling them into old age in seconds. We drift in a sea of organs. A cell duplicates, mutates, starts a dialogue from an apocalyptic movie. They cough, referencing fear of contamination and cancer, becoming organs without a body.
Gheorghiu reveals how class and capitalism control our bodies. A machine decides if we live or die, owning knowledge over health and future. Her characters had the privilege to buy a spot on the Doomsday island. A man without diabetes owns an expensive glucose meter because TikTok told him. A woman’s breath exercises turn to hyperventilation. Despite efforts, they fall victim to age and illness. “Society creates its own delirium,” Deleuze & Guattari remind us, as we wave the yoga mom and entrepreneur off in the sea of organs.
Credits:
3D Animation: Tristan Gieler
Sound Design: Leonard Prochazka
Graphic Design: Clara Lezla
Voiceover: Sarah Blake
Voice Outro: Geo Aghinea
Text edit: Alina Lupu
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
Rory Scott / Various AR/VR filters
@rks_xo
This body of work showcases Scott’s devotion to her practice through her art. A practice born out of motherhood, in an effort to reconcile the passage of time, to create deliberate change and to find peace within.
Through the use of AR Masks & physical & digital Meditative Sets/Landscapes, Scott’s work bridges physical, digital & spiritual realms to connect with self and the collective of humanity.
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
Mollye Bendell / Feeding / Lenticular print / 2025
@moss.piglet
Feeding is a print series of 3D scans that depict a headless woman breastfeeding. The flaws in the scan, the angle of the capture, and the lighting and textures point to a scan that could only have been generated by the feeder. The implied motion imitates rocking back and forth - soothing the baby, while trapping the mother in a position of moving, without moving forward.
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
Snow Yunxue Fu / D.I.C. (Daughter ICE City) / 360° Video / 00:07:00 / 2025
@snowyunxuefu
D.I.C. stands for Daughter ICE City, which is a Metaverse/Virtual Production City that is built for the (on-going project) digital human Daughter ICE during the time frame of preparing for the artist Snow Yunxue Fu’s birth of her human daughter. This floating city is made up of three parts: the Birth Garden; the Silver Metropolis, & the Galaxy Island.
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
Flavia Visconte / Pruebas / Digital Print on Vinyl / Various sizes / 2025
@flaviavisconte
In the contemporary debate, human life reproduction serves as a historical thread to trace the development of the capitalist system, the evolution of family and kinship structures, and the increasing commodification and internationalization of care work, along with its stratification by gender, origin, and race.
Traditional gender role attributions are closely tied to bodily characteristics and capacities. Women’s bodies—shaped by hormonal cycles, libido, metabolic changes, ovulation, pregnancy, and other rhythms dictated by reproductive capacity—have historically been used as pretexts to justify their subordination within the social structure. For centuries, the female body has been a battleground where different forces of power converge, crystallizing in the sovereignty over the body of the pregnant woman.
While maintaining a positive view of technology’s potential, this project seeks to critically analyze how technopatriarchy influences the modern techniques and procedures employed in the medical industry for human reproduction. Additionally, it examines the creation of sexualized devices that reinforce the perception of women as objects, exploring the implications and consequences of these practices in contemporary society.
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
Curated by @wednesdaykimm
Julie Grosche / amour amour amour / Single Channel HD Video / 00:14:23 / 2018
In this universe, humanoids begin to question their own existence.
A child asks their mother, “What are we?”
A group imagines a new way of living—centered on love.
A line by Virginia Woolf glows in the dark, composed of tiny lights.
A child declares: it is impossible to cry in zero gravity.
They are not simply artificial intelligence, avatars, roboids, or human replicas.
They carry their own history.
They are not just projections of us—they are not ours.
The mother answers: “We are data.”
And that is what they embody.
They sing to connect across time—song as the last true technology of transmission.
Together, they form a village.
A family.
They ask: how do we live together?
How do we pass things on?
Why do we love?
And how do we exist?
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
@julie_grosche
Curated by @wednesdaykimm
Faith Holland / TechnoMakeup / mixed media installation / 2016/2025
TechnoMakeup is a YouTube channel consisting of makeup tutorial videos for devices, apps, and websites. The series reflects on the intimate relationship we have with our technology—using it morning and night, updating its software, checking its notifications, and stroking its screen. In the tutorials, Holland applies moisturizer and makeup to devices like phones, tablets, and computer monitors; thus the care and maintenance that we enact on our bodies, particularly feminine bodies, is remapped onto technology. This allows for a customization and an aesthetic that is reminiscent of the early web: colorful, glittery, and user-generated. For Rise of the Care Machines, the Technomakeup videos are arranged in a new installation that fuses a work desk with a vanity.
@asugarhigh@wednesdaykimm@umd_art
“Do Machines Dream of Magic? ” is a website and series of intimate gatherings co-created by Qianqian Ye and AX Mina / 2023- ongoing
Do Machines Dream of Magic? is a website and series of intimate gatherings aimed at exploring the role of traditional forms of magic during a time of AI magic. It aims to merge ancient beliefs with futuristic systems in order to explore tensions, opportunities, anxieties and hopes around the future of technology in a time of climate change and increased concerns about the state of the world.
The entire website is designed and built by Qianqian Ye with the help from AI - the visuals are generated by Mid Journey or Stable Diffusion, the code is generated with the help of LLM. All the work sits at the intersection of technology, spirituality, and social change, fostering a deeper understanding of the ways in which individuals navigate the digital realm and their relationship with artificial intelligence.
The in-person event is a light gathering of people to experience and deliver the spells. We work with LLMs, Stable Diffusion models and the prompt templates to craft a ritual that we are enacting for protection in this new digital age.
For the first iteration of this project, we commissioned artists Cy X, Edgar Fabián Frías, Helen Shewolfe Tseng, and Jamel Mims/ MC Tingbudong to develop AI personas.
We are grateful to the Civic Media Fellowship at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and Communications and the AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS) Initiative of USC Center for Generative AI & Society for supporting this project.
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
@44ian@wednesdaykimm@umd_art
Collaborator: AX Mina @fiveandnine_podcast
AI personas commissioned from guest artists:
• Cy X @cyberwitch666
• Edgar Fabián Frías @edgarfabianfrias
• Helen Shewolfe Tseng @wolfchirp
• Jamel Mims @mctingbudong
𝕊𝕠𝕗𝕥 𝔼𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕣𝕤: 𝔸 ℝ𝕚𝕥𝕦𝕒𝕝 𝕠𝕗 𝔾𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕔𝕙𝕖𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕖
Soft Errors is a collective, text-based AI voice-over video series that threads through this exhibition. Drawn from conversations with participating artists, it reflects on the unseen and glitching labor of caregiving, art-making, and technology. Please look for the three QR codes linking to Soft Errors reflections. Scan one to hear the artists’ voices on invisible labor, care, and technology.
Here, artists respond to three guiding prompts:
What does “invisible labor” look like in your life, and how do you make it visible through your work?
How do you balance or collapse boundaries between personal life, caregiving, and artistic production?
Have you formed an emotional or intimate relationship with any technologies in your practice—especially through motherhood or caregiving?
The Herman Maril Gallery, College Park, Maryland.
September 8 - September 26, 2025
Opening reception: Tuesday, September 16, 5 to 8 pm
Participating Artists:
Mollye Bendell, Snow Yunxue Fu, Diana Gheorghiu, Julie Grosche, Faith Holland,Rory Scott, Flavia Visconte and Qianqian Ye
The Rise of the Care Machines III
John Dorsey Prize Exhibition
Opening reception: Tuesday, September 16, 5 to 8 pm
On view September 8–26. Open Monday–Friday; weekends by appointment.
Meet the Artist
🫚𝕸𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖞𝖊 𝕭𝖊𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖑𝖑🍃
Mollye Bendell @moss.piglet is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in immersive and electronic media. She has received grants and residencies from Wave Farm WGXC, the Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. Awards include the GBCA Baker Artist Award, the MSAC Independent Artist Award and the RW Deutsch Foundation Rubys Artist Grant. She is also a founding member of media arts collective strikeWare, which creates experiences grounded in our collective history, often using new technologies to emphasize the nowness of that history. Mollye’s solo work has been exhibited in venues such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, the New York Electronic Arts Festival, and Maryland Art Place. Public art commissions include Ladew Topiary Gardens and the City of Redmond, Washington. She has recently exhibited at CURRENTS New Media Festival, the BlackRock Center for the Arts and National Sawdust.
Image information:
1-2. how to breathe underwater
Prints. Virtual reality experience.
3-4. COMMIT! This project was created by Kate Ladenheim in collaboration with Mollye Bendell and Timothy Ross Kelly.
5-6. Wander/Wonder
7-8Outgrown
9. sketch for Sleepers
10. Resistor, protector
11. Feeding
