The Oral Logic

solo exhibition · 2019
Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto

The exhibition is an assemblage of four multimedia installations that expand the Oral Logic thread from Ye's extensive research on the poetics and politics of human-machine coupling.

Turning the gaze inward on bodily systems, the installations are conceptualized through the cannibalistic metaphor of "eating and being eaten" to contemplate our dialectical relationships with technology. We as bio-cultural-technological amalgams have always merged

our mental activities with the operations of technologies in a broader sense. For example, writing is a technology we use to make sense of ourselves and the world as it reconfigures our consciousness. Having entered the electronic landscape, we, both consumer and feeder, devour and chew, digest and absorb electronic culture in all domains. From eating to speaking, from the molecular to the epistemological, our body and psyche are subject to the cyborgian economy, where massive networks reveal the entangled power of political ideologies, economic imbalance, and cultural disparities, mobilizing affective and cognitive agencies and planetary computation. In this context, The Oral Logic asks, "to what extent would this symbiosis evolve?"

The four installations interweave The Oral Logic as if our minds already operate as silicon-carbon intelligence hybrids. At the centre of the space, low-frequency sounds activate the sculptural diagrams on the wall and animated digestive system, mapped with malleable texts. Machine learning algorithms are employed to produce text, sound and image during the artist’s process of collaborating with digital bodies. The metaphor of cannibalism in Brazilian literature and translation theory offers ways to rethink cultural assimilation in colonial and post-colonial conditions. Borrowing the same idea to think about technological assimilation, Ye proposes “vomit as a method” to redefine and reclaim human agency in hyper-controlled societies.