Visiting Assistant Professor Angela Washko exhibits in “Blinding Pleasures: Angela Washko / Ben Grosser / Man Bartlett” Feb 10 – March 18 at Arebyte Gallery, London UK.
Blinding Pleasures is a group show curated by Filippo Lorenzin, including Visiting Professor Angela Washko, Man Bartlett and Ben Grosser. The show is the first in arebyte’s 2017 series, which is inspired by Deleuze’s Postscript for Societies of Control. Professor Washko will be showing “Survival Rates in Captivity (Free Will Mode #5)”, a video “in which the artist uses The Sims to place human artificial intelligence into architectural situations which test the constraints of their ability to rethink the environments they’ve been placed in”. Blinding Pleasures responds to the shock and confusion experienced the morning after the Brexit vote and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, where people were forced to reconcile the disparity between the reality constructed by their social media feeds and the one that had actually come to fruition. The show explores the False Consensus effect, delving into not only the “Filter Bubbles” that have enveloped users on social media platforms, but other ways the effect materializes in a marketing-driven world.