Out Of Office, 2022
Out Of Office is a show exploring work experiences through industrial waste: off-cuts, cut-outs, misprints, digital corruption, and digital debris.
You’re Bringing Me Down, 2024
You’re Bringing Me Down is a show exploring counter-directions of media.
Press Release:
Picture Theory presents You’re Bringing Me Down, an exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Jason Isolini. Working through a spectrum of media including optics, lens-based visual opacities, moving-image, performance, and traditional means, Isolini shapes surprising topologies between surveillance-fueleddata-mining and the literal resource extraction needed to keep digital infrastructures running.
The exhibition’s title, You’re Bringing Me Down, at once refers to the psychological damage inflicted by endless doomscrolling, the directional UX of the scrolling experience that forces our fingers into repetitious swipes downward, and large-scale mining’s actual digging and devastating ecological consequences.
Throughout his work, Isolini synthesizes media with sculptural elasticity, creating a rich alter-realm of appearance and disappearance that brushes us against our own limits and apprehension. As we become the screens these works project their technical intelligence onto, we might consider where exactly the public sphere today is located. At stake is the authenticity of aesthetic experience. Have we become no more than AI-driven chatbots in a dystopic globalized chat room endlessly producing data for this extractive system to run more efficiently? Have we become the canaries in the coal mine? Undoubtedly, we have arrived at the shores of a confused aesthetics. We might ask, like many artists have, if we can adequately imagine this devious global machine. But perhaps our question is poorly posed. Isolini asks not whether we can imagine it, but rather, “Does its power lie in it being able to imagine us?”
You’re Bringing Me Down finds Isolini opting for an alternative orientation tending toward radical simultaneity, omnidirectional 360º seamlessness, playful interrogation, and rejuvenating vitality. It is work that engages with our current moment as an abyss not to despair over, but in which one may become light.
Ballad of a Laborer 2019-2022
"The Ballad of a Laborer" is an internet artwork existing in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Google Street View.
Approaching Street View as a stop-motion medium, the click-through experience of the Navy Yard can be understood as an expanded cinema. Transforming an industrialized private-public space into an unexpected and animated feature the work was made over the course of three years through building constellations of imagery captured on-site.
The covertly published media functions as both a map of previously unseen virtual territory, and as a performance work.
Beyond a linear story, the imagery creates omni-directional paths throughout the gated space that present interactive narrative possibilities and follow geographic trajectories reminiscent of land-art. Connecting ideas of occupation to digital surveillance technologies, the story of a laborer unfolds as they look for a way out of the virtual architecture. Paralleling the comedic performances of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, the space of the Navy Yard becomes a theatrical set for playful spectacle intervening in the spatial meaning, representation, and perceived neutrality of virtually rendered terrain.
The work is still intact, you can start here
November 19th 2022 marked the official debut of this work with Microscope Gallery— Please visit Platform for the interactive representation of this work.
Additionally, my video walkthrough of the project was part of Screenwalks courtesy of Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers Gallery U.K.
Steal My Sunshine, 2021
Steal My Sunshine was a guerrilla-installation performance piece incorporating twenty-four artists works on rentable e-scooters. It is considered both a singlular art work and group show.
Through invitation, each participating artist provided one graphic for one section of the scooter. Rented by Jason Isolini and other artists involved in the show, e-scooters were driven into the gallery. Once parked, a hired professional vehicle-wrapped the e-scooters with the specified graphics.
The e-scooters were held in the gallery through time-based reservations. Participants and audience members subverted user-applications be re-reserving the e-scooters to hold them at the gallery. Once the e-scooters were complete, they re-entered the public realm as the rentable objects.
This show took form as an event including a DJ set, and a barbecue.
Press Release:
“Steal my Sunshine”, the one-hit-wonder by pop-band Len, wasn’t about anything but a three-day bender Marc Costanzo was on when he sampled a key riff that brought the band international acclaim.
Riding scooters along a sun bleached Daytona Beach, Len’s music video represents a mirage of momentary happiness within decline – a short lived career built off the appropriated baseline of “More, More, More” by Andrea True-Connection.
A similar sense of impending loss accompanies the regularity of e-scooters and rental vehicles in the city's landscape. Using the sharing economy’ as camouflage, corporations continue to intrude in the public sphere.
If an art gallery is considered public space what happens when e-scooters are parked inside of it? Do they become artworks? Does the user become a spectator? Does the art gallery become a fulfillment center? The premise for this show is based on these questions.
Incidental Container, 2024
Incidental Container is a show that focuses on the contingencies of return poicies, promotional contracts, and digital subscription plans that offer temporary space for free.
It is simultaneously a singular artwork and group show
The show can be thought of in a few ways:
1. A series of processes that dictates the conditions for exhibtion.
2. A format for art works to exsist, and organically form a context on their own.
3. As a document to be reformatted as both, a new exhibtion and an object.
Process Description:
Utilizing a “First Month Free” promotional contract, I invited nine artists to transfer thier works into a storage unit from thier own physical or digital storage.
The works were installed and powered by equiptment utilizing 15 day return policies.
There was no public access to the show, so I decided to create a 360º virtual tour to enable remote viewing of it. The tour was hosted online using html code.
The html code was then extracted from the virtual tour and sublimated in translucent fabric.
At the 15 day mark I deinstalled the show and had the equipment returned at no cost.
I then hung the sublimated fabrics in the contanier as a representation of the exhibtions digital exsistence for the remainder of the contract.
After the show was completed I had the fabrics sewn into purchasable tote bags, ultimatly, becoming new containers to exhibti peoples things.
As a second iteration, this exhition was presented at the gallery PWA. The storage container was printed at scale and all original media was presented as re-photographed and filmed documentation.
All filmed documentation at PWA streamed on gallery monitors from a “Free 30-Day” Dropbox account.
Featuring artists: Jake Brush, Courtlin Byrd, Tomi Faison, Sarah Friend, Xavier McFarlin, Rebecca Millsop, Zach Nader, Georgica Pettus, and Molly Soda.
The Terminal, 2020
Directed by: Jason Isolini
featuring: Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell and Neale Willis
curated by: Off Site Project
Prophesying the titanic upheaval posed by the 4th Industrial Revolution, estimates of AI resultant unemployment vary, from Oxford’s much cited 47% of the US population, to the McKinsey Global Institute’s high-end estimation of 30% and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s baseline 8%. These figures avoid one salient factor, displacement is only one byproduct of the infusion of AI into the everyday, it masks a secondary consideration, that much of the remaining workforce becomes automated by their interaction with machine intelligence.Composed by the artist Jason Isolini and curated by the online gallery Off Site Project, The Terminalis simultaneously a singular artwork and a group exhibition, an exploded version of Richard Hamilton’s iconic contribution to the Whitechapel Gallery’s seminal 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrowand a 21st century gesamtkunstwerk. Playing on Hamilton’s themes of domesticity, leisure and consumerism, The Terminal adds more contemporary concerns of labour, AI and displacement, with contributions from Isolini’s contemporaries each dramatising certain hopes or antagonisms about the coming machine age.
Bob Bicknell-Knight decorates the corporate interior and battlefield with images of choreographed labourers navigating complex warehouse interiors, whereas Erin Mitchell posits a decompression chamber of light, highly saturated artificial sun calibrated to restore Amazon Pickers’ vitamine D. At the end of the supply chain, Ian Bruner creates amorphous sculptures from materials delivered by the retail giant, fusing product with packaging with varnish and smart-phoning scanning technology.
Drawing on her extensive experience with advanced humanoid AIs, Claire Jervert presents a 3D pointmap cloud of the large suburban home of Bina48, whilst conversely, Joshua Citarella’s densely packed visuals capture our spatial constraint, in increasingly compacted home work environments. Continuing the domestic strain, artist and creative technologist Neale Willis has trained AIs on Zoopla data sets, algorithmically proposing machine-eye interpretations of tomorrow’s bathroom.
Fragmented through the narrative loop, Jessica Evans' performance acts out a conversation between AIs as they advertise travel luggage, a commercial symbol of a system that conflates relaxation and freedom with consumption. Whilst, set on a Google Street View loop of their Facebook's California HQ, Kakia Konstantinaki’s undulating alien form beats like an artificial heart, a menacing manifestation of post-Deleuzian control, a theme developed by Angeline Meitzler in an environment of cookie notifications expressing our perpetual tracking within surveillance capitalism.
Finally, James Irwin’s auditorily disturbing condition layers a distorted and copy-pasted cockroach with harsh visuals, cross-breeding nature’s ultimate survivor with cyborg materiality, creating a desperate vision of the resilience required to negotiate this emergent landscape.
Jason Isolini is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York.
His work uses modes of image making and network interventions to test the increased conflation of corporate, public and private environments.
He has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Widewalls, Vice, Artspace, and Pin-up among others. His writing has been published in Outland Magazine, Zora Zine, MIA Journal, and Berlin University’s conference in Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities.
jasonisolini@gmail.com
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