Understanding Anicka Yi's Artwork | AmorSciendi

A deep dive into the career and works of conceptual artist Anicka Yi who blurs the line between science and art, human and non-human, and every other boundary one can think of. This focuses specifically on her work Biologizing the Machine, but the concepts are relevant for her work in general.

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Works Cited
ANICKA YI: Metaspore. RIZZOLI, 2022.
Godfrey, Mark Benjamin, et al. Anicka Yi: in Love with the World. Tate Publishing, 2021.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Cyborg Manifesto. Camas Books, 2018.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of

#conceptualart
#arttheory
#anikayi

Going to a city and want to learn about the art there? Try these:

[jeffjones]

Fascinating compilation of so many facets of existentialism at play within Yi's work! I especially appreciate the impermanence of her creations. Also the futility of perfect understanding based on the infinite number of perspectives and our own filters that bias what we perceive to fit with our own past experiences and understandings. Great talk! Thanks for not "cutting it down."

[lilacswithtea]

i was recently talking to a friend about the tension we felt as young people between wanting immediate feelings of safety and belonging that might come from joining a clique vs wanting the space to understand and explore ourselves as individuals. i think if we could share the PROCESS of developing both our individual identities and building the relationships and groups we want then we could/would speak from this situational perspective much more easily.

of course that would mean opening up emotionally and even artists wear the cloaks of irony and sarcasm or rebellion and subversion or ideals and idealization to obscure their feelings.

also, i love your videos and appreciate you very much 🥰

[timothyharris]

I enjoyed this talk very much. Thank you very much indeed. The few videos of yours I have watched (I have only just discovered them and shall certainly be watching more) have been very intelligent, perceptive and illuminating. But may I say that I wonder whether you overestimate the power of language with respect to the arts. My wife is a concert pianist, I have been an actor and director, and coach (diction & interpretation) for singers of opera & oratorio in English, here in Japan, where I have lived for fifty years; as well as a critic of contemporary poetry, and other things I shan't go into. One of my favourite remarks is one by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his book 'Distinction': ‘(M)usic, the most “pure” and “spiritual” of arts, is perhaps simply the most corporeal…. It is pitched not so much beyond words as below them…’ I think this is largely true of all the arts. One thing that has always worried me when discussing poetry is the impression one gets, a little too often for comfort, that people have understood one's explanation of a particular poem and suppose that they have therefore understood the poem qua poem, when they haven't. An explanation or interpretation (of a certain kind - not, for example, a good pianist's interpretation of a piece in performance) appeals primarily to the intellect, and too readily gives people an illusion of understanding. I am not saying that you are doing that - far from it! I am simply saying that I find language a dangerous and difficult tool.

[RogerColom]

If these works don’t last, who buys them? And if they don’t sell, who pays for them to be made and exhibited? Where does the money to sustain Yi’s studio come from? In the art world we talk about power and distributed knowledge, but we hardly ever talk about where the money comes from (unless it’s some blockbuster exhibition sponsored by a corporation that uses it as advertising). In deconstructing power structures, wouldn’t the logical next step be to follow the money, to talk about the financial god-trick?

[BariumCobaltNitrogn]

Art that a blind person can see. And fight the urge to flee from. Smell is our danger magnet with a direct line to our lizard brain, telling us if something is poisonous, rotting and deadly or lovely, delectable and sensuous.
Smell can trigger the clearest memories and uses little or no processing, unlike all of our other senses. We can smell fear, lust and compatibility in the dark, while our eyes do nothing but lie to us all day every day. No two people see the same rainbow, but have the same gut reaction to petrichor.
In general, we like to not smell anything. The smell of power is silent, fresh, 2 micron clean air changed 50-75 times per hour through a 4" thick MERV 13 filter.
I think the glass plates are like Petri dishes holding a perfectly fine experiment that when hung by cables become art. It doesn't matter what they look like. It's dirt from Rorschach's garden. What do YOU think it looks like?
A deep dive is right, this is a good one. Physicists and language, patriarchy, what is alive, slime molds and intelligence?, the observer effect, vision, society and civility, phew!

[matthewharper]

Isn't the "god-trick" just a rewording of Bacon's Idols of the Mind? Plus, wasn't radioactivity explored originally by Madame Curie? And still, it is mostly applied to weapons and profit. Electrons don't "jump" between shells, that is a colloquial expression. The proper term is transition or atomic electron transition. Likewise, atoms aren't split. That is also a layman's expression, The proper term is fission or nuclear fission. Sure, how anything is talked about can tint the subject, but to wrap a bunch of cherry-picked terms together in a bundle and then promote this as some sort of feminist theory is well... silly at best. More likely it is half baked-theory of a philosphically bankrupt woman who wraps her ideas in "feminism" to protect them from critizism. The ideas aren't very orginal and really don't seem to apply. I haven't read her directly, but you're articulate and I'm sure you are summerizing her ideas accurately.

[wurnotantmlb]

no, dude. you hit at things but you dont need to invent or talk from the artist mouth? to keep talking??