The MAK Center for Art and Architecture in collaboration with the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA presents new work from Aleksandra Domanović and Jen Liu for the eighteenth iteration of the Garage Exchange series. As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and recent political and environmental upheavals, Liu and Domanović examine the lines between viral transmission and closed systems of information. This exhibition is the culmination of an ongoing conversation and convergence of ideas in their practices, on circularity in material forms.

In the case of Aleksandra Domanović, wood bases have been hand-turned to deduce shape, supporting rotating LED fan displays videos: data and lines of research float on the surface of movement.  Domanović’s Worldometers are named after a website that aggregates live tickers for various real-time statistics, exploring the tension between data input and perception when grappling with the vast scale of human mortality represented in recent COVID-19 statistics.

In Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Electropore (2021), Jen Liu continues to explore how insurrectionist ideas might be transmitted and received, using genetic engineering as a narrative vehicle to look at how industrial labor, global environmental racism, and myths of techno-optimism work in tandem. In this piece, Black and Asian womxn form an electrical closed loop: their bodies are used as electricity generators, while they are also consumers (though multiple cheap gadgets).