Tara Foley is currently living and working in Hudson, New York. She got her MFA from CalArts in 2013. She is an artist, a maker, and a community based artist educator who enjoys the opportunity to curate as well. Tara is currently focused on her collaborative project with her partner, Alexander Theodoropulos called Spyrodon, which combines sound, performance, animations and wearable pieces. They have three albums out and have completed and performed at a residency in Asheville, NC called Lamplight. They perform at music venues and galleries, including The Ely Center of Contemporary Art (Hartford), Satellite Gallery (Broome street, NYC), Chanorth, Chashama Artist Residency (Pine Plains, NY), The Avalon Lounge (Catskill), the The Half Moon (Hudson), to name a few.
In anticipation of what we now know commonly as A.I. technology, Tara’s work primarily focused on a project called The Church of A.I. Born out of the fear of the ways this new technology will encroaches on our lives, she looked at questions around why does it exist and for what purpose? How do we want A.I. to function? Can A.I. help humans reach our higher purpose? Can they help us solve injustice and hunger? What would their spiritual practices look like? Is there a spiritual meaning to their existence? Today, we are having a whole other conversation around A.I now that is has arrived, however, its implications are still not completely known or understood.
The Church of A.I. looked at the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence by imagining the spiritual practices of the coming A.I. Tara questioned notions of ethics regarding A.I., what is meant by the term “progress” and algorithmic bias due to the lack of women, artists, people of color, and disadvantaged individuals in creating A.I. code. These works focus entirely on analog technology in their creation, emphasizing time, labor and the human hand.
Works made for The Church of A.I. include:
The Book of Habilis. Homo Habilis is a little known ancestor of modern humans, often credited with the invention of basic tool technology for hunting and skinning animals. The Book of Habilis works are a series of paintings made on hand drawn, or hand silk screened graph paper that represent pages from an imagined spiritual book that explores ethics alongside personal and political aspects of humanity. These works often explore different modes of communication, including languages besides English, as well as, made up encoded systems. The patterns that you see are stand ins for words and phrases.
Tapestries for Talos. In Greek Mythology, Talos, was a giant automaton made of bronze, the first imagined robot. Tapestries for Talos are imagined tapestries for The Church of A.I. These works are half painting and half weaving. The graph that you see is made of string which hangs off the bottom of the page and those strings are woven into. This work acknowledges the role that weaving has played in the history of computers with the Jacquard punch card system of data computation.
Dance Notation for Robots are imagined ritual dance movements drawn from a devised notation system for The Church of A.I.
Vestments for A.I. are imagined ritualistic garments for The Church of A.I. (these works are coming soon). These works explore the symbolism of the circle and look at different cultures that utilize some form of the clerical collar in their respective traditions.
Is there a universal system that can understand all things?
Maybe that system is Art.
Thanks for visiting. Some relevant links
This pattern from Laura Kogler’s pattern generator script meant for mosaic knitting
