This event marks Lauren Huret’s online residency launch, inviting you to take part in a « collective debug » where we will first get to know Lauren’s practice and attempt to understand how we deal with media bewitchment -as the artist calls it. We will dig deep to understand a little bit better all the occult work at stake when we share our content online, or even simply when we use the Internet.

For this, Lauren invited Claire Hoffmann, Head of Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, who organized her exhibition in 2019 « Praying for my haters » and Mary Ellyn Johnson, Head of Exhibitions at swissnex San Francisco, who is organizing her 2021 exhibition for the swissnex Gallery; to talk about the artworks and publication she made on the subject of content moderation, algorithmic illusions and the occult automation processes. The artist Lauren Huret will also elaborate on her ideas for her year long residency in Silicon Valley and the events and collective workshops she intends to do with swissnex San Francisco in the coming months. The conversation is open to anyone who has questions, opinions, suggestions, theories or beliefs.

Lauren Huret’s year residency and exhibition : Praying for your eyes

For the past 3 years, the artist has been exploring the work of content moderators, workers who sort out, as a daily practice, the online content posted on different participatory platforms (for example social media). Lauren Huret is raising questions about what she calls « cursed imagery », or problematic images that can have disastrous psychological and physical consequences on humans in the age of « meme warfare” and political misinformation. For the swissnex online residency, she will take the opportunity to share her research and find ways to counter-act the curse, or to break the spell on media bewitchment, by dissecting our beliefs toward technological tools and illusions.

The artist and the institution decided together to launch this one year residency right after the US election, taking advantage of these agitated times to reflect and rethink our use of media (participatory or not), our collective understanding of images, communication tools, art and politics.