On the occasion of the final weekend of Mo Kong’s solo exhibition, Swift Island Chain, Smack Mellon presents a performance activation of their installation by artists Fiel Guhit and Tianyi Sun. Continuing explorations from the duo’s recent works rooted in the experience of time in contemporary environments, Workloop connects to Kong’s work through the performance of repetitive labor. In dialogue with an autoregressive text to speech system performing as the “narrator,” Guhit and Sun enact the roles of administrators, laboring with the machines to trace its recursive sonic loops. 

The performance expresses itself through what philosopher Byung-Chul Han identifies as the atomization of time–a phenomenon intrinsic to contemporary digital culture, whereby points in time no longer connect to one another to form narrative experience. Instead, experience disintegrates into “non-time,” continually on loop, unable to linger or contemplate, and without end. Set within Mo Kong’s disused, post-pandemic workstation environments, Guhit and Sun play with the tension between their roles as laborers and the resignation of tang ping–a Chinese phrase translating to “laying flat,” a passive resistance to the accelerated temporalities of overwork and over-achievement.

Bios:

Fiel Guhit (b. 1986) is an artist based in New York City who explores systems and their peripheral experiences. He builds software objects to simulate and invert the ways in which innovation has distanced the human experience. Relation to the dematerialized characteristics of technology is central within Guhit’s work as he uses it to guide and situate oneself within emerging non-physical worlds. Through developing experiential software, Guhit brings new animacies to human-computer interaction that break away from normalized patterns—exploring margins of “error” as margins of possibility.

Tianyi Sun (b. 1996) explores the re-creation of embodied experience and its inevitable failure. By integrating painting, sculpture, time-based mediums, poetry, and software, she creates responsive environments to excavate the affects of technology and probe digital interfaces, communication systems, and archival structures as concurrent networks of power. Her work has been exhibited at Artist’s Space, New York; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles; Helena Anrather, New York, among others. Tianyi received her MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons, The New School, New York, and was recently an artist in residence at 99 Canal, New York; and NARS Foundation, Brooklyn.

Image: Courtesy of the Artists. Photo by Xianfan Zhu.