I randomly love you / hate you

The Japanese artist duo exonemo creates experimental projects that explore the paradoxes of the digital and analog environments surrounding us. Formed by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa in 1996, exonemo’s works have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions worldwide. They have continued to produce works that engage with the relationship between ‘technology’, such as the internet and computers, and ‘analogue’ which constitutes reality. exonemo’s point of focus reveals perspectives that have gone unnoticed, giving expression to those perspectives in unique and humorous ways. Digital media has now entered our lives as a given; and the unit create works and develop projects that make us aware of the fundamental nature of, and relationships pertaining to, such media.

In 2006, their project The Road Movie won the Golden Nica in the Net Vision category of the Prix Ars Electronica. Since 2012 they have organized the “Internet Yami-Ichi,” a large flea market that has taken place in Tokyo and New York and which makes the often immaterial flotsam of cyberspace tangible in online-themed objects. The artists have lived and work in New York since 2015. exonemo’s recent solo exhibitions include U & I, NOWHERE (New York, 2019); LO, WAITINGROOM (Tokyo, 2019); The Life-Cycle of Interfaces, New Media Artspace gallery, Baruch College Library (New York, 2018); TO THE APES, Mitsubishi-Jisho Artium (Fukuoka, 2013). They have also participated in group exhibitions including The Invisible Hand, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney, 2019); Reincarnation of Media Art, WRO Art Center (Wroclaw, 2019); TECH ART FOR COLLECTORS, Zurcher Gallery (New York, 2019); SUNRISE/SUNSET Artport, Whitney Museum website (New York, 2019); Reincarnation of Media Art, YCAM (Yamaguchi, 2018); and Hello World: for the Post-Human Age, Art Tower Mito (Ibaraki, 2018).

I randomly love you / hate you (2018)

Mixed media (LCD Monitors, Singleboard Computer)

Two monitors showing conversation about Love/Hate with random adverb continuously.

This work shows a conversation on a messaging app, an endless exchange of the sentences: “I [adverb] love you” and “I [adverb] hate you.” The adverbs are selected randomly from 300 or so options, and some of the generated expressions barely make enough sense, while others result in uncommon or awkward wording. The monitors are set up such that its interlocutors express the opposite emotions to the interlocutors on the corresponding side of the other monitor. The work shows up the contrast between the strong human emotions represented by the words “love” and “hate,” and the impersonal processes by which machines process that information.

HYBRID Box Next Shows

14.04. – 15.05.2022: Theo Triantafyllidis
20.05. – 19.06.2022: Jonas Lund