Tom Leeser Curates Tech/Know/Future/ Exhibition at Montclair State University

Installation photograph of Tech/Know/Future/ From Slang to Structure at Montclair State University. Photograph by Cary Whittier.

Tom Leeser, director of the Art and Technology Program and the Center for Integrated Media (CIM) in the School of Art, has curated Tech/Know/Future/ From Slang to Structure, a new exhibition at Montclair State University in New Jersey running until Dec. 11, 2021.

Leeser, who is currently on creative leave from CalArts, organized a series of works responding to “technological systems within art” as they address themes of identity, history, and abstraction. The exhibition features works from 11 innovative cross-disciplinary artists, including CalArtian Taehee Kim (Art-IM MFA 19). Pieces in the exhibition represent the artists’ efforts to “establish new relationships” with time and technology through AR (augmented reality), AI (artificial intelligence), sound, video, paper, and textile works.

More about the exhibition from Montclair State University’s website: 

Tech/Know/Future is an examination of humanity’s particular moment in time amidst a newfound era of social and political upheaval. Humanity stands at a crossroads between its past attachment to technology’s promise and a precarious, vague future. The artists who comprise this exhibition are compelling and provocative: their work collectively maps future territories of uncommon knowledge, digitally reconstituted iconographies of the present, and short-circuited networks of the past.

The exhibition was inspired by visual artist, writer, and musician Rammellzee’s essay “Iconic Treatise Gothic Futurism,” and Italian cultural theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s book After the Future. Where Rammellzee devised a “technological language” to combat conventional approaches to art making and writing in the contemporary art world, Berardi declared the “mythology of the future” as defunct as a result of the rise of global capitalism. 

Tech/Know/Future is accompanied by a fully illustrated book, which includes an interview by Montclair’s Director of University Galleries Megan C. Austin with Leeser, as well as essays by various artists and academics, including School of Critical Studies faculty Andrew Culp.

The exhibition can also be experienced online through a digital 360° tour hosted by Matterport.