Fever Dream

New Media Installation

Devin Ronneberg + Kite | 2021

Recently on display at EFA Project Space NYC as part of the exhibition Speculations on the InfraRed and Chronus Art Center Shanghai in the exhibition AI Delivered: The Abject.

”Fever Dream is an interactive multimedia installation by Devin Ronneberg, a multidisciplinary artist of Kanaka Maoli/Okinawan descent working primarily in sculpture, sound, image-making, and computational media, and Kite, an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer. The work brings together their mutual interests in the implications of emergent technologies and artificial intelligence, information control and collection, Indigenous ontologies, and the relationship between the body and technology. In response to the audience’s proximity, a large projection flips between channels algorithmically tuned in to scraped footage of apocalyptic robotic athleticism, digital vulnerability, and conflicting predictions of a world powered by AI. The work plumbs the depths of the settler colonial psyche and the ways in which colonial ideologies require the collection and categorization of our data to better predict and control our behaviour, exploring the dangers that we expose ourselves to when developing intelligent, weaponizable, technologies without regulation or ethics enforcement. The work and its library of rotating footage function as a conspiracy generator for settler futurity, reliant on dispossession, denial, and illusions of choice. UFO sightings, space cults, and deepfake prophecies intermingle with new mythologies of Artificial Intelligence, rare earth extraction, and nuclear paranoia. GPT-2 generated subtitles, trained from a custom text dataset assembled by the artists, draw the viewer in, encouraging us to overcome colonial biases by first breaking through embedded conspiracies, mythologies, and predictions.”

- Installation Description from Speculations on the Infrared, written by Christopher Green.