What's up, guys?
My name is Venus X, and we're here at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, and we're standing
on the dance floor of Warm Up festival, which happens here every summer, every Saturday,
during July, August, and a little bit of September.
And it's a really special festival that I was able to play seven years ago, and I'm
now curator of.
What's cool about the festival is that you buy a ticket, and you get to see a full day
of music, but you can also visit the museum, which has some really incredible shows.
Today, I'm gonna walk you through a few of them, so come on in.
This is our lobby, and this is a work from an exhibition upstairs called "Past Skin,"
and this work was created by Jillian Mayer.
She lives in Miami, she's from there.
and “Past Skin" thinks about the relationship that we have to landscape, and to our bodies,
and technology.
And this one specifically speaks to the way that we use our cellphones
So, Jillian Mayer looks at people, takes photos, and she relies on the negative spaces on their
bodies to determine what her sculptures are gonna look like.
Waiting for a friend, texting away, lounging, texting away, take a walk, still texting away,
sounds familiar, doesn't it?
"Why should our body end at our skin?"
Abigail Lucien is from Haiti, very cool.
My family is from Dominican Republic, which is the country next door.
We share an island, which isn't connected for many reasons.
But these canopies remind me of my family's homes in Dominican Republic.
It's pretty amazing to see some artwork like that here.
It's like a movie version of what people think the Caribbean sounds like.
The next part of "Past Skin" that we're gonna look at is this film by Madelon Vriesendorp.
It was made originally for French TV.
And so, in this story, she's talking about the Chrysler Building and the Empire State
Building having a love affair, two penises.
I think they're gay.
Don't edit that out.
Oh, my God.
So, we're on the third floor of MoMA PS1 and I'm gonna walk you through Ian Cheng's "Emissaries."
It is a three-part saga programmed by a computer system that is based on a video game that
plays itself.
So, these first screens here are depicting a world where humans have just arrived, and
they're trying to figure out what they're doing, why they're there, what's their reason,
their ecosystem, their purpose, And so, each character is playing out its own original
narrative that keeps on changing.
So, in the second one, a volcano that exists here has exploded.
Humanity is over, and there's artificial intelligence that's been sent to study what happened, what
did we do wrong?
Apparently, their leader, or the thing that they follow, is called “Celebrity.”
It's kind of ironic.
Anyway, he's a skeleton.
He kind of looks like an entertainer, he's got his glasses and his bling on, but he has
no skin.
And so, a little bit of background on Ian Cheng, he studied cognitive psychology and
also worked in George Lucas' factory [Industrial Light & Magic]
and that's where he picked up all these animation techniques.
So, this is the third and final room in the Ian Cheng "Emissaries" three-part saga.
Artificial intelligence has become something of itself.
It's its own organism now.
Like the idea that we've just fused with all of the crazy shit we were doing, crazy things
that we were doing.
Technology and destroying the planet, and look at what's left of us.
Anyway, this is what you would call art.
Enjoy it.
It doesn't always make sense, but that doesn't mean it's not a really, really, really well-thought-out.
So, we're in the James Turrell piece called "Meeting" now on the third floor at MoMA PS1.
It was created in 1980.
It’s a really special room because apparently, there were four feet of concrete above our
heads that he jackhammered through himself, in order to make this beautiful hole in the building.
The myth is that he pitched a tent and stayed here some nights, which is really cool.
This is one of my favorite pieces in the museum.
It's really simple.
It's a forever piece.
It's like the clouds, or the sun, or a waterfall, it’s one of those simple things that makes
you think about the sublime.
But also, why would you put a hole in the ceiling of a museum, and why would anyone
let you leave that hole there then for 30 some odd years?
It's pretty ridiculous, maybe 40 years now.
What you guys are looking at now, and what we're gonna walk through is the "Lumen" installation
by Jenny Sabin Studios.
And what you have here is a million yards of fiber that have been digitally woven.
Sort of looks like coral reef.
It's crazy how you can make the digital algorithms resemble nature so closely.
And so, that concludes my tour of MoMA PS1.
This is what it looks like, summer 2017.
That's the stage where it all goes down every Saturday.
We open our doors at 12pm, we close at 9pm.
There's music from 3pm to 9pm.
So far, it's been really amazing, and I hope to see you guys here this summer.
You can come all the way through September 2nd, and if you like what you saw today, make
sure you hit the MoMA subscribe button because there's a lot of other cool videos that have
been made, and are gonna be made, about the exhibitions here at this museum and at our
Midtown location.