I made a second visit recently to ‘Digital Citizen – The Precarious Subject’, a group exhibition at Baltic in Gateshead.
It’s an exhibition that draws you back, keeps your gaze and stays with you long after you’ve left. Exploring questions about how technological innovation has reformulated how we see ourselves, how others see us, how we see the world and how we interact with (dis)information.
Much of it is troubling, reminding us how fragmented and poisonous public, journalistic and expert discourse has become.
But there is also hope there, from the opportunities the digital world gives us to create spaces/places of resistance to examples of how popular cultural forms can be hacked to make invisible identities, visible.
There is one piece, a video essay by Alan Warburton (Goodbye Uncanny Valley), that particularly resonates. It shows both how through the relentless development of technology, truth and reality can be reshaped, but also how spaces can be carved out for expression and for people to find a home.
The exhibition runs until the 16th June
Samuel Wallace 