## Upcoming Events January 27, 11am PST In Conversation w/ Commonolithic January 29 - February 1 | Daily 3PM PST | 5PM EST | 11PM GMT | 12AM CET LOT RESIDENT 11 - Nathan Harper - "Drowning In My Sleep"

### January 27, 11AM PST Wade Wallerstein will be in conversation with LOT RESIDENT 10 Commonolithic, talking about his monumental project Gasmask VR. Gasmask VR creates the situation for viewers to fabricate their own tool of protest using materials that come-to-hand. Viewers can use the presence of their body and mind to explore the social, spatial, material and political dynamics of exercising the inalienable right to demonstrate. Commonolithic is currently seeking support for Gasmask VR on Kickstarter. Participatory rewards are available at various tiers of support. Please check out the campaign and consider contributing if you can. ### About the artist: Commonolithic considers how images become objects, bridging the gap between lens-based practices and a sculptural concern with the imaginative dimension of materiality. Through sculpture, print and virtual reality artworks, Commonolithic develops spatial and material experiences from digital image sources. The work addresses the contemporary moment as one of a politics of time bleeding into a politics of space. Born in England, Commonolithic (Watson) has an MFA in sculpture from Concordia university, Montreal Canada. His work has been exhibited in New York, USA (Flux Factory, Art Helix), London, Manchester and Bristol, UK (Hackney Wicked, Cornerhouse Micro-commission, Plan 9), Helsinki, Finland (Cable Factory), Medellin, Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Aarhus, Denmark (Spanien 19c), in Montreal where he is based (Sporobole, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Stewart Hall Gallery) and online in the Wrong Biennale 2019/20. Commonolithic was artist-in-residence at Sporobole Centre en art actuel, Sherbrooke CA and The Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin, and was the recipient of a Research and Creation grant from Canada Council for the arts and a Grant for the arts from Arts Council England. ​

### January 29 - February 1 | “Drowning In My Sleep” Augmented Reality Video Art Screening w/ Nathan Harper ### Daily 3PM PST | 5PM EST | 11PM GMT | 12AM CET Join Silicon Valet LOT RESIDENT 11 Nathan Harper as he takes over Silicon Valet’s virtual parking lot. While select portions of his new work, “Drowning In My Sleep” will be shared via our Instagram channel, the entire film will be screened daily on our Twitch Channel. In his work, Harper explores the materiality of images through regular experimentations with the relationship between physical and digital realities. After appropriating and reappropriating digital files, Harper reconstitutes them either in physical reality with dirt or virtual reality with 3D modeled objects and simulated environments. Harper attempts to uncover how reality shifts alter both our perception and inherent quality of these images, and how they might contribute to an egregore, or “collective group mind.” Nathan Harper is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Florence, Alabama. He is a graduate candidate at the University of North Texas pursuing his MFA in New Media. His work has recently been included in international virtual exhibitions with the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art and The Barcú Virtual Art Fair in Columbia. His interests include semiotics, hyperreality, and digital identity.

### August 13th, 11am PST For Silicon Valet's first ever event in virtual reality, we're hosting a conversation with Lot Resident Carson Lynn. As a culmination of his Residency, we will have a discussion followed by an afterparty within a new, custom space in social virtual reality platform VRChat that the artist built using digital assets from his recent major installation "I Want." To RSVP for this event, shoot an e-mail to info@siliconvalet.org. Then, add Unhappens and MissJuicy as friends on VRChat to be invited into the space on the date. VRChat is free, and works on both headsets and desktop computers. To download, make sure that you have Steam installed. You can access VRChat as a free download via the Steam store. While space in VRChat will be limited, the conversation will also be livestreamed to Facebook & our Twitch Channel. ​ About the artist: Carson Lynn is an artist based out of Southern California who through the usage of digital materials, sublime landscapes, and exploration within gamespaces, creates artworks as a queering of heterocentric photographic conventions and game systems. Carson is working towards receiving his MFA from @artcenteredu with a projected graduation in September 2020. He received his BFA in Photography and Imaging, also from ArtCenter, in 2015. Through his expansive yet highly focused practice, Lynn deconstructs and recontextualizes virtual and interactive spaces. With a heavy emphasis on the traditions of machinima, his works — which exist as videos, digital stills, collages, interactive game spaces, generative programs, physical prints, soundscapes, and more — generate entirely new phenomenologies born from familiar and highly popular virtual experiences and digital assets. These intimate and profoundly personal reimaginings offer safe & queer-friendly spaces outside of the misogynistic, homophobic, and hyper-masculine environments stereotypical of popular gaming culture. Carson Lynn took over Silicon Valet's Instagram account from August 1st - 2nd.

### August 20th, 2pm PST Join us for a virtual film screening of Ziyang Wu's video work, "A Woman With the Technology." The screening will be followed by a short Q&A session with the artist on Silicon Valet's Twitch Channel. "A Woman With the Technology" examines how an individual’s online experience becomes personalized by the Internet algorithm and creates what Internet activist Eli Pariser coined the “filter bubble.” As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural and ideological bubbles. Wu began by recording his daily social media practice over a period of three months using a series of keywords that represent his interests as initial inputs, including “censorship,” “surveillance,” “trade war,” “Asian experience,” “identity,” “Neocolonialism” and many others, and created an archive. He then created imagery through data analysis such as the frequency changes of the keywords in the form of sketches, diagrams, and spreadsheets. Through image detection technology, the three-channel video visually presents what information the Internet algorithm “sees” in the archives and how the “filter bubbles” are inter-connected. Finally, he trained an AI Chatbot using all the collected data. Through his conversation with the AI Chatbot whose knowledge equals all the information in the archive, “we” created a video script and Wu made an animated-video based on the script. ​ About the artist: Ziyang Wu is a visual artist living and working in New York where he is currently teaching at the School of Visual Arts. Wu earned his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and his BFA from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. Ziyang Wu has shown his work internationally in China, North America, and Europe including the solo exhibitions at Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York and CO2 Gallery in Florence, and group exhibitions at the Medici Palace and the Milan Design Week in Italy, the Today Art Museum and the Times Art Museum in Beijing, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, the Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota, the Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art and the Brown University in Rhode Island, the Academy Art Museum in Maryland, The Hole Gallery and Microscope Gallery in New York. Wu has received numerous fellowships and awards including the MacDowell Colony Fellowship and Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) Fellowship at Alfred University in 2019, Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship by Northern Lights.mn and Jerome Foundation in 2017, the AICAD Teaching Fellowship by Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design in 2016, the Winner of The ROCI Road to Peace exhibition by Robert Rauschenberg Art Foundation and Artsy in 2015, and the Best Creative Award in Milan Design Week – Oriental Design Week in 2013. He is currently an Experiment on Art and Technology Track Member at NEW INC, New Museum. ​