Big Data's Deal with the Devil

I keep thinking of Agnieszka Kurant's liquid crystal paintings. I can't help but wonder if their forms are still changing, their gasoline-rainbow palettes still mutating, or whether they've gone quiet like the rest of us. Kurant's work sits in a central gallery of'Uncanny Valley', the Bay Area's first major exhibition to focus explicitly on how artists today are grappling with technologies that have – for the most part – come out of the region. The show's title is a nod, of course, to nearby Silicon Valley – of which San Francisco has increasingly become an annex – but also reflects the show's intent: to look not broadly at how technology has seeped into art, but at how the definition of what constitutes'humanness' has been blurred by advancements in artificial intelligence and how artists are metabolizing these developments. Kurant's work – which, for me, was the soul of the exhibition – relies heavily on technology that reflects human emotions in real time.