During the first year of the pandemic, I was also asked to curate an online exhibition for the Amsterdam gallery Upstream. All online exhibitions at Upstream took place within an interactive environment designed by Dutch artist Constant Dullaart. I put together a show called Appearances featuring only female artists and artist couples. Participating artists were Addie Wagenknecht, Annie Abrahams & Daniel Pinheiro, Amy Alexander, Claudia Del & Jaume Clotet, Evelina Domnitch & Dimitry Gelfand, Knowbotiq, Nancy Mauro-Flude, PolakVanBekkum, Stephanie Syjuco, Valentina Gal, and Winnie Soon. An excerpt from the exhibition concept: “Appearances exist on the edge of reality and perception. Appearances can be sudden or take their time to show. They can be lasting, decaying or downright misleading. We often see what we want to see. We more often see what we expect to see. Most of the time the poetry of that situation escapes us.” Unfortunately, Upstream’s online exhibitions only run for a month. One of the works was Amy Alexander’s What the Robot Saw, a “live, continuously-generated, robot film, curated, analyzed and edited using computer vision, neural networks, and contrarian search algorithms.” The film takes live footage from the internet. The picture shows a still from the movie.
