Feed Me the News
exhibition & live performance with Esben Holk, Chen Jhen, Hsiang-Yun Huang, Wei-An Chen, Tzu-I Yang & Chih-Wei Tseng
About the exhibition
Join us for the opening of Feed me the News on Friday, 21 March from 6pm.
There will be a live performance of My Favorite News Goes Nuclear starting at 7pm.
Feed me the News brings together two artworks: Feed Me by Esben Holk and My Favorite News Goes Nuclear, a collaboration by the artists Chen Jhen, Hsiang-Yun Huang, Wei-An Chen, Tzu-I Yang, and Chih-Wei Tseng, with both works confronting the imploding, self-referential cycle of content production.
My Favorite News Goes Nuclear consists of two parts: a stylized content farm website and a live performance inspired by the internet phenomenon of mukbang, which turns eating into a spectacle. In these – often sexually suggestive – eating livestreams, consumption serves as content, reflecting an internet culture in which individuals, particularly women, perform their consumption for the pleasure of an audience. The artists draw a parallel between these acts and the consumption of fake news, where the more shocking, appetizing, or salacious the content, the more likely it is to capture attention and spread virally. In this way, My Favorite News Goes Nuclear explores how content – whether food or fake news – is consumed in a loop of endless demand, feeding both the bodies of the audience and the algorithms that profit from their attention. The project exposes the physical and labor-intensive mechanisms behind the content, emphasizing the bodies that consume it, and revealing the physical effects of an overstimulated attention economy.
Esben Holk’s artistic practice picks up on this overstimulation. The artist is obsessed with collecting and compiling all of the content they encounter online, constantly feeding and growing their archive. In online games and interactive performances, they ask users to feed them content, to upload large files to a website until the images glitch, the simulation jerks, stutters, freezes, and implodes. This practice can be understood as an over-affirmation of the inherent logic of algorithm-based content production – overfeeding the system until it crashes. Holk’s installation Feed Me centers on this growing auto-biographical meme-archive that documents his somewhat erotic relationship to the feed, the algorithm, the internet, the content – or what he calls "big data dom daddy." Like a circle jerk, two standing screens run a program that ejaculates image cubes into a physics simulation, while the lying screen runs a program that animates image cubes into an open mouth, a rotating vortex, consuming and regurgitating its content.
Both works, Feed Me and My Favorite News Goes Nuclear, question the demarcation between the user and the content, the product and the producer, not without an element of pleasure. They address the self-referential cycle of content production, a tendency that has only been accelerated with the release of ChatGPT and other LLM applications, where synthetic data soon lacks any 'outside' reference. Ultimately, both works ask: Who is the self that is being referenced when we become the content we are fed?
Artists
Esben Holk is a visual artist exploring virtual existentialism, -identity and technoscience through online media content dissemination & -consumption, worldbuilding technology and creative coding. Placing internet native image ecologies and personal artifacts in generative chaos systems, they create post-ironic bad jokes, digital interaction & procedural worlds, that collage into an ongoing rhizomatic fiction that blends their queer life & -politics with life online.
黃祥昀 Emily Huang Hsiang-Yun is a researcher and visual artist from Taiwan. She holds a BA in Philosophy from National Taiwan University (TW) and an MA in Media Studies from Leiden University (NL). Her research interests focus on the relationship between body and technology from the perspective of postcolonialism, cyberfeminism and digital materialism.
Jhen Chen is a graphic designer and co-founder of Limestone Bookstore. She graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands in 2016. Since 2018, she is engaged in a one-year residency program at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. Recent works primarily focus on publishing and book experiments, collaborating with various artists through the platform of Limestone Bookstore. Her work "Amsterdam Lunch" in 2020 was selected as one of the "Best Dutch Book Designs" of 2019 and exhibited in multiple cities.
Chen Wei-An has a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Master of Communication Engineering from National Taiwan University. Specializes in interactive program design, algorithmic art, exhibition system design, and new media production. Formerly the programming lead at Ultra Combos and has participated in numerous technology arts, cross-disciplinary, new media exhibitions.
Tseng Chih-Wei is a performing artist in theatre, dance and immersive works. His practice raises public awareness on HIV/AIDS and explores queer culture. Through the performativity of body and the poetic imagination of language, he invites audience-members to create intimate experiences in unorthodox spaces with him, and to open up possibilities of conversations among people with a variety of beliefs and ideologies.
Yang Tzu-I has a Master from the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering at National Taiwan University, and is a Master candidate of New Media Art at National Taipei University of the Arts. Formerly the machine learning engineer at AILabs.tw, Yang Tzu-I now specializes in research planning, programming, and inter-departmental communication. Past Projects have predominantly involved collaborations with artists and groups, transforming artistic concepts and abstract theories into programmable presentations across various exhibition formats.
My Favorite News Goes Nuclear is supported by
