Connecticut College’s Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology will present Ritual/Virtual: Technologies of Here, There, and Thereafter in the Cummings Arts Center Galleries. Curated by 2021-22 Visiting Fellow Kit Son Lee, the exhibition includes work by Lee, Herdimas Anggara, Neta Bomani, and Songan Kyung.

Ritual/Virtual presents engagements with technology that straddle the sacred and the mundane, the spiritual and the secular, the historic and the contemporary.

Kit Son Lee (sometimes Son Kit) is a designer, developer, and artist based in Brooklyn, NY by way of Providence, RI and Koreatown, Los Angeles. Kit’s work challenges the methods of network surveillance, the attention economy, machine learning, and UX/UI design. Kit is a co-founder of Codify Art, a Brooklyn-based producorial collective dedicated to supporting work by queer and trans artists of color, and an editor at Queer Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary open-access journal pursuing equitable representation in the arts. They have exhibited work and curated exhibitions internationally. Kit holds a master’s degree in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and bachelor’s degrees in Visual Art and Literary Arts from Brown University. 

Lee’s works are interspersed throughout the exhibition, including interactive websites, books, posters, typefaces, image files, and an installation entitled Anthropiscine War Machine: North American Front. This work hails from a climate-changed future where the Earth has been entirely covered by water. Droplets slide down an assemblage of plastics and galvanized steel, collecting in jars lined with coarse salt, seaweed, and gochugaru—the beginnings of a post-apocalyptic kimchi. The piece considers the intentional preservations and necessary integrations that allow a custom to persist, and asks at what point it will be so transformed that its practitioners cannot recognize it as their own.

Other works featured include Herdimas Anggara’s JARANAN (Horse Trance Dancing), a contemporary take on a traditional Indonesian ritual originally presented over Zoom and Neta Bomani’s genre-expansive video, Dark Matter Objects: Technologies of capture and things that can’t be held, which draws the viewer into a story past, contemporaneous, and ongoing: that of the master-slave relationship.

The exhibition also includes two pieces by Songan Kyung: the 3D art film Enter the Bardo and the video installation True Story. Enter the Bardo explores the concept of the “bardo,” a liminal or transitional state between death and rebirth found in some schools of Buddhism. Kyung’s True Story models a larger online ecosystem of content creators, distributors and social media algorithms, investigating the recursive engine of “truth”-generation behind many of today’s most bitter political divisions.

The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Ammerman Center’s Colloquia series. A panel discussion with the artists, moderated by Connecticut College East Asian Studies Professor Ayako Takamori, will take place on Monday, Feb. 21 at 4:15 p.m. in Oliva Hall, Cummings Arts Center, for the Connecticut College community and livestream on Facebook Live.

Please note: In keeping with Connecticut College’s Covid-19 policies all visitors to Connecticut College, including those attending events and performances, must abide by Connecticut College’s Covid-19 protocols. Visitor protocols are as follows:  

  • All visitors to the campus, regardless of vaccination status, are expected to wear masks indoors at all times. 

  • Connecticut College requires that all visitors fill out and sign an Attestation Form that states they are vaccinated against Covid-19 or have a negative test and do not have any Covid-19 symptoms. A copy of the form may be downloaded here and brought to events. 

The Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology gathers faculty and students who study and contribute to the symbiotic relationship between technology and the arts. For more information about the Ammerman Center or this event, please contact Steve Luber.