Conscious Tether: Art and the Internet in Los Angeles is a group exhibition of contemporary artists considering what it means to live with and through the internet.

Appearing to be both nowhere and everywhere at once, the internet’s presence is always felt, always there, always just outside the bounds of perception. Parallel to the common perception within media theory that infrastructures and apparatuses only make themselves known during instances of breakdown or failure, Conscious Tether feels out the sites at which matter, energy, and labor assert themselves amidst conditions of invisibility, control, and waste. These artists prize apart how the networked, digitized subject might respond to the state of ceaseless onlineness; at the same time, the exhibition also asks what role the real space of Los Angeles plays within these complex interactions.

The internet’s inaugural message sent from UCLA’s Boelter Hall reached its destination, but was incomplete. The four-node network crashed after the first two letters—LO—of “LOGIN.” This initial semi-failure or partial transmission seems in retrospect, given the intervening histories and usages, emblematic of all that is in excess of the internet and yet could no longer exist without it. The assembled artists in Conscious Tether emphasize the material and immaterial reminders of the internet’s unceasing presence, exploring its seeming peripheries. American Artist, ann haeyoung, and Romi Morrison implicate systems of quantification, control, and extraction; LA Cryptoparty, KCHUNG, Danielle Dean, Tiny Tech Zines (Rachel Simanjuntak, Jules Kris, Tyler Yin, Tristan Espinoza), and Xin Xin consider practices of labor, privacy, and consent; while works by Ahree Lee, Devin Kenny, and Alice Yuan Zhang reveal both the realities and possible futures of gendered technology, encryption, and technological ruins. Conscious Tether celebrates and acknowledges these peculiar intransigences, to stay with the trouble that rubs up against the gridded globe of the “World Wide Web.”

Co-curated by Chandler McWilliams and Audrey Min, with public programming organized by Daniel Soto and Casey Reas, the exhibition will take place at Human Resources Los Angeles from October 5–20, 2024.