Ryan Kuo
The Way I See It

Though it may resemble a video, The Way I See It by Ryan Kuo is a software-generated work. The work consists of three-dimensional furniture objects from the IKEA catalog which follow certain behavioural rules, interacting with one another in an atmospheric, hazy, pastel-colored domestic setting. The vignettes show the furniture casting long shadows as they become interlocked and tangled, bouncing, jittering, knocking against one another, toppling over, writhing in a pile on the floor. Meanwhile, the camera moves throughout the space, following an algorithmically determined, ever-changing path.
Images of various configurations of furniture are interspersed with lines of dialog appearing in white text on a black screen: “Do you make objects? I make fucking objects.” Permutations of these words appear on a cycle, with each reshuffle, each time becoming more enigmatic. Who is the “I” here, is it the artist or the computer? Does the repeated word “object” refer to these items of furniture, or does it connect with larger questions of subject-object relationships? And then there’s the word “fucking.” Is the narrator angry, or talking about copulation, or both? One permutation of the dialogue in particular underlines this: “objects fucking make you.” Objects–whether the carefully coordinated systems of furniture from IKEA, or the “objects” that we subjects make of others around us, beginning with our family—do make us.
Ryan Kuo‘s practice is concerned with linguistic and visual mapping of ideological structures; interpreting governmental, social, and technical systems through dry humor and a Kafkaesque sensibility. Kuo often makes use of bureaucratic formats, such as catalogs, tables, and indices, and finds within them space to consider philosophical and social topics, such as the complexity of familial relationships, the violence of whiteness, and the politics of grievance in online encounters. Kuo’s work is structural digital art, in that it explores the ways that the shape of digital systems overdetermine the content produced within them. By inhabiting the structures of technological systems, Kuo is able to grapple with a complex, dynamic techno-political moment that is resistant to more traditional forms of critique.