Installation “Uncanny Valley” by Artist-in-Residence Erin Mitchell 

An extension of her previous two-dimensional work, “Uncanny Valley” continues to explore the relationships between humans and technology. The term “Uncanny Valley” was originally coined in 1970s Japan by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, it describes the eerie likeness of human-like AI and robotics, often contributing to a sense of uneasiness and revulsion towards the likeness instead of affinity. Nowadays, with the rise of VR technologies, it seems to be gaining more popularity, especially as a way to describe the verisimilitude between our actual and virtual realities. The exploration of this tension lies at the core of Erin Mitchell’s work, which consistantly ponders the relationship between humans and technology. Mitchell will transform the gallery space into an immersive installation that reanimates the idealized and commodified natural landscapes of our screensavers and desktop wallpapers. It will bring these peripheral background images to the forefront of our attention and create an entirely new experience that questions our physical and virtual understanding of space and environment. Using the human body as an intellectual and manual filter, it will demonstrate new subversive paths for agency in the digital age, ideally encouraging others to question their own relationships with personal technology and redefine their perspectives and movements within these two often competing realities.