Room on Mars
Kathleen McDermott
September 6 through 21 
Opening Reception: 
Friday, September 6, 6-9pm 

Wayfarers is pleased to present Room on Mars, the culminating project of our 2019 summer Artist In Residence, Kathleen McDermott. McDermott’s inventions are mostly functional, but the fictions built around them complicate their relationship to reality. Room on Mars features a living family of robotically-aided houseplants on a simulated trip to Mars, mulling over questions such as Is there enough space in space? And Is it my fault we were expelled from Eden? Room on Mars explores McDermott’s begrudging acknowledgement of the fact that her playful critiques of techno-solutionism have yet to solve any real problems. 

Room on Mars consists of a faux construction site built in front of the gallery, with a small viewing window facing the sidewalk. Within the wooden pen, three planted terrariums fitted into robots roam among a simulation of Mars, in search of sunlight. The collaged backdrop combines images from NASA’s Mars Rover with visions of Mars from the public imagination––science fiction and the American Southwest. A CCTV camera transmits video of the simulation into the gallery, causing the image to degrade. The live feed is intermittently interrupted by text and pre-recorded video, alluding to the difficulty of categorizing the status of simulation, in a world where all media is suspect. 

McDermott’s work utilizes a combination of sculpture, open-source electronics, performance and video to explore the social ramifications of the relationship between bodies and technology - an artistic research method she refers to as absurdist electronics. Absurdist electronics promotes the use of absurdity as a counter to both the solutionist utopia promised by tech companies and the atmosphere of doom often prophesied within science fiction. Drawing on the Dada principle that absurdity can be an appropriate response to feelings of alienation, McDermott seeks to solve her own specific struggles with socialization and work through humor and over-engineering. 

In contrast to narratives of the future that are disproportionately focused on virtual bodies and bodies represented by data, McDermott’s inventions emphasize real-time physicality by deliberately intervening in physical space - to a ridiculous degree. She often creates electronics which can respond to sensors and environmental input, but that cannot be controlled by the wearer directly, complicating the agency of the human actors in the scene. Examples include a dress which creates a cloud of fog based on a reading of the wearer’s stress level and a mechanical brooch that opens to reveal a cinnamon bun when the wearer begins to sweat. The items are worn publicly, either by McDermott or a proxy, and the documentation is edited into narrative videos and GIFs, taking cues from infomercials and advertisements. She then produces tutorials for technically recreating the works in the series, which she distributes online and through workshops.

Kathleen McDermott is a media artist with a background in installation and sculpture. She uses a combination of textiles, sculptural materials and open-source electronics to create absurd mechanical objects that aim to explore the relationship between human bodies and technology, in both real and imagined scenarios. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Cornell University, an MFA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong, and a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). She is currently an Industry Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon, in the department of Technology, Culture, and Society (TCS). Her work has been featured in a range of major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Dezeen, and has been exhibited internationally.

Room on Mars opens on September 6th from 6-9pm and will be on view Sundays through September 22, from 1-5pm, and by appointment at Wayfarers.