Presenting the four selected artists for hotel generation ’21…
Working closely with arebyte’s team, four shortlisted digital artists from regional UK cities are provided with professional guidance, studio visits and general mentoring in producing a proposal for a body of work based on arebyte’s 2021 theme Realities.
At the end of the four months development programme, one of the four proposals is selected by the judging panel to be fully developed into a solo exhibition at arebyte Gallery.
The 2021 shortlisted candidates are Molly Erin McCarthy (PLYMOUTH), Martin Disley (EDINBURGH), Natasha Ruwona (GLASGOW), Sade Arellano (BRISTOL).
Meet the artists
Molly Erin McCarthy a.k.a molly.erh is a multimedia artist based in Plymouth, UK. Her practice moves between physical & digital processes, iterating across sculpture, video, interactive/online media, GIFs, drawing & collage.
Her work considers how the internet & networked technologies have shaped our perceptions of reality by engulfing us in a tangled web of pasts, presents and futures. Using world-building techniques drawn from sci-fi, video games & online communities, McCarthy intertwines truth & fiction to engage in imaginative envisioning of what is, what has, and what could be.
Martin Disley is an artist, researcher and creative technologist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
His visual practice centres around an ongoing critical investigation into machine learning. His recent work has focussed on the machine learning model and the map-territory relation, feedback loops in inference, behavioural conditioning and training and machine learning in states of incoherence. His work seeks to manifest the internal contradictions and logical limitations of artificial intelligence in beguiling images, video and sound.
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona is a Scottish-Zimbabwean artist, researcher and film programmer based in Glasgow.
They are interested in Afrofuturist storytelling through the poetics of the landscape, working across various media including; digital performance, film, DJing and writing. Their current project Black Geographies, Ecologies and Spatial Practice is an exploration of space, place and the climate as related to Black identities and histories.
They are the current resident for Alchemy Film and Arts where they are researching Tom Jenkins – Britain’s first Black Schoolteacher, and the migratory patterns of salmon through the lens of queer ecologies.
Sade Arellano aka @ex.icon works under various digital pseudonyms, personas and avatars.
Using magic, myth, code, and AI, Sade’s practice dissolves, digests and discusses the expanding ecologies of consciousness, what it means to be human/non-human, and how to exist in multiplicity across the virtual/the real.
