How do we understand the relationship between life and technology in a time when they seem to be completely merged? The group show Mud Muses – A Rant About Technology takes its title from an installation by Robert Rauschenberg and an essay by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Meet 19 artists and artists groups who manipulate and play with (gender)codes, flip subjectivities, hook up with other intelligences and short circuit the promises of technology.
In the 1960s the aim was to integrate technology with everyday life: in 2019 that unification seems realized and complete. Perhaps it will be by traveling through history and the imagination that we can trace the differences between life, art, and technology? In Robert Rauschenberg’s fifty-year-old artwork Mud Muse (1968–1971) sonic vibrations create random bubbles in a large, open, vat filled with synthetic sludge. Here our encounter with technology becomes both sticky and confusing. What a Mud Muse actually is remains uncertain, but the installation makes one thing clear: technology is a notion that creates time and space and thus influences our sense of reality.
Mud Muses presents nineteen artists and groups in a time travel via important transformations that the topic has undergone since the 1960s. Several of the works were made specially for Mud Muses, and objects from the museum’s collection are also being exhibited here for the first time. Here you can read about the artists and artworks featured in Mud Muses. The texts can be found in the exhibition folder.
