Before autonomous vehicles were carrying passengers, they whirred around town mapping our cities. Along with fleets of sleek EVs, the street sounds outside subtly started to change. The new arrivals didn’t drown out the cacophonous grinding of gears, emergency sirens and the explosive pops from exhaust pipes. But the persistent hum of those quieter cars were issuing a warning: Make way for the future.
At the San José Museum of Art exhibit Motherboards (through January 10, 2027), the artists in this group show aren’t proffering a panacea to cure the ills of our current digital era. With video, ink, cotton and glass, some of the pieces posit poignant critiques of these dystopian end-times. Others forefront unsung contributions to the field made by women. If a shared theme emerges from the many objects that populate the gallery, it’s that we’re in the cyborgian phase of our evolutionary development. The more we embrace technology, the more it subsumes our morals and what’s left of our souls. We stared into an uncanny valley and the valley, all the while, has been surveilling us.
Across multiple media, Analia Saban has a particular talent for deconstruction. Three very different works of hers demonstrate a wide-ranging approach to conceptual art. In Motherboard #8 (2020), beauty is a quaint idea, a figment of the imagination or something that’s been banished to the past. A flood of black ink has oozed into every corner and crevice of a computer circuit board. Whatever data it once contained has been drowned, sealed up and ultimately lost. When aliens from distant planets find relics from our extinguished civilization, they will look like Motherboard #8.
When Saban and I spoke about her practice, she told me that the series started during COVID. “Computers became this very essential element in our lives,” she recalled. “They were the only way we could connect with your own family.” Saban went to an electronics store and found a big bin filled with discarded computer parts that came from eHarmony servers. “So much of our emotional lives go through them and then at the same time they’re disposable—they age and die,” she said. After Saban took the parts to her studio, she covered them with printer’s ink. “It settles onto the circuitry and starts shrinking to make all these patterns,” she said. “I thought about them like archaeology or remains.”
Visually, Saban’s Flowchart (Painting Gesture) incorporates the same dark black color palette as Motherboard #8. Where the printer’s ink covers and hides the material, the flowchart delves into the art of revelation. Scratched out in white text, the diagram charts the imaginative leaps and cartwheels taking place inside the artist’s brain. There are sketches of bodies, some stick figures, others voluptuous, lists of words, a reference to Matisse and curving lines that may or may not logically connect the dots. It’s a lovely crowded rendering of Saban’s mind at work—the human equivalent of a motherboard where the thoughts on display depict the relationship between spontaneity and order.
Rhonda Holberton’s Collateral Influences disturbs the air in the central gallery. A lone plum branch stands at attention inside of a four-sided aluminum frame. Holberton has coated the branch in bioplastic and resin. Its former life as a fruit-bearing limb has been smothered and transformed into a sculptural presence. The label notes that Santa Clara Valley was once referred to as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Fruit trees flourished throughout the valley until the 20th century settlers uprooted them.
A video plays out on a screen mounted on one side of the aluminum frame. The plum branch’s digital twin plays out on a loop. It isn’t an x-ray but the image seems to be peering under the wrapped bark. A stream of black corpuscles flows up and down and across the limbs. They’re teeming around inside and consuming what’s left of the tree’s vitality. Holberton told me she was thinking about ants when she was engineering the structure, or something “extractive.” Watching the “ants” crawl left me feeling unsettled. Holberton too experienced some discomfort with them. “It’s like watching a lot of ants on something like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” she said.
Both Saban and Holberton mentioned the legacy and influence of the pioneering computer programmer Ada Lovelace (1815–1852). For the Collateral Influences series,Holberton translated Lovelace’s Note G algorithm. The video ants are actually zeros and ones moving up and down in a disturbing computational St. Vitus’ Dance. “She’s been written out of the history of technology because she’s a woman,” Holberton said. “Still to this day, there are folks who will contest that she wrote the first algorithm, partly because it was never executed for a machine that didn’t exist.”
Holberton noted that, as it relates to technological production, women’s labor has been obscured. Tania Candiani’s video installation Four Industries seeks to reclaim those contributions women have made to the industry. In an empty warehouse, Candiani films an all-female chorus standing and singing in formation. They sing “noises” rather than words. They’re mimicking and echoing the sounds heard on a factory floor. The chorus whooshes and whirrs to summon up an unacknowledged labor force. Candiani presents these ghosts with an offering in their honor: a lament laced together with a hymn of praise.
‘Motherboards’ at the San José Museum of Art through January 10, 2027
sjmusart.org/exhibition/motherboards.
