Familial Technologies

Curated by Anuradha Vikram

5 - 7 PM: UCLA Art Sci center gallery

UCLA California NanoSystems Institute
(CNSI), 5th floor

JENNIFER MOON explores the possibilities of virtual world-building for ameliorating psychic pain and social anxiety in her 2018 body of work, “Familial Technologies.”

This exhibition is curated from a larger body of work first exhibited at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and includes virtual living spaces and personal avatars developed for use in Avakin Life, a virtual world game that Moon and her parents and brother used to experience family therapy sessions under self-determined circumstances in conjunction with visits to a therapist “IRL”. Moon’s family members are represented here by “player cards” that profile their avatars, screen shots of their individual dwellings in Avakin Life, and screen recordings of their ongoing weekly Avakin Life family relationship sessions.

Through the idealized, mediated virtual platform, the Moon family is able to access aspects of their emotional psyches free of the barriers that physical embodiment presents.