O-1 Visas
So much of great consequence is invisible to the naked eye, from cellular structure to air quality, defense contracting to water rights. Beijing artist Amo (Mengying) Zeng, currently living and working in Chicago, makes sensitive use of technology to render two such situations more legible. “Embodied Intelligence” is a small, simple machine into which prompts can be entered. Artificial Intelligence will generate the answer, but only once viewers produce the required energy by turning a crank on the side of the device. Presto, the criminally underrecognized environmental impact of even the most basic A.I. task becomes tangible. Imagine if every cellphone had one. “A Book of Diaspora/Disquiet” is a stack of paper, mostly the kind of forms non-citizens must fill out in order to stay in the United States for any length of time. The top sheet is different, a scattering of type that seems at first to constitute what a person might seek here: immigrant, driver’s license, certainty, coffee table, work hard, university, luxurious, job, American Dream. But then other words temporarily appear, written with projected light in between the printed ones, filling in the gaps with distress and failure, uncertainty and instability. That is the truth, momentarily seen.
—Lori Waxman 2025-11-21 3:03 PM