O-1 Visas
As a self-confessed Luddite, our current technological age terrifies me utterly. I want to hear from people who get what’s going on, and I want it in my preferred form: as art. Enter Liang He, a gamer, pirate of video games, and creator of a giant slightly scary robot mouse, a Mega Man helmet that moves independent of its hero or any action, and a loom where the human becomes a cog in the machine. For Ground Floor, the Hyde Park Art Center’s biennial of recent grads from Chicago-area MFA programs, He continues to think deeply about the uncanniness of how humans interface with apparatuses. His contribution, “A Bus Freezing to Death,” constructs a tomb from parts of an old CTA vehicle, as if it had cannibalized its own parts as resting place. Its soul might be understood as residing in the old-school video game that sits at center, more or less playable by visitors, who can walk a parka-wearing character down a snowy street until the vision fails. Someone or something has frozen to death on that wintry night—human or bus, who can tell, and at what point do we forget the difference?
—Lori Waxman 8/19/26 2:25 PM