Jiayi Young Artist Talk. My experience and review

    On April 10th, Lawrence University Alumni Jiayi Young presented a gallery talk on her exhibition "Beyond Tomorrow: An Artist's Quest in the Last Decade". The exhibition consisted two bodies of work. The first one titled "What Does the Bot Say to the Human?" displayed plastic bags filled with water that were hooked up to technology that would let the water drip out of the bag when it traced certain hashtags used on the social media platform "X" during the 2016 US Presidential Election. She also had videos explaining the project and when it was first exhibited (link to video is here). At the talk she explained the concept behind the piece was to visualize the often blurry line between news and fake news and how social media can push certain propaganda towards us. The part of the piece was "Project Echo", which to my understanding was another step further into visualizing the influence social media and fake news has on people's opinions. She developed a way to track the misinformation about the 2020 US Presidential Election on a live graph. The exhibition had a few printed out graphs for the viewer to see and two computers where the viewer could go to Young's data base and see all the infographics she has created (link to date base is here). There was one more body of work at the exhibition titled "Murmur", unfortunately I had to leave the gallery talk before it was introduced because I had a night class I had to attend. I tried to read about the piece on Young's website but the info behind the piece is password protected, so I am unable to comment on her second body of work in this review (link to password protected area is here. I encourage you to try if you think you know the password).

    First off, she was really quiet and it was hard for me to hear what she was saying about the exhibition, so I apologize if any of my descriptions of the pieces are off. Overall, I thought Young's pieces were thought provoking and interesting. I'm personally not very interested in data analysis, so hearing her explain the process of gathering the data and looking through it for the project was a little boring. However I do appreciate what she is trying to say with the data. I agree that fake news is a bigger issue than we realize and by having pieces that show us how much false information is being spread through social media is a huge wake up call for society. Especially when the news can be altered with AI in any way so it appeals to the target demographic. I also love how she wants to make this data accessible for everyone and one day hopes she can have these data programs in public libraries so anyone can use them to look up data on any given topic they choose. I am very interested to see what Young decides to analyze next with "Project Echo".