Carla Gannis: Lady Ava Interface

Apr 10, 2018–Feb 6, 2019

An animated robot with cookie print skin and unicorns in their hair overlaying whitney.org.

Referencing Lady Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), known as the first computer programmer, Carla Gannis’s Lady Ava Interface presents itself as an artificial intelligence assistant. At sunrise and sunset, it provides visitors to whitney.org with a menu of quirky calls to action and conjures a miniature Whitney from a smartphone. While mainstream software agents such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana offer practical information to augment and increase their users’ so-called efficiency, Ava counters the generic and purely functional aspects of technology that often begin and end our days. Ava’s appearance is inspired by the peculiar works of Italian Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who assembled images of fruits, vegetables, and fish into strange yet recognizable portraits. Gannis’s Ava is an assortment of 3D-modeled emojis, clouds, and cookies—familiar symbols of internet culture—that form a cartoonish female android. Lady Ava Interface continues Gannis’s practice of exploring well-known paintings through the iconography of smartphones and the internet, thereby tracing how symbolic languages have developed throughout art history.

Carla Gannis (b. 1970; Oxford, North Carolina) has worked with an array of mediums and tools—including drawing, painting, video, interactivity, extended reality, and machine-learning models—to produce dark and often humorous explorations of the human condition. Gannis received an MFA in painting from Boston University and is an industry professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.

Gannis’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. She has had solo exhibitions and screenings at venues including Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, New York; DAM Projects, Berlin; TRANSFER, New York; the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, South Carolina; and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, El País, ARTNews, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. She is an alumna of the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator.

Sunrise/Sunset

Sunrise/Sunset was a series of internet art projects that marked sunset and sunrise in New York City every day from 2009 to 2024. All were commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org, each project unfolding over a time frame of ten to thirty seconds. Indicating the switch from day to night and vice versa in one specific location, Sunrise/Sunset projects played with the perception of time and space, underscoring the physical location of the Whitney and the global accessibility of virtual environments.

artport

View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.