Data Like Clay: In Search of New Materials is a group exhibition featuring artists who collage, appropriate, sample, hack, and remix material from pre-existing videogame software and hardware to explore new forms of artistic expression and inquiry that interrogate contemporary media issues.

The artists featured in Data Like Clay are mut/moochi, GURN GROUP, Flan Falacci, Lawra Clarke, and collaborators Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. 

By referencing the iconography of popular and mainstream videogames, these artists are in dialogue with the games industry as well as today’s larger cultural landscape affected by artificial intelligence, the loss of consumer rights, algorithmic biases, and widespread enshittification.

Here, data, information thought to be locked beyond the screen, becomes bendable, sculptural material for the artist, a site for building and sharing original digital poetries. Through these acts of playful subversion, each artist finds new agencies within the complex relationships between players, games, and game developers.

Exhibited work will be interactive, encouraging visitors to spend time in the gallery to play and investigate. Through the exhibition and its related programs (which include in-person and online artist talks, workshops, game jams, and demonstrations), audiences will have opportunities to learn more about game development, tech-based art practices, and general computer and media literacy. 

Data Like Clay: In Search of New Materials runs from February 5 – June 5, 2027 in the VSW Gallery and is curated by Nilson Carroll.

Data Like Clay: In Search of New Materials is supported by The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, The Joy of Giving Something Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Monroe County, NY, and all of our members and individual supporters!