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Isaac Sullivan

Research Proposal


Angelus Novus 1 contemplates image repetition, ritual, and the body's mediation within digital networks. Featuring visuals by Ruby Bailey and sound by Zaid Sajdi, this video is adapted from Isaac Sullivan's 2023 lecture performance, Echo Holdings x Angelus Novus, which appeared at Reference Point, London; and incorporates a dialogue with an LLM chatbot preoccupied with teleology, subjectivity, and time. Angelus Novus 1 first appeared in the 2024 group exhibition, Chiaroscuro, curated by Michele Lamy in cooperation with Carpenters Workshop Gallery. The sound was included on the vinyl EP, CAST: Music for No Country, curated by the Singaporean collective, ToNewEntities.


Cybernetic Listening is an artist collective, founded in 2023 by Isaac Sullivan and Zaid Sajdi, which contemplates the digitally mediated body while tracing and configuring new lines of interspecies communication through installation, performance, and video. Now joined by Neda Salmanpour and Ruby Bailey, the group is working with biofeedback, parametric geometries, and large-language-model-generated text; and is based in Dubai, Johannesburg, Amman, and New York. Their recent MMAG Foundation installation included a live textual dialogue between a lemon tree and the AI, Chyron, which was generated using a custom-coded app, GPT-3, and the tree's electromagnetic radiation.

 

Bio


Isaac Sullivan is a Dubai-based artist researching artificial intelligence, sound art, and the mediation of space and place. Applying ecological thought to emerging technologies, his work revisits cybernetics and engages AI’s impact on images, data, territory, and observation. Sullivan’s exhibitions and performances, which incorporate video, text, and installation, include Kulturforum, Berlin; Reference Point, London; KGRn, Tokyo; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; KET, Athens; 8th Tashkent Biennale; Galerie Obrist, Essen; Synap, Bangkok; Walls, Bali; MNFA, Amman; Etta, Singapore; Wonder Cabinet, Bethlehem; IF.BE, Mumbai; Alserkal Avenue, Dubai; and ECC's 60th Venice Biennale collateral. He has been profiled in Outland, SO-FAR, and Twist magazine; and his writing has appeared in Canvas, Quarterly West, Court Green, and 1913: A Journal of Forms. Sullivan is author of “Chyron: Grammar of Simultaneity,” a chapter in Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph Books, 2023). He is co-founder of the artist collective, Cybernetic Listening, and is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Zayed University, Dubai.


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