Do-Until Loop Parade: An Exhibition in a Box
Participating Artists: Hyemi Kim, Po Han Huang, Fernando Sancho, Weihan Zhou, Yi Hsuan Lai, Jinglin Wang, Lingfei Ren
Co-curated exhibition hosted by School of Visual Arts MA Curatorial Practice Program
Do-Until Loop Parade is an exhibition in a box inspired by Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise (1935- 41). Artworks featured in this show hint at the existence of “loops” that have long dictated our psychological, socioeconomic, and political freedoms. These loops are constructs — systems of control — but their origins and logics are obscured. Nonetheless, their effects on our lives are palpable. The exhibition brings together selected works from the 2020 SVA MFA Photography and Video program’s graduating class, which have been selected by their relevance to ideas of cyclicality and isolation.
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Catalogue Essay: Introduction
by Carina MartinezWe’re living in strange times today—today, time itself has become strange. Perhaps it’s been like this for a while now. Stuck in perpetual motion, we have just begun to wonder whether we are actually moving forward.
We seem to live in loops. A structure whose end melds with its beginning, a loop is the snake biting its own tail, the infinity symbol tattoo. It is the anxious doodle of a circle on the back of scrap paper and the continuous replay of a marked memory, a favorite TikTok video, a .gif file streamed on a billion screens. The loop is your favorite meal and drink, your job, your laundry, your Zoom meetings. It is also your inherited legacies and generational baggage, the places you have lived and cannot return to due to cycles of political violence, the hostility sensed from the place you must now call home, and the frequency with which you recall the reasons why you are you.
With the quality of our lives measured by the quantity of coordinate points bunched on a number line, society appears to run on linear time. In order to immigrate, obtain a federal loan, expunge a criminal charge, seek justice in a court of law, or receive basic women’s reproductive healthcare in the United States, millions of people must undergo long and winding bureaucratic processes. The front of the line is promised as a mark of both an end and a fresh beginning, yet it always snakes just around the corner. Time starts to resemble less a one-way progression and more a contrived spiral controlled by something monstrous and perpetually out of reach.
We seem to live in loops. A structure whose end melds with its beginning, a loop is the snake biting its own tail, the infinity symbol tattoo. It is the anxious doodle of a circle on the back of scrap paper and the continuous replay of a marked memory, a favorite TikTok video, a .gif file streamed on a billion screens. The loop is your favorite meal and drink, your job, your laundry, your Zoom meetings. It is also your inherited legacies and generational baggage, the places you have lived and cannot return to due to cycles of political violence, the hostility sensed from the place you must now call home, and the frequency with which you recall the reasons why you are you.
With the quality of our lives measured by the quantity of coordinate points bunched on a number line, society appears to run on linear time. In order to immigrate, obtain a federal loan, expunge a criminal charge, seek justice in a court of law, or receive basic women’s reproductive healthcare in the United States, millions of people must undergo long and winding bureaucratic processes. The front of the line is promised as a mark of both an end and a fresh beginning, yet it always snakes just around the corner. Time starts to resemble less a one-way progression and more a contrived spiral controlled by something monstrous and perpetually out of reach.
What keeps us from breaking free from time’s causal chains? In computer programming, the structure of the loop manifests as a deterministic function. “Do...Until Loop” is a command used to initiate the repetition of a set of statements so long as the input conditions remain false. The programmer will code this command to keep data outcomes in an endless if-then ricochet. The statements rely on falsehoods, on logical dead ends to reach execution, and only exit the loop when the condition becomes true. The opposite of this command, the “Do...While Loop,’’ is widely used in video-game programming. It performs the set if the conditions remain true and breaks the loop when they are false. It is the programmer’s job to design every bit of the game so that it maintains its integrity, sustaining each detail and mechanism to keep the gamer captive. Small keys, few and far between, are hidden across the virtual landscape, anomalies in the game’s structure that allow the player to “advance” in its preset world.
Whereas the architects of the game see the loop as Do-While, the gamer operates in Do-Until mode. Her sole aim is to break through the impasses o each level and continue toward winning the game by uncovering truths that lead her further along its upward path. But these truths exist only insofar as the programmer fabricated and planted them to be found. Without their discovery, the gamer is destined to travel the same loops, endlessly roaming the creator’s playhouse. This presents the need to devise unwritten routes. In the
essay “A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in an Age of Planetary Civil War,” filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl explores the analogous relationship between
Whereas the architects of the game see the loop as Do-While, the gamer operates in Do-Until mode. Her sole aim is to break through the impasses o each level and continue toward winning the game by uncovering truths that lead her further along its upward path. But these truths exist only insofar as the programmer fabricated and planted them to be found. Without their discovery, the gamer is destined to travel the same loops, endlessly roaming the creator’s playhouse. This presents the need to devise unwritten routes. In the
essay “A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in an Age of Planetary Civil War,” filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl explores the analogous relationship between
the loops that are found in gaming and the loops that are integral to the historical function of museums and institutions. She contends, “On the one hand, play is about rules, which must be mastered if one is to proceed. On the other, play is also about the improvised creation of new, common rules. So reenactment is scrapped in favor of gaming moving towards play, which may or may not be another form of acting.” In order for new futures to be born into a predetermined world, history-as-repetition cannot be the only value inserted into the present. Improvisation, then, holds the key to unpredicted paths, because “to play is to re-actualize the rules as one goes along. . . to create rules that demand new actualization every time,” Steyerl states. “There is a continuum between games and play. Both need rules. On one end of the spectrum there is a looped form. On the other, an open one.” Despite the omnipresence of the closed system that entrap the player and necessitate her very survival, there persist possible loopholes through which she may interject her own free will. To play the game is to participate, despite and in light of all fairness that is involved. Whether one chooses to reenact or reimagine the rules is up to the participant.
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