Created by artist Tristan Espinoza for their 2019 Level Ground residency, soft relations uses custom software to explore the boundaries between intimacy and surveillance, inviting audiences to reconsider how technology affects our relationships.
About the Show
soft relations is an interactive software installation created by 2019 Level Ground artist-in-residence Tristan Espinoza. The project draws the overlapping space between participants' bodies. When participants separate, a recording of this shape is left on screen. Espinoza used soft relations to reflect on how we build proximity to one another when that connection gets mediated by technology.
The soft relations installation opened October 18, 2019 at Forge in Lincoln Heights. The show included a Tiny Tech Zines popup library, plus a bar, panel discussion, live performance, and curated, interactive elements.
The Creative Team
Tristan Espinoza, creator and 2019 Level Ground artist-in-residence
Tristan Espinoza (he/they) uses his practice to examine displacement and proximity in the context of technologized life. He frequently works with computer-based processes, such as machine learning and 3D simulations, and complicates them with traditional photographic printing techniques. His practice is dependent on the lived experiences of him and his family and the disparate topologies they occupy.
Espinoza also co-organizes Tiny Tech Zines (TTZ), a tech zine fair based in Los Angeles. As an artist working with technology, he interacts daily with the question of what it means to use tools that often operate as sites of extraction. TTZ is a safe space to navigate this complexity and co-create more loving and critical relationships with technology.
