Text Messages
July 1-September 27, 2025
Text Messages is a program presented on the Mandeville Art Gallery’s exterior screen, comprised of works by digital artists displaying text manipulated and hijacked using programming and code. The words, phrases, and typography presented on view reveal the influence of machines on the production of meaning and the exercise of power within the context of social media, advertising, online censorship, and artificial intelligence.
Text Messages is on view daily from 7 am to 10 pm. All the works have been commissioned or specifically adapted for the exhibition.
Participating Artists:
Maya Man, Winnie Soon, Sasha Stiles
Image: Sasha Stiles, CURSIVE BINARY: FRAGMENT 1B, 2021
AI-powered poetry translated into Cursive Binary, a proposed language for human-machine collaboration.
Courtesy the artist.
Text Messages is made possible by Teiger Foundation
Artist Biographies
Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her websites, generative series, and installations examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online. She is the creator of the browser extension Glance Back and the Art Blocks curated collection FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. She has exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; bitforms, NYC; SOOT, Tokyo; Verse, London; HEK, Basel; and Feral File, online. She has been invited to speak on her work at The New Museum, NYC; The V&A, London; and MOCA, Los Angeles. Her artwork has been featured in Art in America, Document, Vogue, and Dazed among other publications. She currently runs a DIY space out of her studio in Soho called HEART.
Winnie Soon is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher interested in the cultural implications of digital infrastructure that addresses wider power asymmetries with a particular interest in computational publishing, code and software. Their artistic and scholarly works engage with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, digital censorship and minor technology. With works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and alternative written forms, including co-authored books titled Boundary Images (2023), Fix My Code (2021), and Aesthetic Programming (2020), Winnie is also the co-editor of the Software Studies Book Series (MIT Press) as well as the Board member of the UCL Press and Publications. Artistically, Winnie has been honored with several prestigious awards, including the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Artificial Intelligence and Life Art Category), the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture at Stuttgarter Filmwinter, the WRO 2019 Media Art Biennale Award, and the 26th and 17th ifva awards (Special Mention and Silver Award). Currently, Winnie is an Associate Professor of Art and Technology at UCL's Slade School of Fine Art and visiting researcher at the Centre of the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, and AI researcher working at the nexus of text and technology, known for her pioneering experiments with generative literature and blockchain poetics. Her practice refracts heritage and tradition through disruptive explorations of creativity and consciousness, probing the role of human voice in a machine age. She released her debut book, Technelegy, in 2021, and is the founder of theVERSEverse, a writers collective and web3 literary gallery. Stiles’ work has been honored by the Prix Ars Electronica, Sigg Art Prize, Lumen Prize, Optimism AI Prize, and the Future.Art.Awards; featured by MoMA, Artforum, Christie’s, NPR, the Washington Post, and Poets & Writers; and presented at numerous venues worldwide, including Lincoln Center, the V&A, Art Basel, Art Dubai, Art Cologne, SCOPE, Kunsthalle Zurich, Zagreb's Museum of Contemporary Art, Outernet London, Krasl Art Center, and the billboards of Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing.