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MELISA SAYDI
illusion, the fragility of human relationships, and the question of what it means to experience time, to occupy space, and to exist within layers of subjective truth.” As Currents co-founder Amster noted, “Not exclusive of technology, but in tandem with it, we have seen more and more artists re-engaging in more traditional artistic forms like paper construction, ceramics, fabric, and stitchery.” She underscored how artists this year especially have been “reinvigorating their relationship with nature.” In that department, professor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design Ben Moren’s Birch Transducer, a seemingly innocuous lump of gnarled birch on the wall, actually summoned the viewer with chorus calls of the migratory bird the Veery, among others, via an audio voice coil that excited the birch bark hollow and transformed it into a speaker membrane. Moren’s subtly powerful work demonstrated one way of formulating “positive outcomes of a technology-based society,” as expressed by Amster. Out of University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Mary Tsiongas and Jim Roeber’s series of astonishing black-andwhite prints stitched with sound-conductive thread, Silk + Sound Lab, featured the Bombyx mori, a flightless moth long engineered for its silk, as the work comments on the mechanized silk trade in Eastern Europe (via a residency at the Tbilisi Silk Museum, Georgia). The “soft speakers” alternately emitted field-recorded sounds such as notes from a Chinese opera, the clicking of a silk loom, or the whirring wings of the moth, and all added to the creation of a “living museum: one that evoked past states of being-in-relation-with technology.” New Yorker Julia Daser’s frighteningly relatable Flooded House managed a demonstration of NASA’s sea-level rise prediction as modeled by the flooding of her Brooklyn apartment, here exactly replicated in miniature. Her visualization can’t be “passively consumed,” she stated. “It invites