Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman features 17 artists working with both analog and emergent technologies to visualize the interrelationship between humanity, other species, and the earth itself. Using tools such as digital animation, augmented and virtual reality, and motion capture and generative software, artists Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam, Jacolby Satterwhite, Saya Woolfalk, and others challenge the view that human exceptionalism allows us to ignore the need to care for the more-than-human world. Like the surrealists, these artists tap into the transformative agency of the marvelous, the uncanny, and the unpredictable. In their fluid and floating creations, images morph, flicker, and dance, forming psychologically charged archetypes within a new collective unconscious.

While providing otherworldly moments of awe and enchantment, the exhibition is centered on real-world disciplines. The first section, taking a biological and ecological perspective, focuses on such subjects as extinction, evolution, and interspecies entanglement. The second, relating to psychology, includes playful stories of metamorphosis; in this enchanted realm, people become microbes and slime, dreams become poetry, and robots become furious dancers, countering the pain of the world with vitality and joy. The third relates to ontology—the philosophy of being. Bridging ancestral and contemporary belief systems, particularly those beyond modern Western traditions, artists in this section employ new technologies to reawaken humanity’s sense of interconnectedness with the earth.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum