Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto

At the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Toronto right now, it really is all about you.

The thought-provoking multi-media current exhibition, Age of You, was a pleasure to explore, and right on target for an information professional (librarian). I found reflecting on what it means to exist at this technology-intense time in history both horrifying and chucklesome. Concerns over artificial intelligence and the use of our personal data hit home.

The exhibition’s description on the MOCA website says this.

Age of You is a timely exhibition about how the self has become more extreme, and what it means to be an individual today. It is curated by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with graphic design by Daly & Lyon and over 70 visual contributors from the worlds of art, design, filmmaking, photography, performance and electronic music. Age of You has been commissioned and produced by MOCA Toronto.

Guess what this century’s most valuable resource is? It’s you — and all your online behaviours, enriched data sets and millions of meta-data points.

In this process, a large part of you is extracted from you, and now exists everywhere and nowhere, independently of your five senses. Are you really built for so much change so quickly? And what if individuality is in fact morphing into something else?

The exhibition’s brochure suggests visitors “Take a photo of the most unsettling statement you come across in Age of You and compare notes with your group.” Here are a few of my choices.

You End Up with the Face You Deserve — I recall my mother saying that in your 20s you have the face you were born with, but after that you end up with the face you deserve. I’ve often thought about that over the years.

In the old days you were free to die and be gone (forgotten). No longer, it seems.

I wondered what the artwork below could be. Perhaps representing data points in three dimensions? What was I looking at and how did it fit into the exhibition’s themes? I was delighted to find that the mounds were created by termites, with the intention below. A brilliant idea, and creativity at its finest.

Yay contemporary art!

Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto is museum no. 59 in my #100museums challenge (see 100 Museums Challenge).