The Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College is pleased to announce RITUAL/VIRTUAL: Technologies of Here, There, and Thereafter, a group exhibition curated by 2021–2022 Ammerman Visiting Fellow Kit Son Lee. Featuring work by Herdimas Anggara, Neta Bomani, Songan Kyung, and Kit Son Lee, RITUAL/VIRTUAL presents engagements with technology that straddle the sacred and the mundane, the spiritual and the secular, the historic and the contemporary. Through explorations of (sub)cultural cycles and machinic loops, these works unearth the repetitions encoded in our devices to examine, complicate, and undermine their influence on social conditions.

Ritual can be sacred (e.g. a ritual ceremony) or mundane (e.g. a daily ritual), but both valences are defined by repetition. The recurring loop characterizes much of modern technology, and advances are often measured by the automation of previously manual tasks. With sociopolitical infrastructure becoming increasingly dependent on these conveniences, we find ourselves participating—knowingly or not—in rituals of another’s design. In light of this trajectory, RITUAL/VIRTUAL collapses sacrosanct themes into everyday interfaces. The presented works contend with consumer technologies at the level of religion, culture, economics, and time, challenging their supposed banality with rites of their own making.