Further explore the exhibition’s theme of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Narrator: "Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation," from 2016, is an interactive installation in which an upright stationary exercise bicycle has been repurposed into a workstation complete with headphones and a Mac mini. Three 24-inch LCD video monitors replace the bicycle’s digital control panel. Museum visitors can pedal the tall bike while viewing a 9-minute digital collage video of artist Sondra Perry’s avatar that plays on a loop.

The bicycle’s metal frame is cherry red, with a single small wheel enclosed in black plastic. The broad gray-and-black seat and the black plastic backrest are supported by two thin metal legs linked together. Two handles stretch out from behind and below the seat for the rider to grip. With the handles at the level of the rider’s hips, their shoulders do not round forward as they would on a typical bicycle.

The front of the exercise bike has a telescoping vertical post that would usually hold the small digital panel where the rider can set and control speed and other settings. In this piece, the post stretches to more than twice its usual height. At the top, three video monitors are mounted vertically. They feel precarious hanging so high, and they are slightly misaligned, causing the image playing on them to be sliced awkwardly.

At the base of the stationary bike is a black plastic surge protector with multiple outlets stuffed with electrical cables that arc then snake past the bike and up to the power monitors. Extension cords make their way out of view.

Splashed across the three panels is a close-up view of an apparently digitized Black person’s avatar. A disembodied head and unclothed upper shoulders that remain in a fixed position on the screen but move robotically as she speaks with a synthesized voice. Modeled from Perry, the youthful animated face has brown skin, brown cheeks, no hair on its head, and a slender build. The video background alternates between a bright cobalt-blue blank slate and layers of extreme close-ups of Perry’s own skin, which undulate and churn like the spot at an ocean shore where water coming in mixes with water on its way back out. The plain blue background highlights the pixelated borders of the digital avatar while the skin background shimmers, porous and rippling.

Much of the video features Perry’s avatar directly addressing the audience, and at times different footage is spliced in to match the narrative. As the tension reaches its climax, the imagery becomes abstract: the blue background, a modeled sphere of Perry’s skin spinning high above a white grid, interspersed glitches, ocean waves on a starless night. The avatar returns, and as she speaks, she offers soft smiles and conspiratorial raises of her digital eyebrows.

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