Produced for the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media by the multidisciplinary artist Martine Syms (b. 1988), Neural Swamp is an immersive video installation that builds upon Syms’s interest in the proliferation, circulation and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems that erase or make invisible Black bodies, voices and narratives. The publication documents this new work, offering in-depth analysis and a visual essay that reflects the specific approach to images and text characterizing Syms’s practice. Neural Swamp’s multichannel presentation reveals its characters through their reading of a continually changing script, the variations determined by a text-generating model. Through these dynamic interactions, along with the installation’s physical elements, Syms creates a kaleidoscopic view of the world and our complex relationship with one another and with technology.

Includes writing by: Irene Calderoni is curator at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Amanda Sroka is assistant curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Christina Sharpe is a writer and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.

Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
(November 5, 2021–March 27, 2022)

Philadelphia Museum of Art
(May 14–October 30, 2022)

Yale University Press, 2022

7” x 9”

76 pages