NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art launched BANNED SKILLS, a digital art project by artist duo INFANT, sidony o’neal and Bogosi Sekhukhuni, on artport, the Whitney’s online gallery space for Internet and new media art. Commissioned for artport, the work serves as the portal to engage with INFANT’s evolving conceptual framework, XENOFORMALISM. The artists designed BANNED SKILLS as an interactive entry point to explore new speculative understandings of formal systems like math, science, and design. The project reveals how seemingly contrasting ideas can align to generate new aesthetic or ideological orders.
BANNED SKILLS is a nonlinear aesthetic narrative that prompts viewers to consider various aspects of humanity and established understandings of objects or histories. Unfolding along two distinct paths, the work’s primary navigation tool utilizes the psychological phenomenon of the bouba-kiki effect. The phenomenon, first presented in the 1920s, reflects deliberate associations between speech sounds and visual shapes with the word bouba often associated with smooth, rounded shapes and kiki with sharp, angular ones. Within BANNED SKILLS, users begin their experience in a “NEST” where the kiki and bouba forms exist, selecting one of the two shapes to take them along different paths. Along these journeys, users interact with a range of artifacts from art, architecture, design, and sound to explore cultural representations through unexpected groupings, placing the objects in conversation with one another. Encounters with juxtapositions of cultural artifacts—from the Gameboy Advanced SP Tribal Edition to the necklace made from precisely designed whale bones—invite users to gain new perspectives and draw connections. In the top-left corner of the screen, an interactive virtual music device lets users toggle between the kiki- and bouba-coded soundscapes, further emphasizing the visual juxtapositions. After users explore both spaces, a final third environment will appear.
“BANNED SKILLS hopes to use participation as a way around the problem of ‘talking at’ the viewer, working with, not against, postures of engagement from the early 2000's gaming boom that feel familiar and nostalgic simultaneously,” said David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney. “This is the first artport project that dives into this cross-section of the post digital and is a form of practice that garners attention because of its utility across levels of understanding. Considering the intersections of art and design have become a prominent narrative for emerging forms of contemporary engagement.”
The artists designed the virtual experience of BANNED SKILLS as a starting point for exploring their concept of XENOFORMALISM (XF). The prefix “XENO,” meaning strange or foreign in Greek, suggests an unfamiliar type of formalism. XF can be imagined as a category of filters to guide users in unpacking and connecting histories of visual aesthetics, sonic landscapes, and science. The work offers an aesthetic approach to new understandings of cultural representations, using histories of science fiction and digital culture—including gaming and computer graphics—as speculative introductions. The branching sequences INFANT has formed in BANNED SKILLS encourages viewers to reexamine how meaning is formed and reinforced within art, art history, design, science, and science fiction, and how these fields shape and contribute to collective cultural memory.
INFANT’s BANNED SKILLS was organized by David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum, and commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for Internet and new media art commissions. artport is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney.
Sidony O’Neal (b. 1988) is a conceptual artist whose work and interdisciplinary research is informed by mathematics, architectural systems, and the histories of objects, from 15th Century locking mechanisms to plastic industrial pallets. Their works explore human relationships to objects, labor, and technology.
Their work has been featured in exhibitions at Et al., San Francisco, CA; Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Dracula’s Revenge, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Veronica, Seattle, WA; Third Born, Mexico City, Mexico; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME; and Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY. O’Neal has had residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Banff Centre, Banff, AB, among others. Their performances have been featured at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. O'Neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award and a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In 2023, they were awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship. O'Neal is co-founder of design firm INFANT.
Bogosi Sekhukhuni (b. 1991) is an artist and designer who reflects on cultures and histories of technology. Working across a range of media such as sculpture, video, set design, furniture design and performance, Sekhukhuni suggests ways to think about the mechanics of futurity.
Since 2012, Sekhukhuni’s work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions, including Role Play, Fondazione Prada, Milan; Age of You, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics, New Museum, New York; Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Foxy Production, New York; Rencontres de Bamako, African Biennale of Photography, Mali; and Simunye Summit 2010, Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg. They have been awarded the Prix Net Art Award, Rhizome, New York (2017). Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the artist group NTU and has worked closely with CUSS Group. Sekhukhuni is co-founder of the design firm INFANT.
