MASS MoCA’s ‘Technologies of Relation’ Examines the Social Consequences of Digital Systems

‘Technologies of Relation’ at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, brings together artists examining how rapidly advancing technologies are reshaping everyday life, social relations and ideas about the future. The exhibition is on view in B6: The Robert W. Wilson Building through July 25, 2027.

The group exhibition focuses on the ways people relate to one another, to digital devices and to systems increasingly mediated by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Rather than presenting technology as either an unambiguous tool or a destructive force, the exhibition considers the complexity of those relationships, including the ways technological systems can connect people while also reinforcing oppression and erasure.

According to the museum’s exhibition text, the participating artists address colonialist logic, racism and violence embedded in, and produced by, corporate-developed technologies and datasets. The exhibition also presents possible alternatives: visions of technological futures described by the museum as inclusive and liberatory. This approach places critique alongside speculation, asking how technology might be made more accessible and shaped through ethics and care.

The exhibition features Morehshin Allahyari, Pelenakeke Brown, Taeyoon Choi, Neema Githere, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian with Dahlia Elsayed, Andrew Demirjian and Danny Snelson, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Analia Saban, and Roopa Vasudevan. Their practices span multiple media, including both technological tools and analog forms of making.

Several of the artists turn to older or ancestral practices as a way of reconsidering contemporary systems. The museum identifies weaving, tattooing and divination as points of reference within the exhibition, linking emerging technologies to forms of knowledge and cultural production that predate digital networks. By using simpler materials as well as advanced tools, the artists make technological structures more tangible and challenge the idea that such systems are neutral, authoritative or beyond public influence.

The exhibition is curated by Susan Cross, MASS MoCA’s director of curatorial affairs, with Meghan Claire Considine, a former curatorial assistant. One featured work is Morehshin Allahyari’s ‘Speculations on Capture’ (2024), represented in the museum’s materials by a film still. Support for the exhibition comes from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, The Coby Foundation, Robert Motherwell and Renate Ponsold, the Dale and Deborah Smith Foundation, and a grant from Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation’s Artist’s Resource Trust. ‘Technologies of Relation’ remains on view through July 25, 2027.