Today, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced the tour of Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art, a special exhibition held at the museum’s Albright-Knox Northland site October 16, 2021–January 16, 2022. 

Organized by the Buffalo AKG and co-curated by Paul Vanouse, University at Buffalo Professor, and Tina Rivers Ryan, Buffalo AKG Curator, Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art will travel to museums throughout the United States from 2023 to 2024, including the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, California, January 28–April 29, 2023; Gray Area in San Francisco, California, July 7–August 31, 2023; and Wrightwood659 in Chicago, Illinois, October 13, 2023–January 27, 2024.

Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art presents the work of seventeen contemporary artists who address the complex relationship between the technologies individuals use and the identities they inhabit. The exhibition is accompanied by robust online materials, including video interviews with the artists, two curatorial essays, a glossary of terms, a bibliography of readings on technology and inequality, and links to non-profit organizations who promote art and technology or investigate the intersection of technology and society.

“Since Difference Machines opened in Buffalo in the fall of 2021, the question of how technology shapes and reflects identity has become both more mainstream and more urgent,” said Ryan. “We are grateful to our institutional partners for ensuring that more people will have the opportunity to experience these moving, thought-provoking artworks, and to imagine how we might work through the uses and abuses of technology toward a more equitable future.”

The exhibition includes projects that span the last three decades, ranging from software-based and internet art to animated videos, bioart experiments, digital games, and 3-D printed sculptures.

Together, these works explore the aesthetic and social potential of emerging technologies. Some emphasize how digital tools can be repurposed to tell more inclusive stories or imagine new ways of being. Others show how becoming visible within digital systems can be a trap that leads to the technological exclusion, surveillance, and exploitation of marginalized communities. Dynamic and interactive, these projects transform the space of the museum into a laboratory for reflecting on and experimenting with our increasingly powerful “difference machines,” in the hopes of achieving a more equitable future.

Exhibition co-curators Paul Vanouse and Tina Rivers Ryan bring to the project over thirty years of experience working with media art, as well as their own personal experiences of how technology can both help and harm marginalized communities. “I’m interested in artists who recognize that technologies are social, active, and value-laden and not neutral tools, and who can leverage these qualities to take on larger questions and broader issues,” Vanouse adds. “We especially wanted to emphasize that artists who work with technology can be critical of it—while simultaneously expanding our horizons of what technology, and art, can be.”

When the Web first emerged in the 1990s, many people imagined that it would allow us to escape our bodies. Some celebrated the idea that attributes like race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and dis/ability would become irrelevant. Instead, the opposite became true, and individuals’ offline and online selves have fused. Individuals upload their identities when they use their real names in Facebook profiles, post selfies to Instagram, or use hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #TransDayofVisibility to advocate for their given communities.

While the internet allows for self-expression and connection with others, there is also a darker side to digital technologies. Some governments and corporations are creating databases that surveil and monetize identities, as well as biased algorithms that perpetuate discrimination in everything from education and health care to employment and the justice system. The forerunner of the computer was called a “difference engine,” as it was used to calculate the differences between numbers. Today, members of society are surrounded by “difference machines,” or computers that are used to encode the differences between individuals.

Difference Machines earned the 2022 Curatorial Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), in the category of all exhibitions at museums with annual operating budgets of up to $10 million—making it the first major survey of art and technology to be acknowledged by AAMC.

“Our twenty-first-century communal and individual identities are shaped and transformed by radical and constant evolutions and revolutions in digital technologies,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director. “Difference Machines is a timely exhibition that addresses perennial questions about human life today: who are we, what are we becoming, where are we going? It is an honor and a privilege for us at the Buffalo AKG to work with brilliant partners in Irvine, San Francisco, and Chicago to present this award-winning exhibition to communities across the United States.”

While recent exhibitions around the world have surveyed the impact of technology on the arts or examined what it means to be human in the digital age, Difference Machines is the first large-scale exhibition at a major museum to explore the connections between technology and systemic inequity, as manifested in problems like algorithmic bias and digital redlining.

About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. For 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art. The museum’s collection spans some of the greatest moments in art through the centuries, beginning with Marina Piccola, Capri, 1859, by Albert Bierstadt—both the first painting and the first work gifted by an artist to enter the museum’s collection—and is especially rich in postwar American and European art. On May 25, 2023, the Buffalo AKG will open a renewed and vastly expanded campus designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu.

About the Beall Center
The Beall Center is an exhibition and research center located on the campus of the University of California, Irvine. Since its opening in 2000, the Beall Center’s exhibitions, research, and public programs have promoted new forms of creation and expression. For artists, the Beall Center serves as a proving ground—a place between the artist’s studio and the art museum—and allows them to work with new technologies in their early stages of development. For visitors, the Beall Center serves as a window to the most imaginative and creative innovations in the visual arts occurring anywhere. The Beall Center promotes new forms of creative expression by exhibiting art that uses different forms of science and technology to engage the senses; building innovative scholarly relationships and community collaborations between artists, scientists, and technologists; encouraging research and development of art forms that can affect the future; and reintroducing artistic and creative thinking into STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) integrated learning in K–12 to Higher Education. The Beall Center’s curatorial focus presents a diverse range of innovative, world-renowned artists, both national and international, who work with experimental and interactive media. Many of these artists have shown their works primarily within group exhibitions or have a limited number of solo exhibitions in the US. The Beall Center is committed to exhibiting these artists in a way that more fully expresses their individual body of work. We strive to present a direct connection between our programs and the larger trajectory of the history of video, installation art, kinetic and cybernetic sculpture. Our approach is not to exclusively emphasize the technological aspects of works, but to present experimental media projects that are equally strong aesthetically, conceptually, and technically. 

The Beall Center received its initial support from the Rockwell Corporation in honor of retired chairman Don Beall and his wife, Joan, the core idea being to merge their lifelong passions—business, engineering, and the arts—in one place. Today, major support is generously provided by the Beall Family Foundation. For more information, please visit beallcenter.uci.edu.

About Gray Area
Gray Area is a San Francisco–based countercultural hub catalyzing creative action for social transformation. Gray Area's mission is to cultivate, sustain, and amplify a community of creative practitioners who apply antidisciplinary practice—including art, technology, science, and the humanities—toward engaging with the complex challenges facing our world. Through exhibitions, public events, education, research, and incubation, Gray Area maintains a platform that enables creators of diverse backgrounds and perspectives to transcend boundaries within deep artistic collaboration and gain agency to impact the world through category-defying work. For more information, visit grayarea.org

About Wrightwood 659
Wrightwood 659 is a private, non-collecting institution devoted to socially engaged art and architecture designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Tadao Ando, who transformed a 1920s residential building with his signature concrete forms and poetic treatment of natural light. Located at 659 W. Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago, the intimate space officially opened in late 2018 and hosts several exhibitions a year, presented by Alphawood Exhibitions. For additional information, visit wrightwood659.org.

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