Joshanne Dar (b. 1996) is an Asian-Australian artist; her practice merges art direction, filmmaking, moving image, performance, sculpture and digital installation.  

Her interests incorporate science, math and psychology; attempting to create alternative discourses around social topics through deconstruction and experiments with atmosphere and subject matter. 

While pursuing a BA of Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, she has curated at numerous exhibitions and produced multiple performance shows – including a performance piece at the 2019 Tate Exchange at the Tate Modern.  

Joshanne Dar’s art remains multidisciplinary, adapting her medium of choice based on the project itself; versatility and eclecticism exemplify her practice. In addition to her individual art practice, she also designs productions for film, which have brought on sensitivity to narrative through spaces and objects, as well as an interest in pop culture.  She shows, however, a particular interest in digital mediums, and is currently interested in coexisting virtual and real spaces. She curiously explores the meaning of human hood in this age of technology: studying the digital prosthesis and specific devices in AI, defining the digital not as a medium but a subject matter of her art.

Artist’s statement

My work continues to come to terms with the digital period of our long lineage of auto-enhancement via technology. The imagery seeks to construct a theology around humankind and digital machines. The theology is the cyborg theology; I consider the machine and human body not as separate and divided, but as symbiotic; distinguishable only by invented structural constraints. 

My work aims to evade escapism through screens but bring ease to the relationship between biological and non-biological life; specifically, now AI threatens the intellectual anthropocentrism that has hallmarked this lineage of Humanistic development – and dissolves the mystique of a higher being. I go about this by revealing hidden digital structures, and the physicality of machines that presents us with digital imagery. I seek to develop an artist body in the digital realm – one that has the ability to mould and explore a world seemingly covered in glass screens. In this way, my work is about the process of making work in the digital age. My mediums are not a matter of preference, but selected to demonstrate their function. In this way, it is aware of contributing to the subjective representation of data and reality that the virtual acts as; and therefore the ability to almost instantaneously generate meaning. 

My digital experiments playfully demonstrate my cynical approach to digital art as an exploration of my personal sense of uncanny. It mirrors my ethos of thinking beyond what is given, which I then incorporate into digital art itself; a medium that I detach for the human ego. My work is a negotiation of relationships with extended digital faculties. It aims to deconstruct prejudices and mysticism surrounding humans and technology – decontextualise this relationship in a more fluid and integrated way. 

Exploring the abject sublime of the digital. Imagining textures and entities, visual artefacts from imagined dreams of virtual lands and inhabitants. My work is placed firmly in a post-Humanist, deconstructing discourse – seeking to invent new ideologies now that AI has rendered anthropocentrism obsolete. Though far from a didactic approach – this is an imagined narrative that sits alongside other pillars of a social construct as being only as valid as collective. Stemming from vigorous, cross-disciplinary research, of Artificial Intelligence – I am working to build a philosophical, phenomenological and sensory understanding of our brushings with this tech; whose impact remains only largely explored through science fiction. A fast becoming reality now that these externalised machine minds are already built into our smart devices and permeating into our bodies. 

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