Alison Nguyen Journeys Through Digital Realms

When I met Alison Nguyen at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery last year, the artist showed me the back section of a white limousine – sawn neatly down the middle, like an unlucky magician’s assistant – full of dirt and electronic parts, some taken from a former nuclear testing lab across the street. Gutted of any aspirations for social status or mobility, the sculpture was sticky with the strange residue of a childhood memory. Her uncle, who had fled modern-day Ho Chi Minh City for the United States during the Vietnam War (1955–75), used to pick up Nguyen, her brother and her cousins in a used limo that he had purchased as his daily car. During visits to their grandparents’ house, he drove them to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., whose holdings include the same jets that, as the artist’s brother Matthew Nguyen wrote in a poem about the outing, ‘basted the Vietnamese countryside/with napalm and agent orange and flattened haiphong harbor/where in fact uncle chu as a child had escaped from north to south.’

Nguyen has tended to avoid explicit autobiographical references in her work, she tells me on a muggy June day at her New York studio, wary of ‘a very American insatiable desire for biography and the cult of persona.’ Yet the artist, whose creations explore technology’s social and political dimensions, took the surreal memory of the museum visit as a point of departure for her live-action film history as hypnosis (2023), which is currently on view – with accompanying photographic, silkscreened and sculptural elements – at Murmurs Gallery in Los Angeles, following an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston and a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other international presentations. Marked by a certain virality, the project morphs upon each iteration. At Murmurs, the limo contains dirt – sourced from a nearby Cold War rocket testing site – studded with electronics linked to Operation Igloo White (1968–73), in which the US military used electronic sensors, drones and computers to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, presaging the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary warfare.

Nguyen’s film eschews didacticism to instead plunge us into a mesh of affects, imbricated histories and telling fictions. Viewers can take up any number of thematic threads: among them, the politics of assimilation, ideologies promoted by cinema and architecture, the idiosyncrasies of human and machine memory and, underscored by the limo’s contents, technology’s transhistorical violences. As Nguyen notes, ‘much contemporary surveillance technology was seeded in think tanks that emerged during the Cold War, developed in the service of US defence strategy under the guise of research’.

The artist collaged history as hypnosis from vignettes loosely inspired by her Zoom hypnosis sessions, travel experiences and interviews with Vietnamese women who immigrated to the US through the Orderly Departure Program, established in 1979. With a wink at California conceptualists’ engagement with car culture, the film riffs on the American road movie, a historically white-dominated genre that often reinscribes the sentiments of Manifest Destiny. In Nguyen’s take, a trio of Asian women clad in cultish all-white ensembles journey by limo through a phantasmic landscape of West Coast deserts, strip malls and glassy buildings. The women, who have artificial consciousness (the sentience that AI might theoretically develop), have had their memories wiped and replaced with a directive to pursue a man named ‘X’ – though, as their visceral reactions to a helicopter indicate, some of their recollections prove indelible.

‘What are the stakes of their consciousness?’ asks Nguyen. The attempted excision of previous experiences gestures to assimilation’s violences, while hinting at affinities between somatic or genetic memories, and certain deep neural networks’ resistance to erasure. In a sly dig at Silicon Valley archetypes, the ‘programmer’ issuing instructions to the women via oversized AirPods is voiced by a young boy. Comedy isn’t just a rapier that keeps devastation at arm’s length; here, Nguyen uses it to point to the absurdity of real-life scenarios in which powerful new technologies are developed and deployed with little foresight or oversight.

One of history as hypnosis’s three ‘anti-protagonists’ is played by Nguyen herself ­– an embodied means, she says, of synthesizing research and affect. Initially, the decision to perform in her own work was more practical, borne of concerns about subjecting an actor to the miseries of early motion capture technology. Made using a game engine, Nguyen’s my favorite software is being here (2020–21), a 19-minute video currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, was built on solo performances for which she wore a motion capture suit. Set in a Sims-like virtual apartment doubling as a one-stop shop for content generation and processing, the video’s surveillant gaze follows Andra8, a glitchy digital labourer who closely resembles Nguyen. Occasionally glugging from a human data smoothie labelled ‘GPT-2’ (the acronym a reference to a large language model), the self-described ‘virtual assistant, ambient fitness guru, influencer, born from an algorithm, recovering actress, Capricorn’ manically poses, dances, exercises and paints, often begging for comments. The digital doppelganger eventually ‘goes off content’, hurling her hallmark beverage, like the first brick of an uprising, out the window.

Prior to turning to visual art, Nguyen studied literary arts, with an emphasis on digital language arts, at Brown University. She put those skills to use in crafting some of Andra8’s uncanny speech using a machine learning program trained on low-level influencers’ social media accounts. (When Andra8 takes a broom to the gloopy data that has accumulated on the floor, she effectively recreates the artist’s laborious ‘cleaning’ of the program’s output.) Upon embarking on the project in 2019, Nguyen was thinking about the artist as a gig labourer and literal content creator for cultural institutions. When Andra8 began taking Nguyen’s unpaid artist talks in her stead – as she was busy writing grant applications, Andra8 explained on one occasion – the avatar became both the ‘corporate face of the artist and a buffer to the demands of the market system and the museum-industrial complex,’ says Nguyen.

At the end of my favorite software is being here, Andra8 walks straight out of her freemium hellscape into a gelatinous orange hinterland. Is she finally liberated from the drudgery of human servitude, having accessed an ‘outside’ to virtual work? Or is she, like a character in a videogame, doomed to respawn and repeat the same tasks? history as hypnosis likewise concludes on an ambiguous note, when two of the protagonists — one of whom earlier asked, ‘What’s the point in telling a story if you already know how it ends?’ – abandon their AirPods to a washing machine. Through its layers, folds, gaps and open ends, Nguyen’s work refuses transparency, linearity or foreclosure – a gesture linked to other, more existential forms of refusal, and a curious kind of hope.

Alison Nguyen’s ‘history as hypnosis’ is on view at Murmurs, Los Angeles, until 6 July

^{Main image: Alison Nguyen, my favorite software is being here (detail), 2020-21, video still. ​​​Courtesy: the artist}