Image is Everything: Media Art Portraits from the Thoma Foundation

Celebrating the 20th year of Telfair’s landmark PULSE Art + Technology Festival, Image is Everything: Media Art Portraits from the Thoma Foundation explores how technology and time-based media have transformed the art of portraiture. Through videos, interactive installations, and prints, this exhibition considers how power, race, and gender shape identity. It also examines how portraits have represented important figures in religion, politics, and popular culture. Spanning the past 50 years, the works in this exhibition engage with the human image as reflected in the evolving technologies that dominate our lives, from the desktop computer exemplified in Andy Warhol’s cycle1 (1985) to future cyborg and AI entities as considered in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s video Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021).

Over the last several decades, advances in computers, software tools, and sensors have enabled artists to involve people with interactive digital images of themselves, raising questions about how the viewer’s image appears in contexts ranging from surveillance to social media. For example, Daniel Rozin’s computer-driven motorized works assemble a portrait of the viewer made of moving acrylic paddles, and Huntrezz Janos’ exuberant Augmented Reality filters overlay fantastical masks onto visitor’s faces. Other works examine technology’s ability to transmit and transform pop culture identities, as in Marco Brambilla’s King Size (2023), a scrolling digital monument to Elvis Presley. This exhibition asks viewers to contemplate the meaning of self and identity in an increasingly digital world.