The Pits is a new installation by artist Daniel Shanken that descends through tiers and levels: the pit in your stomach, in the ground, and in your brain. It uses eating as a crux, imagining the digestion, assimilation, offloading, and onboarding that occur when giving yourself to be devoured by technologies or entities with their own agency and agendas. The work shifts between different perspectives—human, non-human, pizza box, and microwave—exploring the pleasure and horror of willingly opting in and zoning out.

At the center of the installation is a conversation pit constructed in the gallery, allowing you to physically enter the work. Video projections, created using bespoke software, extend the room with predictive zooms and pans through artificial latent space. The work moves through bodies and places, navigating the relentless extraction of thought and resources, the replacement of cognition with corporate agents.

Daniel Shanken is an artist whose practice centers on the interplay between technology and cognition, exploring its ongoing effects on the environment, consciousness, and culture through installations, video, sculpture, sound, and media. He has exhibited at the ICA London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA Manchester, V Art Center Shanghai, and Kiasma Helsinki. He holds an MFA from Goldsmiths University (2012) and completed an art practice PhD at Kingston University, which culminated in a solo show at Stanley Picker Gallery in London. 2023. He is currently in a three-year postdoc in Umeå, Sweden, with UmArts and UMA.

https://www.dshanken.com/