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Artlab Editorial presents three episodes centered around Art + Technology at LACMA, one of the museum’s unique programs that was revitalized through a long-term partnership between Hyundai Motor and LACMA, beginning in 2015.

Join Mira Dayal as she uncovers how Gala Porras-Kim reimagines museum collections in works ranging from climate-controlled vitrines to institutional databases, proposing expansive new systems that honor the past, present, and potential futures of the artifacts they hold.

This film Gala Porras-Kim: Expansive Data Fields, features the LACMA Art + Technology Lab project Expansive Data Fields by Gala Porras-Kim. This project with encyclopedic museums is an exploration of the institutions cataloguing systems and how the way objects are registered affects how we understand cultural heritage. Porras-Kim interrogates the layers of interpretation imposed on these objects, examining the linguistic, material, and contextual information used to classify them. By rethinking the relationship between cultural objects and the institutions that preserve them, the project highlights the potential for alternative narratives and more inclusive ways of understanding cultural heritage. This aligns with Porras-Kim’s broader practice, utilizing museum archive research to inform her drawings, sculptures, and installations, for example the Chichén Itzá project depicting votive offerings originally found in the Sacred Cenote. Many of her projects attempt to challenge the politics of preservation, revealing gaps and erasures in institutional records and colonial legacies. undefined Gala Porras-Kim is a recipient of the 2023 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant. Inspired by the spirit of LACMA’s original Art and Technology program (1967–71), which paired artists with technology companies in Southern California, the LACMA Art + Technology Lab supports artist experiments with emerging technology. The LACMA Art + Technology Lab is presented by Hyundai Motor. undefined Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá)  makes work about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. It considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles and London. She received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA.  She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), and currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

From Pasadena to the Mojave Desert, follow Dr. Ayana Jamieson as she uncovers the blurred boundaries between fiction and lived experience within the works of American Artist and author Octavia E. Butler.

This film American Artist: Earthseed, features The Monophobic Response by American Artist, showcasing the exploration of technology, society, and speculative futures. Rooted in the legacies of Octavia E. Butler, an American science fiction writer, and African-diasporic communities in California, American Artist's work critically engages with technology, science fiction, and their lineage within America’s Second Great Migration. Their LACMA Art + Technology Lab project The Monophobic Response reimagines the 1936 GALCIT Rocket Motor Test through Butler's Earthseed community while their 2022 exhibition Shaper of God at RedCat draws from Butler’s life in Los Angeles to explore cycles of history and dystopian futures. Artist’s 2024 exhibition, The Monophobic Response, at LACMA coincides with this film, presenting original footage from the Mojave Desert, where the artist staged a rocket engine test fire, weaving together speculative fiction and real-world political concerns. undefined American Artist is a recipient of the 2021 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant. Inspired by the spirit of LACMA's original Art and Technology program (1967–71), which paired artists with technology companies in Southern California, the LACMA Art + Technology Lab supports artist experiments with emerging technology. The LACMA Art + Technology Lab is presented by Hyundai Motor. undefined American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a recipient of the 2024 New York Artadia Award and a Trellis Art Fund grantee. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, EYEBEAM, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Cultured, Artforum, and Art in America. Artist is a former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a faculty at Yale University.

Take an intimate look at Sarah Roselena’s groundbreaking practice with close collaborator and curator Mika Yoshitake and uncover how the artist merges Indigenous craft techniques with pioneering technology to challenge colonial narratives and address climate justice.

This film Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions, features Exit Points and Standard Candle by Sarah Rosalena. Rosalena’s practice is rooted in her lineage of women weavers who used a variety of looms and Indigenous technologies such as beaded looms, manual hand looms, and the digital Jacquard loom. Her LACMA Art + Technology Lab project Exit Points intertwines machine learning, coded language, and the loom to challenge technological norms through a feminist and anti-colonial lens. In her subsequent exhibition Standard Candle, woven textiles are informed by astronomical images reflecting the labor of women “computers,” highlighting their crucial role in shaping Western scientific knowledge and space imaging. With support from the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, Rosalena collaborated with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to conduct her research. undefined Sarah Rosalena is a recipient of the 2019 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant. Inspired by the spirit of LACMA's original Art and Technology program (1967–71), which paired artists with technology companies in Southern California, the LACMA Art + Technology Lab supports artist experiments with emerging technology. The LACMA Art + Technology Lab is presented by Hyundai Motor. undefined Sarah Rosalena is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working between traditional handicraft traditions and emerging technology. Throughout her career, Rosalena has built a reputation for breaking boundaries through her hybrid forms rooted in indigenous cosmologies, re-interpreted through digital tools and her hand. Her experimental practice reconsiders craft in the context of art history and technology and suggests new possibilities as we attempt to define ourselves to innovation and computation. Born from multi-generations of women weavers, she works from her digital Jacquard loom to her mother’s bead loom, mixing hand-dyed natural colors, including cochineal and indigo, with a synthetic, pixelated palette to produce her unbordered textiles. Programming her 3D ceramic printer to imitate coil pot techniques, she fabricates “anti-vessels” that mimic the patterns of weaving and basketry. Working with image software, she creates beadwork–pixel per bead–whose surface mimics the computer screen. undefined Rosalena is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize. She has had solo exhibitions with LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Clockshop, and Blum & Poe Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collection at LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.