Blurb from the Der Greif Guest Room entitled “Black Box”:
Vivian Selbo is a Brooklyn-based American artist whose work investigates how perception, technology, and point of view distort what we accept as visual truth. Her series “Coin of the Realm” captures iPhone photographs taken through bus windows covered in perforated advertisements, revealing psychedelic glitches produced by Apple’s AI-enhanced camera software, images where the boundary between malfunction, mediation, and meaning collapses. By embracing chance, ambiguity, and algorithmic interference, Selbo exposes the unstable foundations of digital seeing, asking what it means to trust an image when the apparatus itself quietly manufactures illusion.
Ambiguity in information and information in ambiguity.
Two questions drive my work: how to explore social concerns through art and collaborate with a medium. Let a twist be an expansion.
With photography and digital media, I’ve examined a range of themes—gender, advertising, the internet and social media, environmental, cultural, and social issues—all through challenging a process, conceptual groundwork, engaging chance and error, and pattern matching.
My undergraduate degree is a Bachelors of Science in Art, owing to three years I spent studying chemistry, physics, math, etc. in a pharmacology program before turning to art.
In 1988-89, I attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, working primarily in photography. I was very fortunate in 1994 to join the team at ada’web, a digital foundry commissioning artists to use the web as a medium. It became my medium, too. In the early 2000’s, my exhibition train derailed though I continued to produce work in that interstitial time spent getting from A to B, here to there. Here’s to getting back on track.
@involvebias is an anagram of Vivian Selbo.
In the course of figuring out what to write here, I toyed around making templates like this.
Reflecting on the relationship between ___, ___, ___, and ___, [name]’s work asks how the ___ and visual ___, along with ___ and ___, serve as forms of both ___ and ___.
Walid Raad has a much better rendition.
