Loops is a project of Jenny Lin, made in summer 2019 for a residency and exhibition related to Machine Learning, instigated by Anteism Books for their 435 Beaubien space in Montreal.

Loops is a project that began as a rumination on personal issues and the idea of possibly having “too much emotion” to view certain life situations reasonably. It is a reflection on the futility of being human, of making things difficult for oneself and others. Loops is also “lol” with “oops”.

The project comes in several different forms, each as a message that is fragmented or interrupted in order to depersonalize the message, render it cryptic or to create uncertainty about its totality and order. It is an invitation for others to latch onto an image or a part of a phrase to find their own meaning in it, or possibly to share an experience through feeling rather than specifics events.

The images and text do not directly correspond (one does not illustrate or explain the other) but they are paired as a kind of gesture or visual enactment of the entire sentiment –uncanniness, uncertainty, unease, an outburst, containment, and fantasies of breaking out of a container to either become delinquent or to flee a situation (or both).

In order to create some distance from the initial impetus of the work while maintaining the sentiment of the experience, I tried to consider what “machine” assistance could offer. I tried to chop up a sentence and randomize its parts, to flatten the experience by stylizing it through simple vector graphics, push it into screen-based and virtual form, to evoke, in physical space, the coolness or flatness of a screen. At the same time, I wanted to preserve the “feeling” and have people contemplate a word with an image as if it could divine something for each person in some relatable way.

While making this, I tried to explore the virtual and the physical, sometimes separating them into different experiences and sometimes bridging (qualities of) them together.

Maybe the work is about masking shame, or evading some situation of an embarrassing over-reveal, at the same time obsessing over it and wanting it to accidentally happen. Ideally, the piece would be installed scattered around a space so that one would have to travel through the space and have time to think about the connections.