Dates: 8/19 - 10/4 

Digital Twin showcases Drexel Westphal faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students who transform human experience through digital rendering, exploring the sublime and chilling effects of technology on physical and psychological existence. 

As humans interact with digital spaces, our data is formed into thousands of “twins” which claim to represent our behavior, preferences, and personas. What do we share with our recreations? How does living beside them shift our data so that our twins morph alongside us? 

These nine artists employ video, speculative design, interactivity, ceramic 3D printing, and assemblage to probe digital doubling technologies, and to imagine paths forward for reclaiming human agency beside our digital twins. Reverent and profane, farcical and severe, unnerving and uplifting, Digital Twin showcases the Westphal community as it wrestles with some of the most pressing creative problems of the digital age.  

Curated by Micah Lockman-Fine, a Drexel MS Design Research candidate who crafts exhibitions, performances, and experiments to build progressive speculative futures. 

Featuring work by Rghad Balkhyoor, Lewis Colburn, Ann T. Dinh, Nicole Feller-Johnson, Emil Polyak, Tin Ta, Victoria Wohlforth, Darren Woodland, and Cooper Wright.

Heavy Merge 

Dates: 8/19 - 10/4 

Heavy Merge is a new multimedia installation by sculptor Carolyn Healy and audio-video artist John Phillips. Inspired by a three-pound blob of warm, wet, living matter networked by billions of synapses, the artists take a personal look at the matrix that mysteriously gives rise to consciousness. For Healy and Philips, the brain is a wonderland of feedback and freewheeling interconnection that melds sensory perception and stored experiences into unique inner landscapes. They are fascinated by our powers of awareness, imagination and abstraction and by the sometimes unruly mental functions that seem to operate without us. Their site-specific installation juxtaposes sculptures and shadows with video feedback projections and soundscape to approximate the boundless creative activity in our brains that allows us to feel human. 

Carolyn Healy is an installation artist who began her career exhibiting small, abstract assemblages of found objects in 1979 at the Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. Since 1987, she has created numerous large site-specific installation pieces, many in collaboration with audio-video artist John Phillips. These have been seen nationally and internationally in museums, university galleries, theaters, as well as rough industrial and alternative sites. Carolyn has received five individual Artist Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Art from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and grants from the Leeway Foundation, the Dietrich Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. 

John Phillips is a sound and video artist. His work has included interactive sound installations and audio-visual performances in museums, art galleries, and non-traditional spaces in this country and abroad. Since 1987, he has collaborated extensively with sculptor Carolyn Healy on site-based installations. His musical compositions have been presented at dance and theater venues, on the nationally syndicated radio program New American Radio, and at national and international electronic art festivals. His composing has been supported by American Composers Forum (collaboration with Pauline Oliveros) and the Millay Colony (composer in residence). To pursue his video work, he has enjoyed residencies at the Experimental Television Center and at Signal Culture, both in Owego, New York. Grants include a fellowship in Sound Art from the National Endowment for the Arts and several in Media Arts from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.