【Curator Talk】
Date | Sunday, Oct 19, 2025 · 2:00–3:30 PM (UTC+8)
Venue | Online
Host | Emily Hsiang-Yun HUANG
Speaker | Doreen A. RÍOS
90min + Q&A"


Registration｜Please register on the Vanishing Acts exhibition page.
*​​​All the events will be conducted in English and Mandarin. The online link will be emailed to registrants on 10/16.

Introduction
The digital age's promises of immateriality and infinite access are vanishing. Instead, we face the material weight, fragility, and ecological toll of our technologies. This talk expands on the online exhibition Vanishing Acts, which asks: can we find alternative relationships with technology through acts of withdrawal and dissolution? We will explore this question through four newly commissioned net art pieces. Federico Pérez Villoro traces the geological scars of undersea cables, Jung Hsu excavates the mortality of memory on decaying USB sticks, Anna Ridler hunts ghost images in AI training sets, and Olia Lialina resurrects fragile, tender relics from the early web. This talk will explore how these artworks, and the curatorial framework of the exhibition, reframe the vulnerability of the digital as a critical practice. 

Speaker | Doreen A. RÍOS
Doreen A. RÍOS (Mexico, 1992) is an independent curator and researcher. Her work focuses on technological disobedience in contemporary art, tactical media, and new materialities. Founder and director of [ANTI]MATERIA, an online platform dedicated to the research and exhibition of art produced through digital media and co-founder of the experimental research project Unidad de Conciencias Colectivas Terrestres. She served as chief curator at Centro de Cultura Digital from 2019 to 2021.

Doreen graduated with a Masters in Contemporary Curating from Winchester School of Arts, specialising in digital cultures, and with a degree in Architecture from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. She’s currently pursuing a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at University of California, San Diego. She’s part of the International Selectors Committee for Lumen Art Prize as well as the Leonardo Peer Review Panel.

Host | Emily Hsiang-Yun HUANG
Hsiang-Yun Huang is a researcher and visual artist from Taiwan. Her research interests focus on the relationship between body and technology from the perspective of postcolonialism, cyberfeminism, digital materialism and critical AI. Projects she has curated include Net.Open public program and www.counterarchive.commons at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, IMPAKT Festival-Our Terms, Our Conditions, Taipei Digital Art Festival-Fake It Real , Embodied Interface. Her dance films often derived from her poetry on the vulnerability of (non-)human existence, with a focus on collective mourning and digital intimacy. She is supported by the Mondriaan Artist Start Grant(NL) and National Culture and Arts Foundation(TW). Her works have been exhibited at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Cinedance Festival at Eye Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Ars Electronica, Kikk Festival, and panke.gallery.