Wetware
Alison Knowles, Aviva Silverman, Bettina, Early Shinada, Faith Icecold,
Khia Hong, Patty Chang, Rafael Sánchez, Tishan Hsu
July 9—August 7, 2026
110 Lafayette St, Suite 201
Hosted by RainRain
Tishan Hsu, New Portable, 1988
Acrylic, vinyl cement compound, alkyd, aluminum, and oil on wood
15 1/2 x 84 x 7 inches
In name, Wetware invokes a logic of transmission and co-transformation between the material sites of the artwork and the human being who made it. Playing on ideas of hardware and software, the term “wetware” treats living biological systems—such as the body’s nervous system—as information-processing networks akin to computational media. The field of wetware computing then materializes this analogy, forming new biological substrates that literally merge the two.
We pose the artwork as another such substrate. Fused through the artist’s own processing of experience and information, the work emerges as a quasi‑cognitive synthetic medium in its own right. Alongside this general account of artistic production, the nine artists in this exhibition specifically attend to the sensory ordeals of human cognition in their work. Their works elicit consciousness as an insistently material phenomenon; a wetness.