Late Jiayi Young Reflection

 When looking at Jiayi Young’s work it’s hard not to be notice it’s distinct differences compared to other installations, it’s not like say, the banana taped to the wall per say, where looking at it might be hard for the average viewer to understand how that ends up in a museum, it’s easy to understand what makes the sprawling nature of the graphs or the craftmanship in IV bags with clicking lights, impressive enough to be noteworthy, but it’s also very obviously different from a painting or how an everyday person thinks of art obviously. Similarly, it’s also not like it’s hard not to see that there is a story it is thematically telling with its use of data sets connected to social media activity and fake news in our current political and social landscape, but what specifically is what I’m sure most people would ask themselves while looking at it. That was something close to my thoughts when I first went and saw Young’s installation for myself, I often like to let the art speak for itself as much as I can let it before I read about any sort of artist statement (though of course I had already heard about her work in class and received prior information), so I looked at all this collected data and how it was visually represented in a physical space, how the vary graphs could be smaller and printed along the wall but instead were laid out along on hangers, dripping onto the floor, or the constantly, nigh irritating, clicking sound of the IV for every stupid bot tweet being made, is clearly meant to show the scale/ size of  propaganda or misinformation, making it a smaller printed sheet would defeat the purpose of really forcing the viewer to awe in its spread, as it towers over you, while the clicking shows how infested and inescapable it is, it chirps like an infestation of cicadas or rats in your house it’s too loud not too notice, which is by and large what the people running these bots want, they want to insert your digital space with these bugs of propaganda and misinformation because it’s the only way they get business, politically or monetarily or both. I remember being told to watch out for scams and misinformation on the internet and now  it feels like the whole internet is a scam space especially with things like crypto and AI, which to me, are basically just elaborate scams.
In one of my blogs for secret game club I wrote a throwaway line regarding  the game Va-11 Hall-A, where I said “but games (art) aren’t escapism, they’re reflections, and Va-11 Hall A is a mirror looking in on itself” a statement I believe rings entirely true Young’s work here, while art can often be activism or escapism or both, more often than not it is that reflection of our times and people affected by them, Young’s work is the ultimate mirror to our present and the fear and exhaustion that comes with.