Working with video, drawing and software, Portuguese-Brazilian Yara Veloso (b. 1993, Lisbon) looks into the (dis)comfort that arises when humanity and technology meet. Having studied Design at the KABK (Royal Academy Den Hague), followed by a Masters in Graphic Design at Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem), her practice oscillates between making interactive webpages, conceiving visual identities, and creating immersive (and often participatory) installations or happenings.

For a species in constant development; technology has always provided us with tools to tighten our grip on the world, to make sense of the chaos. Embodying human intervention, its history goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of language: from clay line and finger marks on caves, to cuneiform tablets, up to the written, and even the printed word. Technological advancements of the 20th century have diverted this human evolution in a way, by splitting our world into two parallel and reciprocal entities: the physical and the digital. A fascination with how this exponentially alters our consciousness and our way of being in the world, is at the root of Veloso’s work. Occupied with language and its structuring of our perception, she explores how thought-processes are rewired through the fusion between mankind and computers.

Defying a moralistic stance, Veloso is rather intrigued by the awkwardness and clumsiness that sometimes occurs in this encounter. Like observing a first date where an attempted smooth kiss goes wrong, noses bumping into each other. Through humor, she casts a playful eye onto the constructed-ness of those systems that we all have come to take for granted. Systems we can no longer live without, systems we have internalised to the point that they are integral to our functioning. What logic has motivated these inventions? From a sober distance, and especially when in use by large groups of people simultaneously, these “solutions” of human engineering look rather absurd. Human evolution, high on a spiked cocktail of steroids. Perhaps the advancement is going too fast?

The question of agency arises. What happened to the Future? (2019), in collaboration with Vera Van de Seyp looks at the archive of Poetry International through a new media lens. The project brings together crowdsourced words, an interactive and participatory chatbot poem (Life is Given to Us Humans) and a video showing the algorithm on the loose. For these new developments don’t halt our relentless urge to leave a trace of ourselves into this world. On the contrary, this urge gets even more frantic now that our imprints are both digital and physical. asdfghjkl (2023, ongoing) is a growing database collecting these reminders of human existence, probing the question of “who’s directing who” in this continuous, and seemingly ephemeral amalgam of content creation. Frue/Talse Portal and Ynoes (2023) make these traces physical again. These large steel panels doodle-like drawings of our physical receptors - eyes, hands and ears - in bright colours, obstructing and rearranging our viewing of reality - in this case, the exhibition.

Veloso considers technological add-ons as new extensions of our senses. They envelop and slowly suffocate us in a tightly wrapped filter. Being the new architecture of our society, they don’t only run parallel to the physical world, but are exceedingly intertwined with it. Weird-looking ergonomic inventions are another recurring motif in Veloso’s work, often blown up into grotesque proportions. A phone on our arm recording our heartbeat and itinerary whilst running, is turned into a bulky iPad strapped to the pillars of a building in Hug (2021). The ideal positioning for hands on a keyboard deviates into new iconography in The Way Things are Going (2022), referring to John Ruskins’ statement that whilst drawing, a line should always have a destination. And so asks the artist, what direction are we going? From a distance and isolated from their everyday use, these inventions and rules look so random. Qwerty or Azerty? It’s all very confusing.