Lira Gallery is happy to announce a solo exhibition with a livestreamed video installation by Cécile B. Evans.*

In her work Cécile B. Evans examines the value of emotion in contemporary society and the increasing infuence of new technologies on how we feel and act. Evans employs installation, video, sculpture, online platforms and performance to address how person-to-machine exchanges refect the wider contemporary human condition.

Evans’ recent works, AGNES (2014) and Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen (2014) addressed the lives of digital beings and our relationship to them. Her latest work What the Heart Wants builds on these ideas to consider how these blurred relations, and the mechanisms underlying them, might effect our idea of humanity. Set in the future, centered around a new system called HYPER, it imagines what it means to be ’a person’.

Working on What the Heart Wants live-streams the production of this world as it is being built. Through three screens connected to specially programmed computers, the visitor is exposed to the network of individuals from around the world helping to build the system itself. As tests and previews of the locations and characters for Evans’ upcoming installation ‚What the Heart Wants‘ are completed, they are uploaded to the computers along with chat conversations that led to them – giving viewers an intimate look at the work’s interior life before it is premiered at this year’s 9th Berlin Biennale.

The playlist in the exhibition is made up of tracks listened to while working on ‚What the Heart Wants’ and was contributed to by the freelancers, animators, renderers, compositors and co- workers for the project.

*originally commissioned by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris