Disruptive Cultures

The Beall Center for Art + Technology concludes its 25th anniversary with an examination of social media

By Christine Byrd

Visitors to the Beall Center for Art + Technology this spring will be greeted by two ghostly figures on a screen, their endless, friendly chatter to each other powered by artificial intelligence. Sarah Rothberg’s haunting Forever Meetings sets the tone for an exhibition examining how social media continues to shape our lives and minds. 

Disruptive Cultures: Affect and Effects of Social Media is the final exhibition in the Beall Center’s 25th-anniversary programming, and it underscores just how much technology has altered the ways we think and interact with each other.  

“As we mark the Beall Center’s 25th anniversary, we’re highlighting a throughline that has defined our program from the beginning: artists using technology to illuminate the cultural stakes of the present,” said Jesse Colin Jackson, executive director of the Beall Center. “Disruptive Cultures: Affect and Effects of Social Media asks what it means to live inside platforms engineered for engagement — where interface design and AI algorithms don’t just shape what we see but what we feel. The exhibition brings together artists who critique that power, redirect it, and in some cases build new forms of engagement.” 

Social Critique 

The cohort of artists that Beall Center artistic director David Familian brought together for Disruptive Cultures takes a wide range of approaches to exploring social media. Some use commercial platforms like ChatGPT and Instagram in their work, while others created entirely new technologies.  

“Most of the artists we’ve brought together for this show have grown up with social media,” said Familian. “At this point, AI is almost certainly being used by social media companies, so we have the ideal entrée for audiences to consider the bigger issue of AI within the complex system of social media that they’re familiar with.”

Image: Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, installation view of A More Than Human Tongue, featuring Voice in My Head and One Who Looks at the Cup. Exhibition Design by Lauren Lee McCarthy. Music Center LA, 2024. Photo by Will Tee Yang for The Music Center. 

“...AI is almost certainly being used by social media companies, so we have the ideal entrée for audiences to consider the bigger issue of AI...”

Kyle McDonald and Lauren Lee McCarthy will present a new version of Voice in My Head, which received the Beall Center’s support as a Black Box Project. This interactive piece offers visitors a running monologue of their own “inner voice” as they walk through the exhibition. It starts when visitors put on a headset and tell an AI chatbot about their own self-talk and how they wish it were different. Through the conversation, the software clones your voice and then uses it to speak to you as you go around the gallery and especially when you interact with other people.

“This piece is really thinking about where we’re going with AI and how that affects our social relationships,” said McCarthy. “We noticed that AI is increasingly seeping into all of our communications and consciousness, so what if we take that to its logical conclusion and replace our inner monologue with AI?”

Through the project, the artists grappled with AI versus reality. “You have your own inner monologue and thoughts, but when you’re attached to your devices 24 hours a day, using them for sending text messages and communicating, there’s a way in which your thinking does change and shift due to these algorithms,” McCarthy said. 

McCarthy and McDonald, who each have their own artistic practice, have collaborated on art projects built around custom software for over a decade. In leveraging ChatGPT for this piece, McCarthy was impressed with its power and how efficiently it could be adapted to suit their vision. 

Voice in My Head is the 10th Black Box Project — the Beall Center’s signature program that provides support for collaboration between artists and university researchers. McCarthy and McDonald worked with Dorothy Santos, assistant professor of teaching art, justice, and digital media at UC Santa Cruz, drawing on her expertise in voice technology’s complex relationship with race, gender and labor. 

Image: (above) Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki, Generative Persuasion (2024-ongoing), mobile computing center. Courtesy of the artists.

Generative Persuasion will be another interactive installation at Disruptive Cultures. Created by Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry, the work also uses a large language model system to allow visitors to create written propaganda targeting specific personalities, such as “liberal” or “conservative,” and “neurotic or “agreeable.”  

Maya Man’s Fake It Till You Make It also uses Instagram but to a very different effect. Her generative art imitates the cheerful look and encouraging tone of social media posts that promote wellness, self-care and confidence — but with the words mixed and matched into utter nonsense. 

These and other works that leverage AI and offer user interaction aim to give visitors reasons to reconsider the power that social media and algorithms hold over their lives. 

Curating Complexity 

For Familian, the title Disruptive Cultures evokes the organic, biological nature of social media, that puts its users in a petri dish of evolving digital landscapes. That interplay between art and science has been at the heart of the Beall Center’s exhibitions over the past quarter century. 

In 2000, the center's inaugural exhibition, SHIFT-CTRL, curated by art professors Antoinette LaFarge and Robert Nideffer, included 23 artists exploring the rise of gaming culture and the intersection of arts and computer games, right as home computers were becoming ubiquitous. Since then, shows have explored a range of themes that cut across art and technology, including movement, sound, video, identity, data, robotics and bioart. The shows evolved as technology advanced. 

“We saw a major shift in the early aughts where electronics and technology got cheaper and programming became more accessible,” Familian said. “When that changed, it democratized technology — and more people engaging with technology means more diverse forms of art that challenge us to think differently about it and the various ways that technology has affected our lives.” 

Image: Installation view of SHIFT-CTRL, the inaugural exhibition of the Donald R. and Joan F. Beall Center for Art + Technology in 2000. 

Familian, who has curated 30 shows at the Beall Center over the last two decades, is retiring in 2026. He says his recent shows, including this one, reflect his obsession with complexity and uncertainty. 

“To me, complex systems are a paradigm shift that art has to represent, because it’s having the greatest impact on our lives in the 21st century,” said Familian. “Everything we are trying to fix in society is part of a complex system, and if you don’t realize that, you develop a solution that is too simplistic and will only make the problem worse.” 

With this exhibition, visitors are invited to look away from their own screens and reflect on how their use of social media and AI is part of a much larger, complicated cultural shift driven by technology. Just as artists will continue to explore and engage with these tools, so too will the Beall Center.

To learn more about the Beall Center for Art + Technology, visit beallcenter.uci.edu.

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CONNECT - Spring 2026