ISSUE 6: ENCOUNTERING THE OTHERWISE
Spring 2026
Edited By: Zahra Safaverdi and Edward Jiaolin Yu
Exhibition Opening: January 12th, 2026
Encountering the Otherwise is the third and final installment of the Media and Materiality series. This triptych explores both established and alternative ways in which media can expand the concept of materiality: Rather than treating media as representational surfaces, the series posits media as operative and spatial environments where materiality is enacted rather than merely depicted. The installation presents five Episodes of Encounter with the underlands: occluded yet vital planetary forces in conversation with submerged networks of extraction and exploitation that sustain life on the surface. Each Episode is articulated through a dual system:
Data Object: A physical instantiation functioning as a material anchor.
Data Environment: A computational layer, video sequences algorithmically mapped and projected in three dimensions onto the corresponding Data Object, producing a hybridized spatial ecology of physical and virtual matter.
ENCOUNTERING THE OTHERWISE
