DB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an artist addressing audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience, often focusing on the role error plays as a generative opportunity. His media-centered installations are the result of DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations and persistent, inquisitive experimentation of available materials.
His work has been supported with awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation and administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). His visual art and curatorial programming have been exhibited at Luggage Store Gallery, Soundwave ((7)) Biennial (San Francisco, CA USA), PICA, Oregon Contemporary, FalseFront (Portland, OR USA), the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu Biennial 2019, Doris Duke Theatre and CRC Cube Space (Honolulu, HI USA), among others.
The digital systems that increasingly permeate our lives necessitate vast public trust. They advance ideals of transparency, while simultaneously becoming more arcane to an increasingly dependent and precarious user-base. Artists, community organizers and their extended networks find themselves in a unique position: while able to benefit from the adoption of such technologies, and bring accountability to them, they are also populations highly susceptible to the unseen ramifications of tech at scale (blockchain, web 3.0, social media, deep-fakes, AI, gamification). In this way, Amorin, Nikolai, and Pugay see their role as resident non-experts as key to an investigation of emergent technology’s social impacts. Toward that end, they have sourced questions and input from communities they see as particularly interested in, and vulnerable to, this rapidly-shifting technological landscape.