Amid the prime galleries and renovated brick buildings of New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, a newly graduating class of MFA students from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) present their thesis work until Monday July 17. The work of the Photography, Video and Related Media department offers surprising insights into technology and human connection, with varying degrees of optimism about the direction of our tech-addicted society.

The exhibition is presented at SVA’s West 26th Street gallery, a space wedged on the 15th floor of the newly renovated Starrett-Lehigh building. I had to get a visitor’s pass from a security guard to walk from the lobby to the elevator, where I then had to select my floor on an iPad-like device (which another security guard had to help me understand). When I entered the elevator, I realized there were no buttons, a detail I had never thought of that suddenly left me feeling ominously out of control.

Everything on the 15th floor is new and clean, and the design evokes part high school, part tech company, part art gallery. There’s what looks like a conversation pit in the dining room, a number of open-plan office spaces, and a handful of cement-floored showrooms flooded with natural light; many of these spaces are still empty. The half-filled floor and its resonating halls – and high-tech elevator – provided the perfect setting for the SVA thesis show, which intensely probes the relationship of humans with machines, the need to create calm and the subtleties of interpersonal interaction.

While the brain show largely focuses on surveillance and technology, the show’s literal centerpiece runs counter to the show’s more disturbing and pessimistic displays. The doors open into a large room with Lilly Steers’ ‘Love Game’ (2023) in the middle of the floor, an interactive installation of colorful pillows and vibrant towels surrounded by twinkling string lights. It’s a thought-provoking meditation on intimacy, betrayal, and relationships, staged in the cozy comfort of a sleepover setting.

“We’re in academia and we make art, but how can we make that less rigid and inaccessible?” Steers said in a conversation with Hyperallergic. She described the project as a “university of memes”.

“We walk in and we’re supposed to talk about all this fancy stuff, but I want to sit on the floor and be together,” the artist continued. In the center of the installation, Steers printed iPhone photographs she had taken over the previous five years. This element was a “diaristic” way for her to reflect on her own recent life, the artist explained. The work also includes a book with text she had jotted down over the past few years and the same images, categorized from repulsive to beautiful. Early images depict insects and decaying food, and later photographs show rainbows and flowers.

Viewers are encouraged to sit in the space and flip through the pictures and books. Steers also created a game: four to 10 players (ages 18 and up) sit in a circle with the center photographs facing up. They choose an image they like, then turn it over to read a prompt written on the back.

“Some test social boundaries, some are affirmations where people can share life lessons,” Steers explained. Among other prompts, players participate in a group hug; two people sitting facing someone, then the two people on the phone talking to each other; and someone calls their best friend on speakerphone and asks him a personal question.

Steers said the game was about trust. “There’s an element of betrayal that I provoke,” she explained.

Deeper in the exhibit, other students ventured far beyond human interaction. The multi-pronged installation of Jingyi Gao It’s us (2023) imagine machine sentience, a timely idea that has begun to sound less and less like science fiction. Gao started the project by creating skin sculptures using a text-to-image AI generator – she wanted to “bring something digital to life, while damaging something in the physical world”. In another part of his project, screens face digital portraits. Nearby, a set of glass balls are arranged on a table.

To create them, Gao asked artificial intelligence to produce images of eyes, then attached those images to the glass spheres. Then the artist started thinking about how those AI-generated eyes would see, so she strapped a camera under the table setup and sent the video feed to the screens. “It’s as if they were seeing,” Gao explained. When a viewer looks at the eyeballs, their own image appears a few feet away.

Elsewhere in the show, some students address our current relentless information-grabbing crisis. Haoyu Zhao’s ‘The Gift’ (2023) features collaged photographs of New York City and a screen full of local newspaper headlines, a project he conceived as a commentary on American free speech. As a Chinese, Zhang sees a contradiction between the ability to transmit information without government intervention and the anxiety that this free media cultivates.

Nearby, Meiting Li’s two-part series Compliance is endless (2023) explores similar ideas. A photograph of a barren school hallway is featured above a desk, which is outfitted with a delightful miniature classroom stuffed inside the book cavity. Tiny desks and chairs are lined up in front of a video that shows a schoolgirl being punished for wearing pink shoes. On a nearby wall, Li has created an LED sculpture that shows images of body parts morphing to create the effect of an all-seeing eye, which the artist sees as a metaphor for internet control.

In a dark back gallery, Fan Yu’s “In the Swarm” (2023) offers a place of meditative bliss away from the gallery’s most frantic works.

“In the summer of 2022, I discovered that living in a society distracted by extreme information, I was gradually losing time and opportunities for deep meditation,” Yu said. Hyperallergic. “It was difficult for me to tolerate a slow pace, and my perception became distracted and fragmented.” Yu wanted to explore this sentiment in his dissertation, with the intention of “getting and bringing life back to the public’s attention.”

Thirty-two screens broadcast hundreds of short films. Yu has edited his work to perfection: the images move seamlessly to create a cohesive moving image despite the inherently fractured nature of the project. A white ball makes frequent appearances on all screens, but most of the shorts (a whopping 213) are scenes of daily life – shots of walking pedestrians, rolling buses and arriving subways.

Yu created the musical score himself and added recorded audio to match what was happening on screen (construction scenes, for example, are accompanied by the roar of heavy machinery). The musical score weaves between fast and slow compositions in correspondence with the energy levels of the scenes. Yu clearly has a gift for melody – the end product is much closer to film music than the eerie, dissonant soundtracks that typically emanate from video installations.

Yu said that before doing “In the Swarm,” distraction had become an emotional issue for her. Then the artist realized that others were facing the same problem. She hopes her work will force viewers to appreciate the mundane aspects of life and reward them for slowing down and thinking.

The show also featured two-dimensional works, including Jun Ge’s stunning series Just for once and once and for all (2022-2023), consisting of Ge prints painted in oil and acrylic. The artist layers rows of calendars and maps over muted fields of color, adding elements of personal information to otherwise abstract works.

At Hui Yu Wang’s Flat terrain (2023) includes digitally rendered three-dimensional objects that Wang flattens, prints on film, folds and stacks on top of each other, then photographs. Wang’s two-dimensional works are almost optical illusions: they condense space in a mind-blowing way, creating impossible layers of distorted figures. At first glance, some of Wang’s works appear to be real photographs, but closer examination reveals that none of the objects can be identified.

While the show’s two-dimensional works are an apparent departure from the sculptural, avant-garde ideas that make up the rest of the show, even these seemingly simple projects are the result of masterful machine intervention and careful manipulation. For those looking for a taste of cutting-edge art technology, SVA’s MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Thesis exposure is visible until Monday, July 17.