AI Care and Art: Chloë Bass & Hannah Zeavin

A conversation between artist Chloë Bass and scholar and critic Hannah Zeavin about the greater recognition of the need for care in our social infrastructure, our relationships with each other, and our relationships with ourselves, while facing the simultaneous reality that modes of care have become increasingly technological and at screen’s length from our embodied lives. The follow-up to a talk hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library and the Art World Conference in 2021, this talk brings Bass and Zeavin together for continued conversation about the many meanings of care, care’s potential violence both in IRL and AFK arenas, and the ongoing importance of translating between digital and material form. The conversation builds on Zeavin's engagement with technology as a simultaneous mediating support and form of surveillance with respect to familial care (her book Mother's Little Helpers is forthcoming from MIT Press), dovetailing with Bass' ongoing artistic research project Obligation to Others Holds Me in My Place, a study of intimacy at the scale of the immediate family.

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: she is a Faculty Fellow for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), a Lucas Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, and was a 2021 - 2022 Future Imagination Fellow at NYU Tisch. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Skirball Cultural Center, Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at CUNY Queens College, where she co-runs Social Practice CUNY with Gregory Sholette.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University and a Visiting Fellow at the Columbia University Center for The Study of Social Difference. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from differences, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left.

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