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Yufeng Zhao, a graduate student in the Future Sketches group at the MIT Media Lab, is exhibiting two digital works in Toolish Behavior at Clive Davis Gallery in Brooklyn. The exhibitions displays both artworks and the tools artists invented to create them, treating tools as equally important pieces.
Zhao's works in the exhibition:
Aligned Waters (2025) - An interactive installation presenting 3,152 seascape photographs from Unsplash, each manually aligned by their horizon lines to create a continuous, scrollable ocean view controlled by a physical knob.
Horizon Labeling Tool (2025) - The custom web-based tool used to label horizon coordinates in thousands of images for Aligned Waters, presented as an artwork that reveals the manual labor behind data processing.
Exhibition Press Release
The show brings together 12 artists’ works and the tools they invented to make their works. Not showing the tools as auxiliary objects, but as equally weighted pieces, the show highlights the common toolish behavior practice in creative processes.
Situated beneath New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the exhibition brings together a group of interdisciplinary artists whose practices the curator has encountered, collaborated with, or followed closely. The selection was informed by recognition of a certain toolish instinct, a productive friction, and a tendency to build around processes.
The idea of “creative process” is often used vaguely and magically. This show insists otherwise. Creative processes are full of decisions, resistance, constraint, and invention. Tools are one of the places where that process becomes visible, tangible, and deliberate. By putting tools and works side by side, the show opens up the logic behind the finished works and the paths that lead to the results. The show does not aim to simplify the creative process but to reveal how messy, iterative, inventive, and therefore reproducible it really is.
The goal of Toolish Behavior is to make visible the labor that usually stays behind the work, and to offer a closer look at the processes that hold things together. Audiences are invited and encouraged to read between the object and the infrastructure, to ask how things were made and how they work, and to reuse the frameworks of Toolish Behavior.
Artists: Suraj Barthy, Graham Burns, shuang cai, Lily Crandall, Andrew Samuel Harrison, Lu Lyu, Julia Margaret Lu, Alanna Okun, Shelby Wilson, wei, David Yang, Yufeng Zhao
Curator: shuang cai