Virga Gallery

Artworks

Sense & Reason video

This video by Sarah-Jane Field is an aesthetic exploration of some of the excerpted communications involved in the making of Sense & Reason. As an extension of the project, in the video language and understanding form an imperfect and troubled pairing.

Sense & Reason zine

Sense & Reason by Virga gallery artist Sarah-Jane Field is a 60-page staple-bound zine that grew out of a call-and-response project begun in February 2025, when Field took part remotely in who nose? at Smith and Gertrude Gallery, Australia. She sent words arranged in a specific configuration, initially to the other artists involved, then to friends and strangers, and invited them to do whatever they wished with, or to the text. The zine contains what came back: contributions made with and without generative technologies, alongside her own and the apparatuses’ further interventions.

The initial text and subsequent responses revolve around what rational thought is worth in a time of intense anti-intellectualism, asking whether sense and reason are as divided as we tend to assume – and whether ‘sensible,’ a word that in English leads with the rational while the other senses trail behind, might recover its link to affect as generative technology’s promise to release humans from certain machine-like tasks – or, as many fear, make us more machine-like still.

For the Virga edition, a revised printing, each copy is inscribed by hand with the recipient’s name and date rather than numbered. This is intended as a record of exchange, not of manufactured rarity, in an age when images can be and are reproduced ad infinitum. Twenty-five copies of the zine are available in our [cloud] Shop.

Thanks to Pattie Beerens and Stuart Black (producers of who nose?). Thanks also to the named contributors: Karryn Argus, Catherine Banks, Philip Craig, Sarah Deane, David Koh, Jonathan Lamb, along with several anonymous responders; as well as to the developers, hidden workers and annotators all over the world who made and continue to make machine learning possible (as opposed to the giant corporations who have the funds to scale and claim the technology is theirs); and finally, to the collective voice said developers have made audible and visible. 

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If you are interested in purchasing an artwork, please contact Jane at Jane@virgagallery.net