Individuality isn’t easy to define. The Age of You art exhibit in Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art has a definition to provide.
The Age of You exhibit’s goal is to explain the oddities of people’s heads. It’s a look into the minds of individuals today and what the definition of being an individual is now.
The exhibit is divided up to 13 chapters tackling different layers and problems of individuality in today’s world, with a prelude to start off the exhibit. The chapters are:
- Am I?
- Fame and The Face
- Intimacy Industrial Complex
- Post-Work
- The Comments Section is the Real World
- The New Crowd
- Micro-Culture/Micro-Othering
- Virtue Power
- Inner Revolution
- The 0.001%
- The End of Democracy
- Wizards and Charismatics
- Towards the End
Many topics, such as how democracy has failed, the 0.001 per cent of people that want to escape reality, and so on are brought up and discussed using the panels in the gallery.
Some more in-depth examples of the contents of these chapters include chapter four, which delves into how humans are easy to replace with automation now and will be easier in the future.
Another example is chapter seven, which tackles the similar extremes of the left and right with cancel culture and outrage culture.
While the art and pictures have related themes to the exhibit, most of them are from other aspects. For example, the Many-Headed Reading photo in the chapter nine is from a performance.
“The work is an image of Many-Headed Reading, a performance where I ingest Physarum polycephalum, or the single-celled yet “many-headed” species of slime mold as a form of AI.” Jenna Sutela, the creator of the Many-Headed piece said.
Not all of the art in the Age of You exhibit is panels, there are other pieces of art included as well to showcase.
A photo taken by Johannes Paul Raether in 2017 in chapter one of the Age of You exhibit as a wide panel. The red-faced individual is one of Raether’s created identities. 
Satoshi’s Fujiwara “Crowd Landscape” piece, a comission for the exhibit made in 2019. A banner made up of hyper-real portraits of people protesting. 
An untitled piece made by Yuri Pattison, made up of eye emojis from each platform (IOS, Google, etc.). A piece spread out throughout the Age of You exhibit. 
“Digiprint” made by Stephanie Saade. This work is made up of images of a smudged phone screen in the Toronto Age of You exhibit. This art is one part of the piece. 
Small mountains of crystal by Agnieszka Kurant from her “Artificial Artificial Intelligence” series from 2014. Implemented in the Toronto Age of You exhibit. 
“The Impossibility of David Bowie Being Dead in the World of the Living,” a head made to look like David Bowie made in 2014 by an anonymous artist. The final piece of the exhibit.
The exhibit also went outside of its walls by installing a giant thinking emoji in multiple areas of Toronto, starting in the Distillery District.
Over 70 artists have their work featured in the exhibit.
The curators of the Age of You exhibit are Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. With graphic design handled by Daly & Lyon, a graphic design office in United Kingdom, London.
For more stories on art exhibits, check out a story the Toronto Observer covered on the Forbidden Forest exhibit.