Natalie and James Thompson Gallery

Exhibition Opening: Click on My Mouth: Language and Technology

March 17 - May 22, 2026

The Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San José State University is pleased to present Click on My Mouth: Language and Technology (March 17– May 22, 2026). Guest curated by Tanya Zimbardo, the exhibition features artworks made in the Bay Area by Anxious to Make (Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez); Ahna Girshick; Asma Kazmi, Jill Miller and Kathy Wang; Judy Malloy; Jenny Odell; Genevieve Quick; Abram Stern; and Christine Tamblyn.

“Click on my mouth” playfully intones a video image of Christine Tamblyn (1951–1998) as the virtual guide for the menu of her interactive work She Loves It, She Loves it Not: Women and Technology (1993; with Marjorie Franklin and Paul Tompkins). As an outgrowth of her cultural criticism, Tamblyn explored how the interactive CD-ROM format could allow her to augment her writing with found pictures and audio/video clips ranging from science fiction films, comics, computer magazines and books about robots. For this feminist, nonlinear essay, she subverted the use of Macromedia Director, associated with corporate training, to discuss the “historical exclusion of women from the technological realm. However, it also attempts to create a place for women within cyberspace by constructing a revisionist history.”

A newly reauthored version of She Loves It, She Loves It Not is the springboard for a group exhibition that explores the ways in which artists have worked with appropriation and archives associated with technology. Artists Asma Kazmi and Jill Miller with designer Kathy Wang have created with an intersectional, feminist lens, a web-based repository of handmade 3D modeled objects that span a wide range of identities, abilities, and affinities. Their Missing Objects Library (2023-ongoing) proposes an alternative to commercial, status quo storefronts that provide digital assets for game design and special effects. Genevieve Quick’s promotional format video for her Cel Bell (2023-ongoing) project describes a speculative global telecom that allows viewers to send voicemail messages to their ancestors or future generations.

A pioneer of electronic literature, Judy Malloy in the 1980s formed her own research and development companies to acquire vendor information like an insider of the Bay Area tech community. She collected information about genetic engineering research and development to make a series of reports and products – small experimental books that combined words and images and were distributed as free handouts or by mail, documented here in the OK Genetic Engineering Briefcase (1991). Decades later, Jenny Odell created Neo Surreal (2017), a suite of prints drawn from the imagery of 1980s personal computer advertisements from BYTE magazine, which Odell encountered during a residency at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Anxious to Make invites visitor participation through Bitcoin Futures (2018), a functional ATM that dispenses crypto prophecies like a fortune-telling machine. Visitors see their reflection in the mirror of Ahna Girshick’s Bias Reflector, II (2025) entangled with the machine-learned lexicon of visual patterns that dictate perception.

Finally, Abram Stern’s new video will surface their research and emulation process of working with Tamblyn’s digital artifacts, including related archival material from Stern’s mentor Margaret Morse. The exhibition offers students and the public the opportunity to learn about key contemporary works made locally by a range of artists, several of whom, like the late critic Tamblyn, have additionally contributed to the field as writers and educators. This group show will complement several exhibitions in San José this spring that highlight the intersection of art and technology.

She Loves It, She Loves It Not: Women and Technology is the latest case study in a collaboration between Rhonda Holberton, SJSU Associate Professor, Digital Media Arts, Vanessa Chang & Alexa Bonomo (Leonardo/ISAST), Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez (UC Irvine), and Abram Stern (UC Santa Cruz). Funded by the Knight Foundation and stewarded by SJSU CADRE Media Lab and Leonardo/ISAST, invited artists work with students to reauthor works using several novel methods being developed by the archiving team. Tamblyn’s reauthored work will be available as both an emulation and a web-based version archived on New Art City, a virtual exhibition toolkit originally developed by Don Hanson, an MFA candidate in the Digital Media Art program at SJSU, during the COVID Pandemic in 2020.

This Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery presentation is part of a series of exhibitions and events planned for the 2025-2026 academic year that mark the occasion of the 40th anniversary of SJSU’s CADRE (Computers in Art, Design, Research, and Education) Media Lab, the hub of Digital Media Art activity at San José State University where students, faculty, and visiting artists gather to explore the future of technology and art.

LOCATION: Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery, Art Building, San José State University

(Near 9th / San Carlos Streets)

EXHIBITION DATES: March 17– May 22, 2026

Curator Presentation and Opening Reception:

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Curator Presentation: 5-6 pm

Opening Reception: 6-7:30 pm

Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery, Art Building, San José State University

Free and open to the public

GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday 12 pm - 7 pm, Wednesday 10 am - 4pm, Thursday 10 am - 1pm

and by appointment (Monday - Friday).

FURTHER INFORMATION:  Alena Sauzade, Gallery Director, Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery, San José State University