Drawing on her background in neuroscience and architecture, artist and UC San Diego Professor Dr. Pinar Yoldas (b. Denizli, Turkey) has built a practice of speculative design that imagines new products, appendages, and creatures in the service of a more compassionate culture. While Yoldas has shown extensively in Europe for nearly two decades, this show will be Yoldas’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

At ICA Central, Yoldas is producing several new projects, including photo bioreactor systems that transform algae into a biodegradable plastic alternative. In addition, she will debut CATGPT–a companion video to her 2016 work, The Kitty AI– that considers the relationship between AI and human creativity.

Yoldas will create an immersive experience that illuminates the connections between technology, creativity, and human desire in contemporary life. “If we ask ourselves what drives technological progress,” Yoldas explains, “we can see that it is as much our collective desires –wealth, longevity, beauty– as it is our collective needs, such as access to clean water, food, and shelter.” This exhibition invites us to consider how desire and emotion can combine with technology to create a more just and compassionate future.