Technology has always been central to the work of artists—how they make and what they make—but its acceleration and entanglement with our daily lives today feels unprecedented. We are seduced, dependent and—often—alarmed.
Alarmed! But pause on the doom and gloom for a moment. Sophie Penkethman-Young’s internet-based artistic practice offers a healthy dose of absurdist humour and self-reflexivity. A self-described “digital hoarder”, “big reposter”, and “meme truffle pig”, Penkethman-Young dives into the cursed, chaotic and charming depths of the online world to create inquisitive artworks exploring technology, the internet and capitalism where humour is key: “I would feel bad if I was putting depressing work out into the world; the world is depressing enough.”
While the medium is her method, Penkethman-Young is cautious about fetishising the technology. Her ability to navigate its seductions and entrapments with clarity and wit is what drew curators Katie Dyer and Sarah Rose to her work in the current exhibition at Artspace, Amongst the Clouds. There, she appears alongside an array of provocative Australian and international artists: Liu Chuang, Nina Davies, Archana Hande, Lawrence Lek, and Liam Young.
The exhibition examines the ways in which digital realms are determinedly tied to the physical world.
There is an installation of thousands of analogue punch-cards referencing India’s transnational textile industry and the first analogue computer that was based on handloom programming patterns by Ada Lovelace (Hande), and a speculative film about bitcoin mining that reveals how cryptocurrency mining is partially powered by cheap hydroelectricity in remote China (Liu). Among these, Penkethman-Young presents a video essay titled Robot//Dog (2024), that unpacks artificial intelligence (AI) through the history of domesticated dogs, which she contemplates as a form of human-made intelligence: “Dogs are a product of human design, which is an interesting allegory for AI.” Her work circumnavigates the alarmist media and social media portrayals of the evils of AI through a lens that combines personal anecdotes of pet ownership with incisive research into the history of dog training and how it parallels the way we train machines through repetition, reinforcement and the increasing complexity of context-based scenarios. For example, dogs are trained as pets, as well as for use in police, military and assistance contexts. From guide dogs to police dogs, these companions are moulded to fit human desires.
The thesis is entertaining, humorous, and quietly unsettling: dogs, as we’ve made them, are a form of technology—projections of our own needs.
The curatorial concept of the cloud not only refers to the digital cloud but also asserts the dual immaterial and material presence of technology in everyday life. The titular robot dog captures that tension perfectly: cute yet freaky, user-friendly yet powered by cables, code, and deeply human ambitions. Penkethman-Young’s work is ultimately ambivalent on its view of AI: “It is hard to hold ambiguity, especially for things that are innocuous and all around us. But we can hold it for dogs.”
For Amongst the Clouds, Dyer specifically chose artists who explore the hidden costs, histories and contradictions behind technological development, in open ended, propositional ways. Penkethman-Young skilfully wields machine language across her practice with sophisticated aplomb to shape an unexpected and compelling body of work. In Progress: The Wait of Expectation (2022) features her exploration of the psychological suspense of loading bars.
In Boléro: A Tail of Tech Support (2021), she stages a gratingly cheerful chatbot encounter, and in Woolworths Orchid (2019), she probes the blurred lines between digital consumption and natural beauty. Her recent work 404 Psychic Error (2025) draws on her dual fluency in coding and divination—braiding together internet relics, astrology, and 3D printing to explore parallel systems of logic and belief.
The work of the meme truffle pig is, fittingly, a kaleidoscopic artform of foraging: unearthing memes, extracting the psychologies and machinations behind the perpetual doom-scroll, tearing oneself away from endlessly tantalising screens and reassembling it all into tangible, yet unmistakeably online artworks. Her pieces entertain, poke, and provoke—distilling the chaos of digital life into something delicious and selfaware. She roams the depths of digital realms freely and joyfully, presenting live improvisations and zany rhapsodies. After all, memes transcend language, as Penkethman-Young says: “It’s like jazz—so much of it is what you say and don’t say.”
Amongst the Clouds
Artspace
(Sydney/Gadigal Country)
On now—20 July
This article was originally published in the July/August 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
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