Isaac Soh Fujita Howell | Malign Influence on the Information Interchange | T293
June 10 – July 31, 2026
“Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.” — Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism
T293 is pleased to present ‘Malign Influence on the Information Interchange’, the second solo exhibition by Isaac Soh Fujita Howell with the gallery. Across six paintings, Howell composes a fragmented narrative tracing a genealogy of invented cybernetics. Figures merge with mechanical appendages, animals appear as subjects of surgical procedures, while unfamiliar engines hum in the background.
In making this body of work, Howell combined a collection of disparate found images, references to models of early computational technology, and invented speculative and futuristic forms. The Icarus-like figure in A Ballet of Steadiness originates from a still from Takashi Miike’s The Bird People of China. The profile of a goat wedged between a gridded enclosure and a labyrinth of machinic elements featured in Total Artificial Heart was developed from visual research into biotechnology experiments conducted at the University of Tokyo. In Signal Encoder, a figure emitting musical notes through an invented visual vocabulary, foregrounds a representation of the Jacquard loom.
The show’s narrative emerges through a process of associative image-hopping that mirrors the fragmented rhythms of our online attention, where focus collapses into an insistent logic of continuous scrolling, sampling and recontextualization. Howell harnesses this mode of engagement, accumulating images into an unstable narrative that reflects how meaning and memory have increasingly become by-products of a disinterested digital circulation. Even as technology becomes increasingly abstract and invisible, the paintings in ‘Malign Influence on the Information Interchange’ insist upon visualizing the mechanisms that increasingly control us, forcing us to reflect on twenty-first century alienation within evolving technological paradigms. Howell reflects on the paradox of increasingly sophisticated systems of transmission that nevertheless fail to guarantee clarity, intimacy, or presence, asking: at what point does technological modernization cease to serve human flourishing?
T293
Piazza Del Catalone 8
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