• ANALIA SABAN
  • Analia Saban's work investigates the hidden systems that shape both art and contemporary life, bringing together traditional materials with the technologies that increasingly define our world. Through a variety of materials, she reveals the often invisible infrastructures behind digital culture. In this presentation of works, recurring motifs such as computer cooling fans and historic computer graphics cards reference the hardware that powers vast server farms, artificial intelligence, and global networks. These components - designed to regulate heat and sustain constant computation - become poetic symbols of the immense physical and environmental systems that underpin our increasingly virtual existence. By rendering these technological objects in handcrafted and historically significant materials, Saban collapses the boundaries between the analog and the digital, exposing the material realities behind contemporary technology while questioning the ways innovation, labor, and history continue to shape one another.
  • detail of nvidia laser cut work

    GeForce 8800 GTX, Nvidia, 2006, African Mahogany

    In GeForce 8800 GTX, Nvidia, 2006, African Mahogany, Saban uses a historic computer graphic card as the point of departure. Using a laser cutting machine, a thin sheet of African mahogany, was sculpted to emulate the pattern of the computer graphic card. The burned material reveals a wood grain pattern, drawing connections between concepts of energy consumption and the environmental concerns of our technologically dependent society.

  • detail of laser cut paper

    Cooling Rack (5 x 5)

    The cooling fan, a ubiquitous yet largely invisible component essential to the operation of data centers, invites viewers to consider the vast physical infrastructures that underpin our digital lives.  As artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and digital networks increasingly shape how we communicate, create, and assign value, Saban asks us to look beyond the screen and consider the tangible architectures that make this technological age possible.
  • marble fan

    Computer Fan

    At the center of this presentation is the computer cooling fan rendered in marble, adding a humorous layer, grand and elevated in its material presence, it is nonetheless an impotent object, stuck mid-spin. Meanwhile, its misspelled inscription ("rotaion"), replicated from an error on the original computer fan, functions as a lighthearted trace of globalized trade and miscommunication.

     
  • detail of motherboard

    Motherboard

    Encompassing the fundamental methods and concepts from Saban's practice, the Motherboard series consists of found motherboards - the principal component and central processing unit in any electronic device or computer - coated in a thick black ink. Responsible for communication and holding a vast amount of memory and information, traces of the circuit board appear through the ink, a pattern of encoded memories that in many ways, contain much of our lives.