Image courtesy of the artist
From May 21-23, 2026 New City Arts presents a solo project by Holly Zhou.
This mixed-media installation choreographs a conversation between viewers, imagining an ethical, community-based technological system through a programmed typewriter-zine interface.
Holly Zhou (they/them) is a writer and mixed-media artist from the California desert, the unceded territory of the Cahuilla and Mojave peoples. Working across video, electronics, sound, software, bookbinding, and collage, Holly’s projects curate experiences mediated by play and a poetics of liberation. As a product of diaspora influenced by Sinofuturism, Holly aims to blur the borders between water and land, the digital and the tactile, and the artist and their audience, forming distributed communities of imagination and care around their installations.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
Opening Reception
May 21 from 5-7:30PM; Artist talk at 6PM. Free and open to the public. All ages welcome. Exhibition opening sponsored by William Taylor and the Taylor Group of Truist Investment Services.
Gallery Hours | May 21-23, 2026
Thursday: 10AM-7:30PM
Friday-Saturday: 10AM-5PM
Exhibition Statement (courtesy of the artist)
In a world shifting toward an existence that remains increasingly lodged within the human-machine threshold, Memory Maps combines art, poetry, software engineering, and electrical engineering to examine the ethics of human-machine interactions and to interrogate what it means to be human. As a response to the explosion in usage of large language models, particularly in the way they flatten and output data from artists without proper accreditation, this installation is an imagination of what an ethical, community-based technological system might look like independent of using artificial intelligence.
The system invites the visitor to participate as an interlocutor, crediting them and choreographing a continual conversation between the past and the future. Through an electronic typewriter rewired to an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi, the installation facilitates a question-and-answer exchange with the visitor. The visitor re-imagines themselves, where they have been, and where they will be, closing the conversation by contributing questions for future participants. At the conversation’s close, the visitor receives an automatically formatted and printed zine of their dialogue. With their consent, the original typewriter copy will become part of a larger, growing guestbook. Visitor responses are manually collaged into risograph-printed posters displayed around the exhibit. There is no way for the viewer to passively give the machine data, and there is no way for the machine to use the data in a way that the viewer does not know about or consent to. The installation is enclosed in a standalone unit made of plywood, acrylic, and dichroic film. The installation will always be ongoing and will retain the memories of those who have wandered through.
Located at 114 3rd St. NE on Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall, New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery supports artists who live in the Charlottesville area. Welcome Gallery exhibitions and programs are made possible by generous sponsors, donors, and grants. Interested in sponsoring an exhibition? Connect with us!