Althea Rao: Commit to Memory, Know it Will Perish, showing at Gallery 4Culture in Pioneer Square through the first week of August, opens to human engagement like no other exhibition in Seattle today, or yesterday. The artist delivers an intelligent, multisensory and overall visionary experience that draws viewers in to interact with her meticulous installations. Designing each work to question methods of preserving knowledge and to propose alternatives to memory and modern data storage today, Althea Rao explores the validity, purpose and principles behind memory and knowledge storage.
Recounting a story of her variable naming, Rao offers a prelude to her creative mind. Her parents chose her original given name, Mengxi (梦溪), that combined with her family name make her Rao Mengxi (饶梦溪). When she entered a bilingual Chinese-English school in Beijing as a child, she became Nancy, a playful rhyming with Mengxi (pronounced mung-she). Later, she assumed the name Alexandra, after a character who plays a newcomer to American life and customs in the popular American English language TV series Family Album U.S.A. (1991) that she watched via video cassette and CD.
Through middle school, she committed to being “Miranda.” With the arrival of personal email addresses, she preferred to shed that name, and randomly scrolling through an electronic dictionary between the names Alexandra and Miranda, she discovered “Althea.” She chose this as her username. “Althea” bears mythological associations with healing and strength. It also includes the “th” sound, which many English language learners struggle to pronounce. While later studying in Japan, rather than subscribing to the common practice of the Japanese reading of the characters in her Chinese name, she opted for a classic Japanese name, Kanae, which carries the sense of dreaming and serves as an iteration of the first character in her given name, meng, meaning dream.
Today Rao herself by both her Chinese birth name and her adopted formal English name Althea M Rao on her website. By including “M” for “Mengxi,” she not only preserves a trace of her original, cultural name, but she is also claiming for herself the stylistic middle initial, used especially in American contexts, to convey professionalism, individuality or tradition. She also takes on evolving titles, calling herself a “cultural facilitator,” “storyteller at large,” “researcher working critically with data,” and more recently, a “multiform conceptual artist” which is broad enough to encompass the range of modes and materials she uses while still signaling the creativity of her work.
If only for sheer play, Rao’s name-switching allows for new personas as she enters new contexts. Different names also convey information about a person, even if the information is unreliable, misleading or temporary. This longtime practice of adjusting names and titles across shifting social, cultural, linguist and technological contexts presages her treatment of the instability and impermanence of information that is available to us in myriad forms and accessed in myriad ways. This compilation of Rao’s names, for instance, ultimately may only be documented in this article. If this content was to disappear, we would never know the multiple personas of Rao Mengxi; knowledge, once gone, suggests how information collection in the multitudes of forms may be faulty and ephemeral.
At the entrance to Rao’s show, I paused before art books that I assumed were placed there by the gallery curators for browsing. As I reached for a publication with a plain black cover, however, I discovered it was a library book, the title page revealing it was AIR, or Have Not Have (2004), the celebrated sci-fi novel by Geoff Ryman framed around human-centered exploration of technological disruption and the need to bridge cultural divides. The other publications included Ben Young’s Clouds: An Illustrated Taxonomy (2012), Rose Lowder’s Bouquets 11–20: Notebooks (2018) and the Asimov Press’ 2025 essay anthology encoded in DNA with a companion steel-encased, pill-sized capsule of its content. A ringed notebook covered in a handwoven textile houses notes and photocopies from an old book about twill techniques. What eclectic information could this be? Bingo! Rao exhibits her personal collection of knowledge. The notebook, for instance, was a treasured gift to Rao from Southeast Seattle Senior Center ladies who taught her how to weave twill. It exemplifies a form of analog storage that in its transfer to Rao at least offers the possibility of transmission of twill craft to another generation.
The gallery itself becomes an archive of Rao’s creation that is set within the ostensible “Department of Permanency and Perishability.” Rao provides an explanatory guide to the Department’s displays and plastic magnifiers are available to aid in remembering the information down to the cellular level of some of the specimens. No signage instructs how visitors are to experience the collection. If at first tentative, visitors rely on instinct as they pause to wonder, scrutinize, touch and try things out.
Rao’s parody of early science labs and museums exhibiting information, dead or frozen in time, extends to the artist’s displays of her alternative storage systems. Some of the specimens she has designed and hand-created are placed “under glass” in antique wood-paneled cases (that present like retro cocktail tables). Appearing in digitally rendered Courier-like font once designed for typewriters and resonating with both lab and museum formats, the labels list abbreviated facts about the specimens. Each one presents an alternate storage system emerging from a fusion of contemporary ideas: a package of fortune cookies, homemade by Rao, signifies the behavioral data cookies invented by Lou Montulli, who is attributed as “Author” on the specimen’s label.
With more troubling satire, high-resolution satellite images of massive Meta Data Centers around the world are exhibited in a triptych of archival grade giclée prints. Rao elaborates that she wrote code to retrieve and stitch the imaging together. The prints are affixed inconspicuously to a dark interior wall of the gallery, yet these images are the motherlode of Rao’s show: humans are leaving content, from our personal stories and memories to information and knowledge of our cultures, communities and civilizations to synthetic data centers. Not only may such systems prove to be inaccessible to us, but we are also relying on storage beyond our individual control. Most critically, such centers inhibit human connection to the non-human biomes in which we exist. In contrast to succinct text on other labels, this one elaborates on the impact of storage centers on surrounding habitats—water and energy consumption, environmental disruption, noise pollution, and when discontinued for bigger, better storage, they will leave permanent waste.
Rao’s reformulation of storage incorporates both organic substances like DNA or biomaterials such as bacterial cellulose to illustrate how visible processes, material results and sensory elements are also means of storing memory. A magnetic stirrer continually keeps a glass vat of pink liquid in motion, its stir bar emitting a regular bumping sound against the vat that is audible across the gallery space. A hanging textile in a diaphanous mix of silk and rayon reveals, in its visual detail, that it is another form of storage, visibly worn away in some areas. Its embedded information calls attention to itself when its flutters delicately in the evening air.
Rao’s incorporation of science and digitization into her work is less the product of a formal academic path as it’s about observation, collaboration and experimentation enabling her to explore her deep belief that humans exist in a multispecies world. By admitting other living beings into our human community, she illustrates that the connection with non-human organisms can enhance the health of our shared biome. She proposes that rather than the one-way human infiltration and control of organisms, we can learn from invisible-to-the eye organisms and systems, such as DNA, that work on and shape us too.
In practice, her concept is difficult to conceive of because it remains microscopic in scale. She’s hoping to transcend this perception of scale, however, to convey that non-human life exists in a range of scales where humans have no capacity to witness change. She wants to design things on a scale that can humans can understand. Moreover, she aims to embrace the scale of organisms other than humans, to position herself and indetectable organisms as parts of something much bigger.
Not surprisingly, Rao comes to this exhibition with a diversity of interdisciplinary study, spanning creative, technical, social and scientific cross-fertilization. She created her works for the 4Culture exhibition in a hybrid studio laboratory at the University of Buffalo as the most recent resident artist for the 10th anniversary year of Coalesce, the Department of Art’s Biological Art Center and Lab. Designed for hands-on creative encounters with the tools and technologies of the life sciences, the center gave her the means to work with DNA molecules. Her primary motivation was to create a book in book form with DNA that attached to certain bacteria unreadable to humans that could grow and develop into communities.
Back in Seattle, she is completing her PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. Her ongoing research and development occur, in part, within the program’s SoftLab that intersects work in craftsmanship, technology, and the body as an interface. She also works in the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL), where she has experimented with information technology and molecular biology. Her current lab work is supported by Seattle’s only community-based biology lab, SoundBio. In short, Rao is building her own creations within and across multiple systems impacting human existence that are not simply invisible but, moreover, unknown to most people. At the same time, the artist is engaged in human-centered connection and visible material creation through engagement with—like South Seattle Senior Center—the longstanding Seattle Weavers’ Guild and the Brooklyn Lace Guild in New York.
Even as Rao injects a playful sensibility in her work, giving her projects names of whimsy and the absurd, she is, in her own words, “painfully serious” too. However invisible to the eye or difficult to comprehend the implications for daily life that Rao’s work documents, she is posing logical questions, advancing consequential concepts and exposing material that are immediately relevant: How are law, science, culture and technology producing, packaging and preserving knowledge today? And how do the structures and mediations of such sectors impact both humans and the microscopic species that also support the biomes in which we exist? Above all, how do the operations of systems outside of ourselves affect our mutual collaboration as species in a more ideal world of give and take?
If Althea Rao could also call herself a “creative futurist,” “intricate harbinger” or “compassionate whistleblower.” Most optimistically, she is a model of how artists today can expand problem-solving to create healthier, more harmonious and mutually beneficial communities.
As I exited the gallery, Seattle’s DAIPANbutoh Collective dancers drifted toward Gallery 4Culture. They lingered at the gallery entrance, manifesting unconscious primal impulses through their bodies, while dissolving the boundaries between human and non-human behavior. In the moment of their silent convergence at Commit to Memory, Know it Will Perish, they aligned with Althea’s cry.
Althea Rao: Commit to Memory, Know it Will Perish runs through August 7th, 2025 at Gallery 4Culture, 101 Prefontaine Pl S, Pioneer Square, Seattle. Rao will give an Artist Talk on Saturday, July 19th, 2025, 1:00-2:00 pm. See Rao’s website for numerous examples of her multiform art and on Instagram through her handle cloudvill.
Rao is co-organizer of the “Technopoetics of the Cloud” panel as well as one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S): Reverberations, taking place in Seattle at the Sheraton Grand Hotel on September 3-6, 2025. Registration required.
