Tishan Hsu at Empty Gallery

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Videodrome's image of the man sinking into a television screen, along with its tagline "Long live the new flesh," were two perfect nuggets all but eclipsing the film itself - which I can barely remember. But recall the movie magic: image, pure ethereal surface, desire, that could was given reality, body, skin. The practical SFX perfected the transubstantiation. It tapped some unconscious cultural anxiety to give body to what was only presented to us abstractly, remotely, a televisual war that didn't actually take place. It's an old horror story- our dreams, manifested, bring actual nightmares. This is what we deep down know, why it's such successful plot trope, our desires are craven, you manifest the flesh on the screen and in reality you receive a really annoying supermodel. 

Tishan Hsu at Hammer Museum

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Obvious forebear and yet something else entirely; today's surrealist melting icons are kept distinctly separate from our biomorphic goop. Hsu's technology acquires a bulge; the inanimate congeal a Cronenbergian "new flesh." For years smartphones pressed to be seamless, this was the pinnacle of technologic interface, to lack the orifice that Hsu keeps pressing. A phone shouldn't look like it might drool, Instagram icons shouldn't look like a dank bathroom. Like Thek, or Lynch, the campiness is part of the grotesque. You take your phone away from face, a smear of your human grease marring its perfect black pool. We don't like our tech to feel like us. The more we interact with it, the more it becomes us, the most we want it not resemble us.