The Lucy Chinen-curated Never cargo terminal has recently discovered the trembling hand of state secrets resounding oversold bounce child – running at LA’s Smart Objects from July 12 to August 8 – lifted its oddball title from a Google-translated text generated from the “Android Swype predictive typing of an ant pathway” by participating artist Adriana Ramić.

Ramić’s featured drawings and ebook base themselves around something as obscure as the studies of insect movements by French civil engineer Victor Cornetz. They’re then retraced onto an Android Swype keyboard, which in turn predicts subsequent words based on gestures, crowd-sourced dictionaries, official documents, and Ramić’s personal habitual vocabulary.

Perhaps, because so much of modern language has become overworked to the point of banality in the context of contemporary art (‘post-internet‘ and ‘speculative realism‘ as examples), more and more modern exhibitions are turning to lyrical, vaudeville-like titles like Never cargo terminal… to differentiate themselves. Except this one, it seems, is no longer meant to elucidate or conglomerate, but rather to point to something more ephemeral – the playfulness, the absurdity, the rapture of art.

Joining Ramić in the group exhibition are artists Kareem Lotfy and his Navajo-style woven blanket, as well as researcher-designer Simone C. Niquille, whose video ‘Here Be Faces: FaceValue Part2’ (2014) functions as a short story exploring the notion of camouflage through facial copyright, encrypted identity and plastic surgery. **