GUILLERMO BERT: TECHNO-EMPATHY

Starting March 29, 2026

Guest Curator: Patrick Frank, Ph.D.

Are high technology and empathy compatible? They seem to come from different sides of the human brain. Technology deals with science, facts and numbers, while empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings or perspective.

This exhibition shows the Chilean-born artist Guillermo Bert bringing the two together in novel and powerful ways. He uses three principal tools, all of them uncommon in most art production: QR codes, 3-D imaging, and laser engraving. In the Encoded Textiles series, weavings include QR codes that literally embed the story of the weaver into the work so that anyone with a smartphone can see and hear them. Through 3-D imaging, the artist creates life-size images of workers whom he has met, allowing us also to meet them face to face from a unique perspective. Media images today often show migrants and refugees, but Bert uses laser engraving to transfer them onto unusual surfaces, such as wood panels that mimic the look of some of the earliest “high technology:” the rectangular panels that encoded instructions for the first mechanical looms in the 19th century.

By using these new ways of creating and presenting socially conscious images, the artist refreshes our empathetic seeing.

Biography

Guillermo Bert (Chile, 1959)

Los Angeles–based multimedia artist Guillermo Bert, born in Santiago, Chile (1959), draws on his bicultural experience to explore urbanism, consumerism, and displacement. In the early 1990s, his bricolage transformed street posters from Los Angeles’s Skid Row into a form of urban archaeology. He later incorporated barcodes into laser-cut artworks and paintings. A pivotal 2010 trip to Chile led to collaborations with Mapuche weavers, integrating QR codes into textiles that, when scanned, reveal films featuring Indigenous stories. Expanding this project, Bert has also worked with Navajo, Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec weavers, producing 40 short films that connect viewers directly with Indigenous artists.

Beyond textiles, Bert’s films offer documentary glimpses into cultural narratives. Over 15 years he has recorded artists sharing their voices— often in Indigenous languages—creating a series of films spanning several countries. His multidisciplinary practice includes weaving, laser sculpture, photography, and film.

Bert’s mid-career retrospective, The Journey, was presented at the Nevada Museum of Art (2023) with an accompanying book and catalog. His work has recently been shown at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica and at LACMA in the exhibition Grounded.

His work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, LACMA, MOLAA, and the Rhode Island Museum of Art, and has been reviewed in Smithsonian Magazine, ArtNews, The Los Angeles Times, and LA Weekly.

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