Born and raised in Australia and now based in New York, Camila Galaz is a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores the social histories of technology, memory, and identity through media archives and the reinterpretation of cultural myths and touchstones.

Diskette//Rosette, Galaz's first solo exhibition in the United States, presents a series of new paintings, video, digital prints, and an interactive website examining how 1980s computer advertising used the symbol of the rose to humanize technology. As Galaz explains, "This exhibition continues my exploration of semiotics, digital intimacy, and media archaeology, reconstructing lost or overlooked tech histories to better understand our current era of increasingly seamless human-computer integration."

Galaz’s research for this exhibition focuses on IBM’s 1980s Personal Computer advertising campaign featuring Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp to show how the company transformed its image from a monolithic corporate entity into something domestic and accessible. With Chaplin’s “everyman” persona, consumers saw a familiar cultural icon navigating the modern industrial world: someone inventive, vulnerable, and human confronting the frustrations of a machine and successfully integrating it into his life.

Alongside Chaplin, the recurring image of a rose became central to IBM's visual language, thereby producing a distinctly gendered narrative. When personal computers were first entering the home, there was not yet a stable language for describing the relationship between humans and computers. For Galaz, the rose represents this emerging relationship. "There's this sense that the computer is an other—something you live with, something you rely on, something that does things for you," she explains. "You give a rose to somebody that you care about, or somebody who helps you, or somebody whose presence you value." At the same time, the rose also suggests the feminized labor that these computers were often replacing: the female figure absorbed into the machine.

Together, these elements softened the machine’s industrial presence and framed the personal computer as both rational tool and emotional companion. By reconsidering this moment of technological optimism from today's vantage point, Diskette//Rosette reveals how corporate advertising mobilized romance, gendered symbolism, and nostalgia to shape public trust in emerging technologies. Rigorously researched and formally experimental, the exhibition asks audiences to consider how emotional attachment to machines continues to be designed, marketed, and normalized today. 

Major support for Diskette//Rosette is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.