How can we begin to analyse and reflect on the complexities of our contemporary society? INTERFACE represents a threshold, a shared boundary where we exchange with an interconnected, technological world.

How do we perceive this threshold? Ubiquitous images we engage with on a daily basis present an unstable reality. These images have a physical materiality, and when this physicality is manipulated, we are reminded that reality is distorted through the lens. The photographs of Guy Grabowsky highlight this through his transposition of analogue photography and its abstraction in darkroom processes.

Creating a product to boost efficiency and minimise time spent away from keyboard (AFK), Soylent’s meal replacement product has streamlined our food consumption so we can better spend our time contributing to global flows of exchange in a stereotypical Silicon Valley tech-based lifestyle. Jordan Halsall utilises this product to explore the simultaneously sinister and liberating potentials of ‘hacking the body’.

Videos submitted by the human workers of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk reveal the lives of those responsible for training artificial intelligence (AI) how to ‘think’. Through the recruitment of a geographically distributed workforce on ‘human cloud’ platforms such as Mechanical Turk, AI companies uphold the illusion of ‘autonomous intelligent machines’. Amalia Lindo’s films depict the real experiences of over 300 of these online workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, responding to her Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) by submitting a short video of personal significance from their mobile phone archive.

Both transparent and reflective, this presentation offers a window of our world, while also reflecting and therefore questioning our participation within a globalised, technological society.

Hayden Stuart, August 2021

~ Closed due to COVID lockdown ~

Press:
MEMO Review