2/7/2022
Tommy Carman
Harry De Vries
Annabelle McEwen
Exhibition Text
The BLACK BOX is a metaphor for many technologies, but none more so than artificial intelligence– a form of technology so opaque sometimes even the engineers and programmers can’t understand how it works. Today, we ever-increasingly rely on AI, made frictionless and simple with touch-screens, voice-activation, algorithmic recommendations and facial recognition. Meanwhile, the knowledge of how these things actually work concentrates ever further into the hands of dubiously-funded corporations, masked behind proprietary licences and trade secrecy.
BLACK BOX cracks open that smooth perfection of techno-capitalist power, treating these ruptures as sites where potential new relations with technology could begin. The show is a group exploration of new aesthetics designed to untangle the untapped potentials of artificial intelligence from the web of surveillance capitalism and ever more intimate data extraction.