affective induction spa
2017 / performance / collaborative work with hotmilks foundation: Adam Horowitz, Ani Liu, Xin Liu, Gershon Dublon, Nicole L'Huillier, Rebecca Kleinberger, Akito Von Troyer, and Sands Fish
Daily we become more measureable. Affective artificial intelligence helps us recognize emotions in ourselves and others. Video surveillance predicts the outcome of social interactions amongst us. Algorithms determine our friend groups, tell us who must be ostracized from society for our wellbeing, curate our information intake. Our hearts, our breath, nothings written in confidence to lovers, whispered across the screen, all quantified, documented, averaged, optimized. Machines write the poetry of our daily experience, we write machines, and yet we call art creation alchemical.
Art insists on this mystery in the face of measurement, feeds on it. Insists on leaving space for the daemon. It is the last bulwark for contemporary appreciation of the experience of not knowing, not controlling. A last bastion of ignorance excused as the sublime, fog forgiven for presence of a pedestal. Porcupines in the cold, we approach art desperate for its warm embrace, to encompass it, but are rebuffed, spikes in our sides hint at our shortcomings and its intangible transcendence.
This performance was commissioned by the Boston Museum of Fine Art