Thirteen color televisions. Portable. All from the mid-1990s. The three largest are lined end-to-end. Below them, eight smaller televisions, square, stacked in two columns of four. The stacked televisions suggest legs, while a second television draws our eye. The way it lists above a smaller one suggests a head and neck, fronted by a snout. At the rear, a handheld video camera curls off like a tail. At the top, two plastic air horns pointed upward. They imply the ears of an alerted animal. Nam June Paik is the artist who assembled these objects. Paik, a refugee from Korea, sniffed the trail we were on, even then. Watchdog II (1997) is his warning from the first Internet boom, when dotcom fumes wafted from every screen. Today, there is no arguing: People inhale under constant surveillance by technology that has been domesticated to watch us. Every moment of every day, the watchdog is at our heels, huffing our steps, our sweat. Such a good dog, right? Always looking out for us, or so we think, until we find out who the beast belongs to.
Thirteen color televisions. Portable. All from the mid-1990s. The three largest are lined end-to-end. Below them, eight smaller televisions, square, stacked in two columns of four. The stacked televisions suggest legs, while a second television draws our eye. The way it lists above a smaller one suggests a head and neck, fronted by a snout. At the rear, a handheld video camera curls off like a tail. At the top, two plastic air horns pointed upward. They imply the ears of an alerted animal. Nam June Paik is the artist who assembled these objects.
A blank text field. Oblong. With rounded corners. It is our refuge where we are free to say almost anything. Some treat it as a mail slot to dispatch their most personal thoughts. Others leap across it as a stage where they become a different person. Or a heaving jumble of Pessoa-like heteronyms, or what most people call trolls. Most of us troll without noticing, or we perform for clicks with a keen understanding that what we type (however non-factual) conjures data about what we are. An armchair existentialist might say the space mirrors the void inside us.
When I look for a place to start our discussion, I am reminded of a website from a few years ago. With the ominous address “thispersondoenotexist.com,” the site presents a single face filling the screen, with another face replacing it every time the user presses “ENTER.” No commentary or introductory text is offered, but a quick search returns cautionary news articles written when the site launched in 2019. The site is the work of a former NVIDIA engineer who created a custom A.I. that generates faces in real time from images scraped from social media platforms.
Digital Poetics