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.
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