“Dear Imaginary Audience,” exhibition catalogue with texts by Cory Arcangel, Clément Chéroux, Jodi Dean, Doris Gassert, Fabio Paris, Katrina Sluis, Nadine Wietlisbach, edited by Doris Gassert, Fabio Paris, Mona Schubert, designed by Studio Achermann, Zürich, available at Spector Books.
Half Cat is a new sculpture based on a LOLcat meme, currently installed at Fotomuseum Winterthur for our show “Dear Imaginary Audience,”.
Photos of Hannah Uncut currently installed at Fotomuseum Winterthur, for our show “Dear Imaginary Audience,”. A thick layer of memory foam covers the floor, keeping a temporary trace of the viewers’ presence.
Hannah Uncut (2021), a new commission by Fotomuseum Winterthur, is now part of their collection! For Hannah Uncut we posted an online open call offering to buy someone’s phone with all its contents. The resulting work is a 52 minutes slideshow comprising 1,276 images and videos set to a loop of Marc Bolan’s “Cosmic Dancer”.
Photos of new work The Bots currently installed at Fotomuseum Winterthur, for our ongoing show “Dear Imaginary Audience,”.
Somewhere — maybe, let’s say, in Berlin — people sit behind screens in drab office buildings and get shown everything from pictures of topless Jesus to snuff videos and decide what stays, what goes, and what gets “escalated.”
Day in and out, content moderators are forced to skim the worst social media has to offer and to process it “unemotionally.” They’re delivered updated rules and guidelines that often seem arbitrary or conflictual.
The bots are not bots and often, before long, they quit, burnt out staring at the worst and the most banal humanity has to offer. The Bots is a new piece that recounts interviews we conducted with the workers social media keeps hidden.
“E3: The Bots (Italian Market)”, featuring Ruby McCollister, now streaming on DIS and installed at Fotomuseum Winterthur for our exhibition Dear Imaginary Audience,
Jake Levy’s signature foundation-free look doesn’t hide the unpleasant truths of what’s going on behind social media corporations’ own conspiratorial and neocolonialist surfaces, but it can cover up the lifelong scars remaining from viewing violent content.
The Bots recounts interviews we conducted with the workers social media keeps hidden. To tell their stories we’ve borrowed the aesthetics of fake make up tutorials used on social media to bypass censorship.
Now streaming on DIS and installed at Fotomuseum Winterthur for our exhibition Dear Imaginary Audience,
We know everything we post to social media is screened and surveilled, reportable and deletable. There are “community guidelines,” “content restrictions.” Which community? Whose restrictions? It must be some algorithm, right?
The bots are not bots, they are human beings in offices applying rules handed down from outside, perhaps from some other office in California, onto content they must view — your vacation photos, your aunt’s Minions meme, beheadings, your uncle’s pornography, your neighbor’s glorifications of Hitler, your friend trying to make a living selling herbal teas, your local MP’s anti-immigrant diatribe.
We’ve embarked on a new video project along with writer Adrian Chen to talk to the non-bots. The Bots recounts interviews we conducted with the workers social media keeps hidden. To tell their stories we’ve borrowed the aesthetics of fake make up tutorials used on social media to bypass censorship.
E1: The Bots (Greek Market)
Featuring Bobbi Salvör Menuez
Now streaming on DIS and installed at Fotomuseum Winterthur for our exhibition Dear Imaginary Audience,
In conversation with Emanuela Mazzonis, co-curator with Francesco Bonami of the amazing show “Me, Family“, at MUDAM. We talked about a few works dealing with oversharing, vulnerability and the darknet. And cats. Half Cats to be precise.
