Brea Souders
Another Online Pervert

Exhibition Details

The artist and a chatbot engage in a real-time dialogue. What chance do a human and a machine have to learn from each other and create a shared story?

The female body. The size of hail. A favourite colour, blue. The desire to escape. At the two extremes of a sometimes surreal, sometimes surprisingly concrete conversation we find Brea Souders and an algorithm trained to simulate a human interlocutor. They meet in chat rooms and seem to be able to talk about - almost - anything. Juxtaposed with entries from Souders' diary spanning twenty years and photographs from her archive, the messages exchanged expand and take on a broader meaning, giving rise to a spontaneous flow of questions exploring the concepts of love and death, desire and disappointment.

In the space of their correspondence, the absurd and the poetic meet the material reality of the bot and its programmer. Its answers reveal connections to capitalism, help us glimpse the future of technology and the thin, slippery line between being and non-being in the third decade of the 21st century - a historical moment in which the fact of interacting with inanimate objects is becoming increasingly taken for granted.