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.
About the Author
Brea Souders (USA, 1978) works in photography, text, painting and collage, often blending digital phenomena with physical objects. She explores questions related to the human body, technology, autobiography and the natural world. Her work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions with Baxter St, Bruce Silverstein Gallery and the Abrons Arts Center in New York (US), the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie (FR), and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (CA). She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Baxter St. Workspace Residency, and a Fellowship with the National Arts Club. She is the author of the books Another Online Pervert (MACK, 2023) and Brea Souders: eleven years (Saint Lucy Books, 2021).
Where
Main Location - Spazio Bianco, DumBO
Via Camillo Casarini, 19 – Bologna
22-23-24-29-30 September and 1 October
11am - 9pm
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