“Distributed Empire” by Christopher Dodds, Justin Clemens, Adam Nash

Title:

Distributed Empire

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Exhibiting Artist(s):

Symposium:

ISEA2013: 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art
More artworks from ISEA2013:

Venue(s):

The Portals , Darwin and Sydney , Australia

Artist Statement:

Australian Centre of Virtual Art. Have we been sucked into ‘the machine?’ – and if so, did we have any choice? “In this age of global networked data, nearly everyone in the developed world has signed away their rights to privacy … to produce content for a handful of massive global data-capitalist corporations – who delete none of it, ever, presenting nothing but the right-now, erasing history and context and replacing them with an endless parade of banal distraction. Our experience is presented back to us in a networked digital simulation so comprehensively distracting that it actually becomes our experience, an endless now without context, pure representation, the perfect visual medium for advertising nothing but itself; promising self-empowerment, this perfect simulation delivers nothing but … a need to produce more content for itself.” Participants in the gallery and online are asked to consider their place and role within the global network of data capital, and whether resistance is even possible. Endlessly recombining the facial and vocal input of participants in a state-of-the-art real-time morphing composition of audiovisuals, Distributed Empire highlights the fragile state of the global ego in an era of massively online narcissistic consumerism