X is the product of a set of carefully crafted combinations. Her character is based on visual information and borrowed content – the product of a collective artistic process, a joint work in which many people took part. She was developed from technological devices and artificial intelligence that are available online and a databases created by the artist herself. Her physiognomic characteristics are based on many human profiles, and her emotional world is based on the fears, desires and fantasies of friends who have been invited to contribute and teach her how to feel. Objects of profound sentimental value were collected from dozens of participants, scanned, and 3D-printed to form a repository of moments that make up X’s “artificial self.”
This figure is at once individual and unique, yet also completely generic – a replication of the human. Her existence highlights the availability of the information that is accumulated and stored on various platforms. Snippets of memory, emotions, and thoughts of all of us are distributed across dozens (perhaps hundreds) of databases, both offline and online, physical and virtual. Artificial Intelligence, code-based technologies, augmented reality, etc. are all portents of the ability of science to provide reliable alternatives to humanity, thereby undermining its validity and substance. Soul Seeker is an endless journey through the Museum’s exhibition spaces, in which X undergoes a process of humanization and learns, with the artist’s mediation, how to feel, love, or simply be. Her failures do not discourage her, revealing the tragic nature of her existence and the paradox inherent in her being.
The installation highlights the emergence of a parallel, ever-evolving world, in which the possibility of distinguishing between original and copy, between human and programmed, is diminishing day by day. At the cusp between human and its imitation or replacement, technological progress raises moral and ethical issues and points to an unknown future, in which humanity may be utterly superseded by a new world of replicas.
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