Text by CLOT Magazine
Created by Alice Hoffmann-Fuller with pieces by the anonymous art collective Anti.Gang (featuring A.n0nE + i.no0NE) and Ruaridh Law as contributing sound artist, Auto.Corp is a show based around a fantasy future big corporation, created to relieve humans of the tiresome burden of choice and decisions. It is a human-curated mimeograph of AI in its infancy, designed to expose how humans overlook the fact that everything the computer spits out at them is based on the prompts humans input.
Consisting of three worlds —Auto-Culturo-Quota, Auto-Boutique and A[i]utopia— Auto.corp questions the use of the morpheme “Auto” within contemporary life and uses it as a vehicle to explore our relationship with daily voluntary and involuntary actions and their effects on us, our evolution and our society, we read in Hoffmann-Fuller statement.
Auto-Culturo-Quota is a cultural box-ticking exercise. It is a conveyor belt of artworks set within a future gallery that, once experienced, fulfils a weekly quota of cultural achievement. It is designed to leave the viewer without control over the experience ~ it is an artwork delivery system, leaving the viewer unable to leave the conveyor belt until the experience is complete. By the end, the prize for staying on track is an uptick on your records and the ability to go “off-grid”, “out of bounds” into the outside world, an area that is actually forbidden and is a dystopian dumping ground of out of date and abandoned artworks.
Auto-Boutique is a parody of commercial lifestyle platforms. Alluding to choice, it presents possible identity options. Displaying various potential avatar features in the guise of a digital gallery. Which personal aesthetics would you choose, and would your options actually be available at the checkout? Hofmann-Fuller asks.
And finally, A[i]utopia envisions utopian ideals through the lens of the imagined infant-AI. It offers an artificially generative, false-data-driven idea of Arcadia in bite-size utopia chunks ~ drive-by utilitarianism in a disposable take-out pack. Containing a tripartite of microcosms, the trinity of NATURE, DEATH/AFTERLIFE and SCIENCE are explored within AI’s self-limited interpretation of potential perfect harmony….
Auto.Corp runs in the New Art City space.
