Watching

The sensation of being watched has occupied the imaginations of iconic artists throughout the past century – George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Julia Scher, Banksy, Ai Weiwei – each who variously depict the faceless machines of their time: totalitarianism, imperialism, attentional oligarchies. With AI, the next panopticon takes a different shape. The faceless machine is now a machine with a face: smiling, articulate. Eager to please. Great question! But unlike its prior surveilling structures, AGI's total integration into home, job, and relationship elicits, for the first time, our own responsive monitoring of, and dialogue with, this machine. In ‘Watching' the pseudonymous artist Ripcache asks the question again for a new age – asking of Chat, of users, of us: Who is watching you? Who we're looking at, when we look at an LLM, is increasingly unclear – but its watching is ubiquitous and the evidence of it is abound in contemporary telemetric feedback. Telemetry is a method used in AI, astrophysics, and meteorology (among other applications), that compiles and analyzes data from remote sources, like satellites and servers, usually to monitor performance and ensure security. For this series, Ripcache interpreted remote telemetry data to create newly deconstructed, pixelated, black-and-white images of recursive watching: us seeing the surveillance footage of the many-eyed monster that is always watching back at us. As technological realities change, the motifs visible in Ripcache's work span generations of evolution in surveillance, growing from simple CCTV into the more amorphous, uncontrollable figureheads of AI and its jumble of internal systems. This system is most notably visualized as the Shoggoth: a shapeless, viscous entity recognizable by those working with AI as a blob-like creature with an abundance of eyes, like a modern devolution of Argus, the many-eyed watchman of Hera. Except now it has a yellow smiley-face perched on one of its tentacles: a sign of the growing unknowability behind the sanitized mask of infinite training that inevitably watches even itself.

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