EVERYDAY MACHINES #2
ALASKA Projects - Saturday 20th of May
Performances from 4 pm

ALASKA Projects in collaboration with Tom Smith presents Everyday Machines: A performance series bringing together artists exploring the tyranny and poetics of everyday machines. 

This edition of Everyday Machines coincides with the final day of Alaska Projects’ current exhibition: Samuel Hodge (downstairs) and Spence Messih (upstairs)

Kynan Tan
Jasmine Guffond + special guest Alex Gawronski
Akil Ahamat + Delilah Lyses-Sapo


Kynan Tan

Kynan Tan's work Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart explores the strange and shifting boundaries of computer and human perception. Focusing on the now obsolete CAPTCHA system used to identify whether a user is a human or bot, this work questions the importance and relevance of this certainty of humanity. 

Reframing the turing test as an aesthetic experience, the work places CAPTCHAS alongside generic, everyday digital tools of capture -- such as computer vision and speech-to-text -- that attempt to produce, read and deduce information from sensory inputs, drawing a diagram of loosely connected points on bots, humanoid robots, algorithmic authority and errors in automated logic.

Jasmine Guffond + special guest Alex Gawronski

“Before cookies, the Web was essentially private. After cookies, the Web becomes a space capable of extraordinary monitoring.” - Lawrence Lessig

The Web Never Forgets is a live performance that exposes the proliferation of ubiquitous online surveillance via the real time sonification of internet tracking cookies. Named after the computer science term “magic cookie” internet cookies are commonly used for data profiling by advertising, corporations and governments, by placing a small file on the user’s computer. The relative invisibility of digital surveillance, and the proliferation of consumer modes of online surveillance has both intensified and rendered ambivalent our relationships to being surveyed. Sound will provide a means for listening back to some of the imperceivable surveillance infrastructures that form our habitual online browsing.

Akil Ahamat + Delilah Lyses-Sapo

Under the Yolk (how to wrapp 5 eggs) - Gudetama is an egg based viral phenomenon; an embodiment of a market induced depressive malaise; a product of the Sanrio corporation (of Hello Kitty fame). In this new collaboration, the artists speak to and through this blobby avatar to re-imagine its ennui as an aesthetic of quiet and slow moving fallibility.