Preview link: https://vimeo.com/468811648
Password: Andra8

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Alison Nguyen’s body of work centering on a computer-generated woman based on the artist’s physicality. The project spans video, installation, sculpture, and interactive online performances.

Andra8 is a simulacral subaltern created by an algorithm and raised by the Internet in isolation in a virtual void. From the apartment where she has been ‘placed’ Andra8 works as a digital laborer, surviving off the data from her various ‘freemium’ jobs as a virtual assistant, a data janitor, a life coach, an aspiring influencer, and content creator. The domestic space from which she is constantly surveilled looks like the inoffensive love child of the results of a ‘Midcentury modern’ Pinterest search, a mental health hospital, and a perpetually sunny L.A. Airbnb. In other words: A kind of antiseptic neoliberal purgatory.

As she multitasks throughout the day, Andra8 is monitored finding herself overwhelmed by a web of global client demands. Something begins to trouble Andra8: her life depends on her compulsory consumption and output of human data – or so she’s been told. Andra8 explores the implications of such an existence, and what arises when one attempts to subvert them.

Andra8’s speech was written in part originally by the artist Alison Nguyen and in part by a machine learning program Nguyen created with Achim Koh, a researcher and programmer whose work engages digital culture and the infrastructure of knowledge production. The program uses training data collected from the posts of “B-list” social media influencers (individuals with 10,000 to 1 million followers) to generate passages of text based on real world examples. Though the combinations of words are novel, the machine has no inherent creativity – it can only learn from what we feed it.

Employing techniques of experimental video, 3D animation, and machine learning, the work expands on dialogue taking place around technology, gendered digital labor, and the construction of self in the age of ambient intelligence, subtly revealing invisible structures of control