directed by: Jason Isolini

featuring: Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell and Neale Willis

curated by: Off Site Project

Prophesying the titanic upheaval posed by the 4th Industrial Revolution, estimates of AI resultant unemployment vary, from Oxford’s much cited 47% of the US population, to the McKinsey Global Institute’s high-end estimation of 30% and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s baseline 8%. These figures avoid one salient factor, displacement is only one byproduct of the infusion of AI into the everyday, it masks a secondary consideration, that much of the remaining workforce becomes automated by their interaction with machine intelligence.

Set within a cyclical 360º narrative, The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole imagines the future work life balance brought about by AI technologies. Comprising a succession of artistic vignettes, The Terminal traverses an invisible supply-chain that transports products and workers in equal measure. Between warehouses and airport lounges, into offices and video games, caught between hallucinatory dérives and corporate rejuvenation treatments, momentarily returning to a cylindrical studio apartment before repeating an endless journey. An lucid account of cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han’s characterization of societies of self-optimisation, matching ourselves to the machine.

Composed by the artist Jason Isolini and curated by the online gallery Off Site Project, The Terminal is simultaneously a singular artwork and a group exhibition, an exploded version of Richard Hamilton’s iconic contribution to the Whitechapel Gallery’s seminal 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow and a 21st century gesamtkunstwerk. Playing on Hamilton’s themes of domesticity, leisure and consumerism, The Terminal adds more contemporary concerns of labour, AI and displacement, with contributions from Isolini’s contemporaries each dramatising certain hopes or antagonisms about the coming machine age.

Bob Bicknell-Knight decorates the corporate interior and battlefield with images of choreographed labourers navigating complex warehouse interiors, whereas Erin Mitchell posits a decompression chamber of light, highly saturated artificial sun calibrated to restore Amazon Pickers’ vitamine D. At the end of the supply chain, Ian Bruner creates amorphous sculptures from materials delivered by the retail giant, fusing product with packaging with varnish and smart-phoning scanning technology.

Drawing on her extensive experience with advanced humanoid AIs, Claire Jervert presents a 3D pointmap cloud of the large suburban home of Bina48, whilst conversely, Joshua Citarella’s densely packed visuals capture our spatial constraint, in increasingly compacted home work environments. Continuing the domestic strain, artist and creative technologist Neale Willis has trained AIs on Zoopla data sets, algorithmically proposing machine-eye interpretations of tomorrow’s bathroom.

Fragmented through the narrative loop, Jessica Evans' performance acts out a conversation between AIs as they advertise travel luggage, a commercial symbol of a system that conflates relaxation and freedom with consumption. Whilst, set on a Google Street View loop of their Facebook's California HQ, Kakia Konstantinaki’s undulating alien form beats like an artificial heart, a menacing manifestation of post-Deleuzian control, a theme developed by Angeline Meitzler in an environment of cookie notifications expressing our perpetual tracking within surveillance capitalism.

Finally, James Irwin’s auditorily disturbing condition layers a distorted and copy-pasted cockroach with harsh visuals, cross-breeding nature’s ultimate survivor with cyborg materiality, creating a desperate vision of the resilience required to negotiate this emergent landscape.

Presented for the first time with anonymous gallery as a sculptural projection, The Terminal: Human Shaped Hole questions the ramifications of the great job churn, asking how society will be restructured and what the psychological ramifications will be. Whilst AI technologies usher in increased productivity, they do so by decimating stable employment, a golden era is accompanied by deep dissatisfaction. How do we live alongside the machines that make us obsolete? What will it mean to engage with Alexa when she is a symbol of a better future you don’t fit into?

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Jason Isolini , Bob Bicknell-Knight , Ian Bruner , Joshua Citarella , Jessica Evans , James Irwin , Claire Jervert , Kakia Konstantinaki , Angeline Meitzler , Erin Mitchell , Neale Willis .