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I, product

By Chris Kore
www.chriskore.com

“Buy my time and body will follow.”
- GPT-2

The phenomenon of the Internet, personal computing, digitization of money, communication and information lead to destabilization of physicality and create a new postman reality. Paradigmatic changes in conceptions of knowledge, society and economy force us to reconceptualize not only the system we live in but who we are as a group of entities, whose identities can fluctuate between physical bodies and virtual space. We can witness how human digital patterns are treated and redefined as mechanical engines when advanced technologies like CGI, ML algorithms and robotics are asked to imitate human look and functions. “Machines become humanized and humans are turned into machines.”

The nature of economy is shifting from the production of goods and services to such immaterial resources as knowledge, data and creativity. Nanotechnology, automation, biorobotics and engineering, will lightly become inevitable parts of technocapitalism and/or biocapitalism in the 21st century. These new sectors change the standards and create new advanced business models, that will automatically affect almost every aspect of human existence. The virtual world operates as a global borderless market and contributes to the expansion of transnational capitalism. Today, the most advanced and powerful technology along with the Big Data banks lies in the hands of powerful monopolistic corporations. And those who own the data and technology, they own users’ minds, bodies and the world.

 ‘I, product’ is a CGI video artwork that questions the autonomy of a human body from big corporations and their possible impact on shaping and regulating artificial aspects of our identity through new technologies. People became so attached to their devices, that algorithms, which are tracking and learning human online behavior know more about our unconscious drive and desires than we do ourselves. Political parties, advertisers and social media companies are developing powerful techniques to hypnotize people into forgetting themselves and slip into capitalistic coma. They are watching us. They are predicting our choices. They are selling us. What will be the notion of a human being and the function of a body in the context of technocapitalism?

The mixture of various virtual production and CGI techniques has been used in the creation of an artwork. Machine learning algorithms, such as GANs and GPT-2 were trained on custom datasets of online visual advertising and commercial slogans to generate the visuals and narrative for ‘I, product.’

A question for the author:

How does the theme ‘metamorphosis’ relate to you/your work?

” A multidisciplinary aspect of my practice brings a constant transformation, mutation and hybridisation of creative ideas and their further experimental execution. Therefore a theme ‘Metamorphosis’ stitched with a red thread through all my artworks. I believe that every new creation is a certain rebirth of the previous one but with new explorations, qualities and aspects.”

Chris Kore