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As part of a Digital Narrative module, our class went down and visited the most recent solo exhibition of New York based Artist, Tony Oursler in Edgware. The exhibition itself was the artist’s first in the UK for for a number of years and primarily revolves around his interest with the progression of identity techniques such as facial recognition technology.
In the exhibition, Oursler explores the possible ramifications of these tools increasing omnipresence in daily life, with the artist’s interest in the face as the main region of communication and identity, through features, movement and expression, being central to these works.
Each of the giant head bare the cage of marks associated with the different facial recognition systems, used by social media sites, law enforcement and now even on dating sites to get you a ‘perfect match’.
Oursler also made a point of positioning all the heads towards each other, to give the impression they were conversing.
With all these systems and all this data collection, we are all building and updating our own invisible electronic profiles almost daily.
As for the rest of the exhibition, Oursler filled the other rooms with Nine wall-hung, stainless steel panels containing traces of now further abstracted facial features. The latticeworks are used to recognize people, transposed here into etched silhouettes constituting the altered identities we are increasingly forced to assume by the strictures of modern life.