January 17 – March 12, 2023
About:
Imagine walking out the door, and knowing every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted and logged. The Nemesis Machine, by British artist Stanza, is like Big Brother parsed through the lens of the Internet of things. It gives visitors a bird’s eye view of a cybernetic cityscape, where skyscrapers are constructed of silicon and circuit boards.
***For more information, please check out the artist’s website.
Related Events:
Spring Opening Reception
Thursday, January 26, 7 p.m.
Campus Gallery, Elaine Langone Center, Top Floor
The Samek Art Museum will launch the Spring 2023 semester with an opening reception in honor of our newest exhibition, The Nemesis Machine, by British artist Stanza. Come and enjoy light refreshments as you observe a bird’s eye view of a cybernetic cityscape, where skyscrapers are constructed of silicon and circuit boards.
Curatorial Text:
Nemesis Machine: From Metropolis to Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis
Imagine walking out the door, aware that your every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse, and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted, and logged. The Nemesis Machine, on the gallery floor, spatializes and maps out what is often abstracted, Big Data, operating through ubiquitous smart devices connected through the Internet of Things to create a new environment, a machine-city that we all inhabit.
The artwork invokes historic visions of both utopian optimism and dystopian dysfunction. It does not surrender entirely the idea of the future as a thing of wonder, of glittering lights and endless possibilities. But it also reveals the seductive power of those glittering lights to distract us from the more insidious functions of information technologies to monetize, politicize, exploit, and even control our most personal moments.
The artwork you see is a city of electronic components that reflect in real time what is happening elsewhere. In this sense the city and the artwork are one and the whole artwork functions as an algorithmically coded city observing its real world double. As well as the Internet of Things networks there are two sensor systems in the gallery and a separate area of the city tracking global pollution data with machine learning systems and another area tracing peoples wifi connections and phones. Our city is hungry for data and we are always feeding it, complicit with our Nemesis Machine.
Alan Cheville, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Bucknell University’s interview with Stanza, the artist of The Nemesis Machine, 2023
Video, 42 min.
The artist behind The Nemesis Machine and Velocity discusses the conception of his work, the reasoning behind the artworks, and the real-time data they are filtering.
Installation Images:
