CKRBT A new art show by Nye Thompson

Machines are watching and interpreting images that are captured by algorithms operating other machines that are seemingly watching the world on our behalf.

The CKRBT Network is browsing the world. It watches and consumes images collected and fed to it by feeder machines.  Any thing, or person, entering the bots’ field of vision will be similarly analysed and categorised.

My new solo show CKRBT, which has just opened at Watermans gallery in London, explores the emergent machine gaze and the unseen power structures that underpin it.

CKRBT (pronounced see-ker-bot) is a new installation from my ongoing project The Seeker, something which I've been working on since 2017. The Seeker is a machinic entity that travels the world virtually looking through compromised surveillance cameras and using image recognition technology to describe what it sees. Named for Ptah-Seker, the artist/technologist god of the Ancient Egyptians, who created the world by speaking the words to describe it, this project looks at how this act of describing the world might establish a whole new worldview for machines and humans alike.

The Seeker is essentially a software stack with no material manifestation (other than the artworks I create from the data the Seeker generates). However, for this exhibition, I wanted to create actual physical avatars for The Seeker - objects that would operate in a gallery space real-time and that we could have some kind of embodied engagement with. I named these avatars CKRBTs. They are ‘bots’ with camera eyes and synthesised whispering voices. The CKRBTs watch, analyse and describe images generated by machines watching other machines. The installation sets up a self-contained system where machines are performers, audience, content providers and commentators.

My initial architectural plan for the CKRBTs

The bots are whispering their visions but you can also follow their activity on the logging screen - in the gallery and online.

The show also references the commercial cloud services used to run the bots. These monumental virtual edifices represent huge mainly hidden power structures, both in terms of how they actualize the world and the things they permit and don't permit. For instance, consider the power implicit in the act of describing a scene - choosing what objects and concepts to include or exclude, and what terminology to use in defining them.

Exhibition details

CKRBT is a free exhibition at Watermans Gallery, open to the public until 26 May 2019.

Watermans Gallery
40 High St, Brentford, London TW8 0DS
Open daily 10am-9pm

This exhibition is generously supported by Watermans and Arts Council England through the National Lottery Project Grants Scheme. I'd also like to thank RS Components for donating the hardware used to create the CKRBTs. 

About the artist

Nye Thompson is an artist who uses hardware/software systems to explore the relationship between the embodied and the virtual; and the volatile notion of what it is to be human in a world of evolving machines and meta-connectivity.
www.nyethompson.co.uk