Michael Candy
VAULT talks to nomadic artist Michael Candy about how technological curation and algorithms might destabilise authenticity.
Image credit: Michael Candy, CRYPTID, 2019, aluminum, glass, electronics, code. Photo: Tom Mesic. Courtesy the artist
As an artist who plays with artificial intelligence and robotics, Michael Candy worries about mankind’s loneliness at the mercy of the algorithm. Yet Candy embraces technology, installing 10 interactive spotlights ominously disguised as security cameras in an alleyway, while elsewhere building a lotus-shaped artificial insemination machine.
At 33 years old, Candy has grown up in modern surveillance societies – first in South Africa until the age of 11, then in Queensland after his family migrated to Australia. He is speaking via video conference now from Ljubljana in Slovenia, where he has just installed his AI-enabled network Persistence of Vision, which he calls a “playful choreography of technology, movement and light.” A version of this system of cameras, which are really spotlights, was previously installed in Melbourne’s Brien Lane for more than a year.
Candy wants people to think more about devices spying on us, in an era when we pay to be tracked by, say, health and fitness apps on our smart phones. Spookily, just after Persistence of Vision had been set up for Melbourne’s RISING festival in May 2021, the Covid-19 outbreak shut down the festival on its second day. So, the ‘cameras’, fitted with DeepStream vision software technology, mostly detected people jogging through Brien Lane on their state-mandated exercise breaks in the city with the world’s longest lockdown (262 days, to be precise).
With the installation set lower in Ljubljana than it was in Melbourne, Slovenians have had more negative responses to its intrusiveness than Australians, even ... Subscribe to read this article in full
