Dear Alexa is an exhibition that revisits the way a reality reconfigured through information reaches us today, at a moment when the active human process of seeking information is being automated by artificial intelligence. Just as the editorial structure of a newspaper can determine the relative importance of events that occur over the course of a day, and user-friendly search engine algorithms can reorder the priority of information exposure, the process of searching for and collecting information always presupposes constraints structured by information interfaces. As such, the network of these information interfaces has long functioned as a key condition mediating the pathways of perception whenever we attempt to access reality through information. From newspapers and radio to domestic television and personal computers, from PC communications and wireless internet to smartphones and social media, the constraints generated by such information interfaces become increasingly abstract as technology continues to advance and permeate our daily lives.
Through the practices of contemporary artists who have responded to changes in the technological media environment, this exhibition asks how we ourselves might actively find our way through the maze that lies between information and reality. Spanning more than fifty years of shifting information interfaces, from the 1980s to the 2020s, the works of these eight contemporary artists critically examine the structure of our information-driven reality by appropriating the constraints produced by information interfaces as conditions of artistic creation. They construct non-linear maps by hyperlinking seemingly unrelated pieces of information, reinterpret historical monuments as information interfaces, and push further the doubts and perplexities encountered in the process of gathering materials. At times, the information embedded within these practices can serve as an index that prefigures changes in the times; at others, they actually form new historical contexts that exceed the artists’ intentions.
The exhibition is divided into Gallery 1 and Gallery 2, titled “Sent” and “Inbox,” respectively. Just as the “Sent” folder of an email interface is a space where information previously sent can be revisited, Gallery 1 presents works that wind their way through information we have already experienced, prompting a reconsideration of the very conditions through which reality is perceived. By contrast, the “Inbox” is a space into which new information continually flows, accreting over earlier information. Accordingly, Gallery 2 introduces works that collect fragments of a given era and reconfigure them in the form of an index, while also extracting the collected information as historical material and reinterpreting it as an alternative archive. In this way, Dear Alexa invites viewers to investigate the contemporary reality restructured through information for themselves.
The “Alexa” in the exhibition title evokes the ancient Library of Alexandria, which sought to gather all human knowledge and information in one place. At the same time, this name is also used for a conversational AI platform operated by one of the world’s largest cloud companies, which began as an online bookstore. Recent news that an AI company purchased millions of secondhand books from libraries and used them for AI training offers a telling glimpse into a reality in which the human process of searching for information is being compressed into the simple act of entering a question. In an age when the process of understanding reality through information is being simplified into exchanges with AI, Dear Alexa proposes that we become active seekers of information. It is also an act of reflecting on the significance of the art archive itself, with its mission of preserving records and building a foundation for research.
