SUSAN O'DOHERTY | Standing Watch

“The sculptures are about relationships - human and technological and how these interconnections occupy the same space.

We’re being watched, surveilled.  All or our data is collected and communicated back to us. Addiction to our devices and social media has wiped out our sense of personal privacy.  Where you live, who you love, your relationships, your sexuality, where you work, what you eat, what you purchase, what you watch, what you wear, where you travel, what you listen to, whether you’re happy, whether your sad, your health, your religion, your politics, your finances: they know more about us than we know about ourselves.  We create technology and computer intelligence that can compose music, write poems, essays, prose, mimic voices, create realistic images – every bit of data that humans feed AI is catapulted back to us as cognitive bias and yet we don’t trust ourselves to not turn into passive receptors.  With the acceleration of AI trajectories are we and our emotions rendered irrelevant, subservient or redundant?   Have humans created a projection of ourselves that we can’t control?

What is real?  We are constantly seeking purpose and meaning but life is messy and we tend to catastrophise.  There is an existential dilemma in being human, trying to think our way through problems whereas the machines are mathematically programmed to leap to the optimal best solutions without having to think, understand or feel lonely.”