Artificially Intelligent display ©Victoria and Albert Museum.
Artificially Intelligent display ©Victoria and Albert Museum.
Artificial intelligences, Machine performances, Bespoke Software Architecture, Prints & drawings, Landscape & mapping
The Seeker was an AI-based software system, a demiurge-like entity, existing within the infrastructure of the Internet. It watched the world through millions of security cameras, analysing and naming the things it saw.
This project evolved out of Thompson's 2016 domestic surveillance work Backdoored, and contemplated the growing ability of machines to describe the world and how this might establish a whole new worldview for machines and humans alike.
A re-imagining of Ptah-Seker, the artist/technologist god of Ancient Egypt who created the world by speaking the words to describe it, The Seeker explores the growing ability of machines to analyse and classify their visual input and so define the world anew.
During its active life The Seeker described tens of thousands of its visions: objects and concepts it identified through its CCTV eyes. The colossal drawing “Words That Remake The World” is a topographical mapping of the objects and concepts that The Seeker identified: a point-in-time exploration of the development of machine vision, and an emerging machinic conceptual landscape.
'Words that Remake The World (2025 Versions)'
Two blackboxed rescaled reworkings of the original drawing.
‘Words That Remake The World «The Seeker»’ was originally commissioned for the V&A Museum and forms part of their national collection. It also features in 'Digital Art: 1960s to Now' edited by the V&A and published by Thames & Hudson.