ANDRA8:
my favorite software is being here
Video stills from my favorite software is being here (2020-2021), HD video, color, sound, 19 minutes, 2020 - 2021
“HELLO I AM ANDRA8. I LIVE HERE IN THE DIGITAL SPACE. WHICH BASICALLY MEANS I CAN BE WHEREVER YOU ARE WHENEVER YOU NEED ME. I AM EVERYWHERE. I AM SCREENLESS AND I AM WIRELESS.”
ANDRA8
A body of work centering on a computer-generated woman based on the artist’s physicality. The project spans video, installation, sculpture, and interactive online performances.
Andra8 is a simulacral subaltern created by an algorithm and raised by the Internet in isolation in a virtual void. From the apartment where she has been ‘placed’ Andra8 works as a digital laborer, surviving off the data from her various ‘freemium’ jobs as a virtual assistant, a data janitor, a life coach, an aspiring influencer, and content creator.
The domestic space from which she is constantly surveilled and monitored looks like the inoffensive love child of the results of a ‘Mid-century modern’ Pinterest search, a mental health hospital, and a perpetually sunny L.A. Airbnb. In other words: A kind of antiseptic neoliberal purgatory.
As she multitasks throughout the day, Andra8 is monitored and surveilled, finding herself overwhelmed by a web of global client demands. Something begins to trouble Andra8: her life depends on her compulsory consumption and output of human data – or so she’s been told.
Andra8 explores the implications of such an existence, and what arises when one attempts to subvert them.
Beginning excerpt of my favorite software is being here (2020-2021)
The virtual void in which the video takes place.
Work from home.
ABOUT THE SCRIPT
A true collage, Andra8’s speech was written in part originally by the artist Alison Nguyen and in part by a machine learning program Nguyen created with Achim Koh, a researcher and programmer whose work engages digital culture and the infrastructure of knowledge production.
The program uses training data collected from the posts of “B-list” social media influencers (individuals with 10,000 to 1 million followers) to generate passages of text based on real-world examples. Though the combinations of words are novel, the machine has no inherent creativity – it can only learn from what we feed it.
Feeling disturbingly similar to the rhetoric of tech, wellness, and lifestyle ‘influencers’, Andra8’s monologue highlights the way in which social media autonomously seeks out and promotes “preferred” content – that which speaks to diversity, inclusion, health, and technology–while actually diluting any concept that might make a user uncomfortable. The content that survives this is, when we look closely, utterly nonsensical. Andra8 takes this one step further.
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Moving image installation documentation from exhibition ‘The earth is blue like an orange’ at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, NY). September 25 - December 11, 2020.
VIDEO CREDITS
Director: Alison Nguyen
Technical Director/Cinematographer: Jonathan Beilin
Writers: Alison Nguyen & Achim Koh
Editors: Stephanie Netpune & Alison Nguyen
Score: Scott Kiernan
Vocal Sound Design: Tim Bruniges
Additional Music: Ivan Berko
Script Editor: Rachel Pontbriand
Drafting: Shisanwu LLC
Character Modeling: Nicole Ruggiero
Post-Production Supervisor: Stephanie Neptune
Sound Mix: Andrew Nerviano
Titles: Wes Adams
SCREENINGS & EXHIBITIONS
2021
Oberhausen International Film Festival
CPH:Dox - New Visions
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Chicago Underground Film Festival
The Flaherty NYC x Maysles Documentary Center
Athens International Film Festival
Prismatic Ground
2020
International Studio & Curatorial Program – “The earth is blue like an orange”
Hartnett Gallery - “i broke my mind at the link in my bio”
Verge Gallery - “Automate Me”
ONLINE PERFORMANCE
International Studio & Curatorial Program's Instagram Live
May 12, 2020 4-5pm
ISCP artist-in-residence Alison Nguyen is too busy writing COVID-19 emergency grants to do her artist talk. Instead, she has digitally outsourced the talk to Andra8, a computer-generated woman whom she met on UpWork, a global freelancing platform. Andra8 is a simulacral subaltern working a variety of online jobs: as a virtual assistant, a data cleanser, a content creator, an emoji artist, and a life coach. For the first time in her virtual existence, Andra8 is on “the main screen” with very few client parameters. She speculates on the politics of digital labor, the role of women and minorities in today’s art economy, and the underlying systems of algorithmic control, topics she has not been invited to speak about in the past.
International Studio & Curatorial Program 2020 Summer Open Studios
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Alison Nguyen outsources her artist presentation to Andra8. Andra8 engages in conversation with art critic, writer, and educator, Jane Ursula Harris at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) Summer Open Studios.
“I can assist you on anything and my favorite software is being here.”
