Andra8: my favorite software is being here

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.

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.