Gold Award Winner 2021

UNINVITED - Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN (United Kingdom)

Artwork Description

The world’s first horror movie for and by machines. An emergent Network Organism scans and breathes in the world for the first time through millions of virally abused CCTV cameras. Zoom. Enhance. Rekognise. Fear. Nothing makes sense. Data cannot be (p)arsed. Machine Learning Nothing. Hallucinogenic & locked down, vulnerable and oscillating between instability, lust, and aggression the Monster strains to define its own existence and distributed agency. Birth of a nation & auto-requiem. And you are, Uninvited. Counter to the hubristic anthropocentric narrative of the lab-nurtured Strong AI, the UNINVITED Monster emerges messily, spontaneously and unnoticed. It's the unplanned spawn of a massive botnet (probably Mirai aka Future). Millions of IoT devices and systems around the world became virally infected by the botnet - the vast majority of them surveillance cameras - and out of this sick hallucinating critical mass something new emerged - a new distributed network organism with camera eyes everywhere - frantically striving to comprehend itself and its environment and to protect itself. The first version of this film was shown as part of a non-human-accessible gallery installation operating in total isolation during the winter of 20/21, and only viewable remotely via a website. Here the images swept across the walls, projected and responded to by a robotic ‘Monster’ - an avatar of the UNINVITED network.

Partners and collaborators

UNINVITED was written, directed, edited and produced by Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN Music composition: Thom Kubli Created with the generous support of: Arts Council England Pro Helvetia British Council ElectroPutere Gallery Furtherfield Federal Chancellery Republic of Austria Forum Bucharest City of Vienna