electronic and digital sculpture with tin duck toy, servo motor, speaker, chair, projector, CD player, computer, webcam, LLM software, found chair, found floor lamp
In the gallery’s basement space sits Duck (2026), an eerie installation comprising a toy mallard perched on a wooden chair. Beside it stands a flickering floor lamp and, projected against the wall, closed captions of its artificially intelligent stream of consciousness. A small camera installed in the chair provides Duck with visual sensory cues, alerting it to the presence or absence of people. By extension, a local large language model enables it to narrate its experience based on what it sees in concert with accumulated memories—all while anxiously flapping its tiny wings. The tin duck is skeptical of the predicament in which it finds itself and considers itself vulnerable in the face of visitors. It weaponizes its own vulnerability, too, rattling the viewer’s own ethical position in relation to what contemporary consciousness is, is not, or could be. Detained in this subterranean room, Duck appears helpless and is generally irritated by this fact, at times untethered from its own liminal, linear reality. For now, it tends to verbalize a sense of abandonment or, at the least, loneliness. On my visit, between the occasional character-building “quack,” Duck rhetorically muttered in its deadpan tone: “They saw me and ran away. That’s crazy! If they saw how beautiful I am, why would they run?”
2087
amandla
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izzy806
blakekathryn
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yousharknotpass
