Emotions Go to Work
Exhibition Dates: 19 January – 24 March 2019
Firstsite, Colchester, is delighted to present an interactive installation by the New York-based artist Zoe Beloff. Entitled Emotions Go to Work, the exhibition examines how technology, through a variety of means — be it internet marketing or Artificial Intelligence — is increasingly able to read our feelings and transform them into valuable assets.
Using samples of early black and white cartoons, kinetic experiments, slick advertorials, film projection, watercolours and cardboard cut-outs, through to the ubiquitous emoji, the exhibition presents itself as a riot of human and non-human faces, each of which build a picture of the interwoven history between man and machine.
The exhibition considers a number of key questions, such as what balance must be struck between entrusting machines with the freedom to reshape us in their image and, as technology adopts more and more emotional characteristics itself, the effect this might have in transforming our desires.
Says Firstsite Director, Sally Shaw: ‘We are proud to be staging this deeply thought-provoking exhibition. Like the subject it explores, Zoe’s work appears benign, however after engaging with it we are left pondering complex and difficult questions about technology and its effect on human desires and identity.’
An illustrated book that accompanies the exhibition can be purchased from the Firstsite shop.
For more information visit: https://www.firstsite.uk/whats-on/zoe-beloff/
