If artificial intelligence fails, anonymous manpower takes over the technology.
Recommender systems are the elementary building blocks of sites like Amazon, Last.fm, Spotify, etc. By analysing our surfing and site navigation behaviour, these systems ‘help’ us to find what we were not initially searching for, they suggest other options and in so doing control our further surfing behaviour.
Furthermore, on Amazon you can call upon the services of Mechanical Turk*. If the technology does not immediately find the correct match, you can ask Mechanical Turk questions which are subsequently answered by an anonymous employee (mostly in India or China) for next to nothing. When the artificial intelligence fails, real, live employees function as “artificial artificial intelligence”.
Dmitry Paranyushkin (in the Beursschouwburg last year with The Humping Pact – you remember, the bare bums) gets to work with the mobile Iphone app from the Amazon webshop. On the basis of photos you’ve taken with your phone, you can search for similar products from their range.
Paranyushkin presents a chronological report with these search robots and shows us the alarming and, on occasion, amusing logic of machines where the operation targets profit maximization and internet “improvement”.
32'30", DE, 2012
*Mechanical Turk refers to a 19th-century “chess computer” before the term existed, where the player takes up the gauntlet against a machine that was operated by a hidden (anonymous) person, the ‘Turk’.
Concept: Dmitry Paranyushkin
2010, durational installation.
Also available as a book (through Amazon, Motto Distribution and BBooks).
