Will technology bring about demise of humanity? Artist says yes
The collection took five years to make, with ErraZuriz taking images of preexisting famous artworks.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - "The Beginning of the End" is Chilean born artist Sebastian ErraZuriz’s commentary on the impending demise of humanity due to technology.
"The exhibit is definitely pessimistic," he said. "And I don’t know if it’s 10 years or it’s 20. It doesn’t really matter. The fact is, automatization and artificial intelligence will take enormous numbers of jobs and will reduce them much quicker than people think. I mean all it takes is a 15% unemployment. It’s not that big. So to think that we’re not going to get there is being incredibly naive. There’s enormous amounts of different categories of industries that are about to have enormous setbacks due to loss of jobs."
His show features 3D printed sculptures made out of resin of tech moguls Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg immortalized into Greco-Roman statues.
A depiction of Jobs is the first of the sculptures, representing "The Prophet," reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker. With the iPhone, customers have a ready stream of information at their fingertips, but it also takes data that machine learning needs in order to be able to develop into artificial intelligence, said ErraZuriz.
The collection took five years to make, with ErraZuriz taking images of preexisting famous artworks and "sculpting" the tech magnates onto its base, in digital software.
"By moving the mouse pad, we’re moving digital frameworks so that we can sculpt in the same manner as you would be physically sculpting with a chisel," he said. "But here we’re doing the equivalent in software. And then finally when that result is finished, we can choose to either 3D print, or we could choose to generate an augmented reality version. In this case, the pieces are 3D printed in many different sections that then get bonded together into a single piece."
"The Beginning of the End" is on view at the Elizabeth Collective through May 24.
