Description
This piece is from ‘Spirits, Ghosts and Mortals’. In this series of works, I am dealing with the issue of AI and surveillance in contemporary society. But I am doing so using archival materials I stumbled upon from MIT.
The Scottish photographer and explorer John Thomson was one of the first foreigners to travel widely in the far east. In his published work ‘Illustrations of China & Its People. Vols. 1–4’ published in 1874, he catalogues remarkable scenes and images of the people and places he visited during his travels.
I stumbled on these works via a random pinterest link, and was amazed to find the entire work scanned and available for public viewing.
By re-contextualising the images with the modern reality of invasive 360˚ 24h AI powered surveillance, I hope to interrogate the reality of modern citizens of China (where I lived for 3 years) using the ghosts of China’s past, a world completely unrecognisable from the Party-run behemoth that is modern China.
