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my beloved new face

Ian Margo

2024, digital video,
color, sound 16:9 4K,
06:00min
artwork  faciality LLMs new media interface
language cybernetics video abstraction economy


Addressing issues such as faciality or family construction, my beloved new face explores the relationship between body and home, person and mask, mask and language. The family nucleus is invaded and presented as a destabilizing and destabilized border territory. With references to Reza Negarestani and his idea of oil as a demonic entity, as well as the Deleuzian abstract machine, my beloved new face examines the territorial condition of identity and the performativity of intelligence.

my beloved new face /
burning_church ushers in a demonic scenario; the face arrives, a synthetic technology, a network-hole that possesses agency. The face of the father, the face of the son / a body that mutates after the invasion of the home-territory, recodes the economy //οἰκονομία//. my beloved new face / burning_church is a failed invasion, vastly spread over a viscous surface, corrupted by the narrative of history and its maps and its signs. It burns over the desert, the enlightened models crumble, the light comes now from [digital fire] in low quality. It turns back on itself, on a still-frame that documents a moment of collapse. The face is an artifact, an inanimate demon, a technical system of infiltration and performativity. The flesh that rots as it detaches; the face is a parasitic demon, our most prized technology.

In this project, artificial intelligence has been partially used throughout the entire production process, including text, sound, and 3D modeling, as well as digital fragments manually created from image files retrieved from the internet. The house in the video was modeled based on images of the destruction in Nait Hanun (North Gaza) on April 17, 2024.




related entries


Text Box: Eschatology of the Digital Visage
Algorithmic Flesh and Confessional
Aesthetics in the Work of Ian Margo

Giorgi Vachnadze


publication

(...) In this sense, its failure is generative. To fail to be computable is to refuse the enclosure of meaning. Margo’s work is, once again, not Turing-Computable, it’s Deleuze-Computable, that is to say; demonically machinic. To become unbaptized data is to remain in the domain of the Real. Like the Eucharist consumed without transubstantiation, the Wet Box leaves a pure residue, an aftertaste of what should have become body, and didn’t; it became flesh. The interface compounds the syntax error in stutters. The glitch is a processual breaking in execution and expectation. We expected sense. We were given endless remainder – lack...(more)