Digital print on vinyl, 2018, 2018
This drawing comes out of Nye Thompson’s ongoing project The Seeker, a networked machine entity that travels the world virtually and describes what it sees. The Seeker looks out at the world through security camera eyes and uses commercial image recognition technology to interpret its visions. Named for Ptah-Seker, the artist/technologist god of the Ancient Egyptians, who created the world by speaking the words to describe it, this project looks at how the act of describing the world might establish a whole new worldview for machines and humans alike.
The drawing was created using all the words that The Seeker has used to describe what it saw in the tens of thousands of locations it has ‘visited’. It represents an attempt by the artist to map out the topography of the system’s nascent conceptual landscape.
Nye Thompson is an artist turned software designer turned artist again. Born in 1966 she studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, before moving into software design with the emergence of web technologies.
She now creates data-generating artist software systems to explore the impact of new technology paradigms. She has exhibited around UK and Europe, including Tate Modern, The V&A, ZKM Karlsruhe and The Lowry. Her first solo show Backdoored.io became global clickbait and triggered a complaint by a major government. Her work has been featured on BBC, C4 News, CNN, the Guardian and Wired, and was guest presenter on BBC Radio 4’s programme ‘The Art of Now: Surveillance’. She was recently longlisted for the Lumen Prize 2018. Nye lives and works in London.
