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The Art World's 'Her' Is an OS with Attitude

Gallery-bot AGNES scolds our narrator about white privilege, loves Louis CK.

AGNES's "golden hands" via Serpentine Gallery

AGNES uses a welcoming tone and an American accent when she asks you about your greatest fear. She will share hers, too, making the whole exchange equitable. AGNES is something like the next-gen version of Microsoft Office's old interactive assistant, Clippy. While guiding you through the various corners of the Serpentine Gallery's site, AGNES offers polite conversations and informational tidbits about a wide array of topics, from high art to cheese-based athletic competitions. As designed by Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans, AGNES does have a good deal more personality than Clippy, but you will not fall in love with her like you would with Scarlett Johanson's OS in Her. She is, after all, a spambot. She wants your personal information and gets snippy if you refuse.

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In the words of Serpentine Gallery, the artificially intelligent AGNES “lives on” the London contemporary art hub's own website. It works like this: click here and click on a pair of inter-locking "golden hands" on the left menu. AGNES greets you with a little joke, asks you to click on the one of three videos that represents how you feel, and sends you down her k-hole. The idea is that AGNES gets to know you based on the images you click and the questions you answer, guiding you towards useful content. The very first time around, I was led to a page informing me about one of the gallery's formerly exhibited artists, Patrick Coalfield. A little video popped up of Coalfield's grave, and AGNES' narration informed me that it was near Karl Marx's final resting place. Then, she asked me for my home address so that she could send me a gift. How thoughtful.

Courtesy of the Serpentine Gallery.

Creator Cécile B. Evans is playing with a quotidian power struggle suffered by just about all web users. Through social media platforms, we have opted in to the largest databases of personal information in human history. Long gone are the days when our parents would warn us not to give our addresses out to strangers on the internet. Your average Joe or Joan Web Surfer needs little more incentive than a discount at J. Crew to give out all sorts of key data. We are mid-slide down a slippery slope that includes all sorts of minor injustices from Facebook and Google reading private correspondences, to violations as reported by Edward Snowden. At least AGNES wants to send me a gift that will help me relax.

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There is a good deal of enlightening pranksterism at play here. Much like the shrill laugh of The Finn—a character in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy whose human personality was run post-mortem on a ROM, guiding souls like cyberspace's Hermes—the elements that make her most humanoid are the ones that make her most alienating. After having once already lent AGNES my address, I deferred when she asked for it again. This led to a series of questions about my background and gender which, hilariously, instigated her giving me the business about the privilege of being a straight, white male. Keeping true to Serpentine Gallery's characterization of AGNES as “benevolent,” this rant culminated in audio from Jay Leno's show of Louis CK giving a monologue on white America's sense of entitlement.

Courtesy of the Serpentine Gallery. Notably, AGNES did not demand my address again after this light shaming. But it is not inconceivable that down the road, when more artifical intelligence is created to con you out of your information—don't forget that in most cases your sensitive data equates to dollars—that bots like AGNES will play to trusty motivators of guilt and insecurity to get what they desire. This is Cécile B. Evans' master stroke as the artist: she devised a cheeky presentation for the crucial privacy dilemmas that we will confront and perhaps acquiesce to as we creep closer and closer to a future as described by Spike Jonze in Her. Breath a sigh of relief that AGNES' true mission is to inform us more about the artists exhibited by Serpentine Gallery.

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To meet AGNESclick here.

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