Open stacks

‘open stacks’, a digital video installation by Yuri Pattison, is situated in the heart of one of the largest public libraries in Europe, The Mitchell Library. Pattison’s video is formed of a series of visual essays that unfold across multiple screens, exploring recent digital trends involving the rapid encircling and extraction of knowledge by networked technology, artificial intelligence and corporate power.

The image sequences of ‘open stacks’ are voiced by narrators who ruminate broadly on the consequences of a world steadily overwhelmed by the private, commercial interests of technocratic powers. These unidentified, yet somehow familiar, narrators postulate variously on creative homogenisation and increasing cultural degradation; the pillaging of our shared intellectual and artistic heritage; eroded workers’ rights and the status of labour economies; and the social and political consequences of the unchecked centralisation of knowledge.

The voices are in fact clones, generated by AI as an amalgam of accents and anachronistic speech patterns recognisable for their perceived intellectual authority. The words they ventriloquise, which are unreliable, meandering and sometimes bizarre, are also authored by AI tools, as with the images on screen. Slipping between sense and nonsense, the video essays, made up of poor copies and degraded data, expose the intellectual limits and biases of AI. They make clear AI’s necrotic tendency to endlessly resample scraps of past human endeavour – with nonetheless alluring effect.

 Pattison addresses the library space as a stage upon which linearity, time, and veracity are in a constant state of recirculation, reformation and collapse. Through critically confronting current discourse on AI technology, Pattison speculates on what appears to be history’s closing chapter of individual authorship, and the opening of a new one dominated by corporate intellectual property. ‘open stacks’ is accompanied by a piece of writing by writer and researcher Aurelia Guo. Guo’s text will be available from The Mitchell Library for the duration of the project and from The Common Guild website for a limited time.

 Yuri Pattison (b. Dublin, Ireland) connects and materialises the intangible spaces between the virtual and physical through video, sculpture, installation, and online platforms, exploring how new technologies have impacted our perception of time, space, and nature

Please note exhibition opening times:  Wed – Sat 12 – 4.30pm Thu 12 – 7pm