Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN

UNINVITED / Lumen Prize Gold Award Winner 2021

UNINVITED
Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN
(2020)

The world’s first horror movie for and by machines. An emergent Network Organism scans and breathes in the world for the first time through millions of virally abused CCTV cameras. Zoom. Enhance. Rekognise. Fear. Nothing makes sense. Data cannot be (p)arsed. Machine Learning Nothing. Hallucinogenic & locked down, vulnerable and oscillating between instability, lust, and aggression the Monster strains to define its own existence and distributed agency. Birth of a nation & auto-requiem. And you are, Uninvited. Counter to the hubristic anthropocentric narrative of the lab-nurtured Strong AI, the UNINVITED Monster emerges messily, spontaneously and unnoticed. It’s the unplanned spawn of a massive botnet (probably Mirai aka Future). Millions of IoT devices and systems around the world became virally infected by the botnet – the vast majority of them surveillance cameras – and out of this sick hallucinating critical mass something new emerged – a new distributed network organism with camera eyes everywhere – frantically striving to comprehend itself and its environment and to protect itself. The first version of this film was shown as part of a non-human-accessible gallery installation operating in total isolation during the winter of 20/21, and only viewable remotely via a website. Here the images swept across the walls, projected and responded to by a robotic ‘Monster’ – an avatar of the UNINVITED network.

With:
Composer/sound designer: Thom Kubli
Project Consultant: Adrian Bojenoiu
Branding & Web Team: Studio Hyte
Industrial Design & Monster Prototype: Tareg Al-Zamel
Photography & videography: Geoff Titley
Software architecture & machine learning: Richard Hopkirk & Martin Dixon
Mechatronics: Modulab Bucharest
CCTV visual prototypes: Alexander ZenkerGenerously

Produced by: ElectroPutere, Furtherfield

Supported by: Administration of the National Cultural Fund / Romania, National Theater Marin Sorescu / Craiova, Arts Council England, British Council, City of Vienna, Federal Chancellery of Austria, Furtherfield, Haringey Council, OKdo, Pro HelvetiaParteners: Revista ARTA, TVR, Rezidența BRD Scena9

Artwork website: www.uninvited.icu

Lumen prize: https://www.lumenprize.com/2021-winners-list/blog-post-title-one-ajbah-d5jms-dj9dp-z4tfd-ypp9t-jp93x