event

The online exhibition User Activated by artist Cheryl Sourkes consists of three interactive pieces: BRB (2010), Everybody’s Autobiography (2012), and Mistaken Identity (2014) plus the series of short videos Nervous_Devices (2021) posted to Instagram.

Cheryl Sourkes is an innovative artist living in Toronto while staying connected to communities in Montreal and Vancouver - places she previously called home. Her work investigates the visual dimension of new technology, especially social and cultural developments associated with the Internet. It foregrounds communication modalities in the virtual realm and brings these codes, epistemologies and conventions of representation into view. Cheryl Sourkes reads the current moment and consistently makes prescient work that anticipates future realities. Her still photographs and time-based installations have been seen nationally and internationally over many decades and are included in both public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery and Seattle Art Museum.

Cheryl Sourkes has had her eye and mind on technology for the last 20 years; how we use it and how we are used by it. She engages the very technology she observes and analyzes. Her interventions reveal something about the Internet and about how we use it; from webcam selfies to the server farms that warehouse them, from the bowed posture of cell phone users to the surveillance data they generate. Sourkes's work ponders current societal patterns and the back and forth effects of the digital/human interface.

The work in User Activated is based on online material mostly gathered from social networks. It reflects on the influence the Internet has on the individual and on the culture, on how notions of public and private are migrating vertiginously, and on how data is amassed and distributed without people understanding or consenting to what extent and to what end.

“Between 2000 and 2014 I documented webcams. During that time they upscaled from an outlier phenomenon to standard equipment. I documented webcams as their numbers increased, their refresh rates quickened and as impersonal weather, traffic and tourist type cams zoomed into ever more personal spaces.
While Internet participation is a requisite of contemporary life, at the same time government and commerce have adapted protocols to use the information gathered from its leaky back doors as a tracking device. Although time on the Internet divulges a person’s preoccupations, finances, movements, religious affiliations, political leanings and more, the convenience of the Internet makes resisting it a losing proposition.” Cheryl Sourkes

BRB (2010)
Installation
An interactive projected bookwork that shows people either asleep or else on their computers. The viewer turns the pages with a click activating images that are sometimes still and sometimes moving.

Everybody’s Autobiography (2013)
Installation
A twinkling projected interactive image grid with sequences grabbed from live-stream webcams. The top of the grid shows windows facing the outdoors. The bottom part shows windows on computer screens. In between are rooms arranged sequentially from the more public spaces in a house to the more private ones.

Mistaken Identity (2014)
Installation
This interactive piece shows 23 portraits rotating slowly in front of a data centre. When the viewer chooses a particular portrait it grows to fill the entire screen and plays out a series of supposedly similar images as proposed by Google Image Search. Each sequence is potentially a few minutes in duration. A red line moves down a small inset of the selected portrait reading its digital information aurally line by line providing a soundtrack for that sequence. Clicking on the image at any time causes the circling portraits to reappear over a different data centre.

Nervous_Devices (2021)
Instagram videos
Nervous_Devices are short anxious videos that mark time by standing in the same spot. They are captioned with hashtags - such as #controlnocontrol and #wereallinthistogether. I post them as I make them. Their nervous stasis reflects the Covid-19 lockdown experience.