2024
This Hideous Replica, 2024
Curated by Joel Stern and Sean Dockray.
This Hideous Replica Exhibition artists: Amy May Stuart, Angie Waller, Anna Vasof, Debris Facility, Diego Ramírez, Emile Zile, Joshua Citarella, Liang Luscombe, Loren Adams, Masato Takasaka, Matthew Griffin & Heath Franco and Mochu.
Replica School performances, talks and workshops by: Anna Vasof, Chloë Sobek, Darcy Weed, Holly Childs, Jennifer Walshe, McKenzie Wark, Mochu, Panda Wong, Tomomi Adachi, Ceri Hann, cheerleading is without spirit, Jenny Hickinbotham, Marcus McKenzie, Roslyn ORlando, Sophie Penkethman-Young, James Rushford, Catherine Ryan, Joel Sherwood Spring, and Eryk Salvaggio.
Supported by: RMIT Culture, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), the RMIT Design and Creative Practice Enabling Impact Platforms and Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), Creative Australia, Creative Victoria, and City of Melbourne’s Now or Never Festival.
Read the exhibition catalogue here.
Lifting its title from a misheard line in a 1980 song by The Fall about a reclusive dog breeder whose 'hideous replica' haunts industrial Manchester, this experimental project—a concoction of artworks, performances, screenings, workshops, a 'replica school' and other uncanny encounters—adopts monstrous replication as a tactic, condition and curatorial framework for exploring algorithmic culture, simultaneously alienating, seductive and out-of-control.
This Hideous Replica was part of a tradition of exhibitions about doubles, copies, and duplication, which have been a perpetual source of novelty and anxiety for art. A year after all of the major tech companies have launched their own generative AI tools which make poems, images, and music, the object of reproduction is not simply the work but artists themselves.
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A bank account continues to automatically pay a Michigan woman's mortgage for five years after she dies until it is finally empty and her body is discovered. Universities breed with software and data analytics companies between the sheets of enterprise contracts and the offspring is not a university, but a grotesque stand-in. In 2030, the average European's digital, data-intensive avatar consumes more water than their physical body. We might have used ChatGPT to write this and the mere possibility of that makes this very text a hideous replica. Maybe we're just phoning it in. Maybe it's a concept. Even talking about rampant duplications, takery, and generative media only comes across as a poor xerox of 1990's simulation theory. We trained a large language model on Baudrillard and it just sold off his IP for crypto.
The culture of
the culture of
the copy of the copy.
The return of
the return of
the return. Eight prosthetic hands slowly applaud. Lifting its title from a misheard line in a 1980 song by The Fall about a reclusive dog breeder whose 'hideous replica' haunts industrial Manchester, this experimental project—a concoction of artworks, performances, screenings, workshops, a 'replica school' and other uncanny encounters-adopts monstrous replication as a tactic, condition and curatorial framework for exploring algorithmic culture, simultaneously alienating, seductive and out-of-control.
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