
AO ROBERTS
The Yolk of Menial Light
aceartinc., 2015
The Yolk of Menial Light combines emotional, facial, and voice recognition technologies in an expansive reflection on neuroplasticity and trauma within surveillance capitalism. Eye Dialect, a teleprompter-like sculpture plays a script in washes of bright saturated colour. The script is a compilation of public apologies made by public figures like Tiger Woods and Reese Witherspoon and the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum, transcribed through dictation software. You Can _____Your Life (EMDR), uses sub-bass tones just at the level of perception (40-51 Hz), alternating from two subwoofer speakers across the room from one another, one submerged in an off-kilter stage.




What does it mean today to say that the face is threatened as a category? Perhaps it has become commonplace to bemoan the technologically vitiated abjection of the face, a biometrically secured maquette, newly phrenologized by techniques of long-distance surveillance and (gendered, racial) profiling. By this logic, the face may be defined as the trauma to which it is subjected; and for this reason we must emphasize a notion of faciality that emphasizes plasticity of expression rather than the fungibility of its momentary bearer.
- Cam Scott, "On Facing" exhibition response to the Yolk of Menial Light, Critical Distance. 2015
