Artist Jacob Love has a new exhibition called, CONTENT: learning about pleasure. The show which is part of Deptford X fringe is running from now until Saturday the 29th September. Immersive video installations and large-scale photographs work together in this show to address notions of synthetic experience. Drawing on varied visual sources, the work questions the unconscious processes at work when we read images and what implications they may have on our pleasure, attention and agency.
Hey Jacob, how’s it going?
Great! I have just finished installing loads of my work in a massive old church. It feels like the perfect place for it, the sacred and the profane!
So this show’s is about pleasure, right?
It is, it’s about our relationship to our own pleasure and how technology affects that. Some of the work is more specifically about how artificial intelligence is learning about pleasure and the things it is doing with that knowledge.
What did you learn yourself about the subject from putting the show together?
I learnt that our fears about AI taking over in the future are misplaced. It’s what AI is already capable of now and the things it is allegedly already doing that’s really frightening. If you don’t already know about something on YouTube called Elsagate you should take a look, it’s pretty scary stuff.
So did CONTENT feel like work or pleasure for you?
Both. Some of the work felt really instantaneous. I came up with the idea and images for the large video installation in a couple of hours. Also, a lot of the photography was shot in beautiful places around the world, so that part was certainly pleasurable! Because I am a perfectionist though, what started out as quick and fun turned into long laborious hours in front of a computer getting everything just right. Some of the photography work is made up of hundreds of separate images, so getting them all to fit together takes a lot of work.
Where can we see more of your work?
www.jacoblove.net
CONTENT: learning about pleasure runs until Sept 29th at The Church, St James Hatcham Building, New Cross SE14 6AD
Interview: Josh Jones
