Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1239894
50 Stanza b. 1962 Stanza is an internationally recognised artist, exhibiting worldwide since 1984. His artworks have won twenty international art prizes and art awards including:- Vidalife 6.0 First Prize Spain, SeNef Grand Prix Korea, Videobrasil First Prize Brazil, Cynet Art First Prize Germany, Share First Prize Winner Italy, AOF Nova Competition Norway, Videoformes First Prize France, Nesta Dreamtime Award, an Arts Humanities Creative Fellowship, a Clarks bursary and a STARTS residency. The Reader is a large data visualisation sculpture of the artist Stanza wearing a hoodie, reading a book. The sculpture becomes a pulsing algorithmic heartbeat of living data. It is made with custom made digital software and hardware generating live events inside the sculpture. 'The Reader' references artificial intelligence and machine learning. Data is taking over our bodies and making its very own nervous system. The artwork uses open data and new technologies to question audiences' experiences of real- time events. We live in a world of infobesity, we are bombarded with information that is made malleable inside the artwork, it is shaped to give it meaning. The data body acts to reposition a future view of ourselves when embedded technologies will become part of our everyday lives. In the future there will be different varieties of man and machine all embedded with different levels of technology and therefore experience and knowledge. What will happen in the future when embedded chips in our bodies have access to the world's information data and knowledge? Who will have access to this world of data and how will you know who does? What happens when AI and machine intelligence becomes part of our human fabric? The artwork explores new ways of thinking about life, the emergence and interaction within public space. This interactive system is based on a 3D scan of the artist's body. Over one hundred micro display screens show data pulsing through the body. The artwork took over a year to design and make. The Reader, 2015 100 LED matrix displays and custom designed and manufactured PCB boards, custom made cables, custom made and modelled perspex body, base box and laser cut metal plate, PCB boards, power sockets and custom power box 225 x 84 x 80 cm Courtesy of the artist www.stanza.co.uk This work raises questions about the future possibility of embedding chips in our bodies, in order to access more information faster. If we see the body as an intelligence machine, how do we now talk about our souls? Is there something more mysterious and perhaps unknowable about what it means to be human?