ripcache

The sensation of being watched has preoccupied artists from George Orwell and Julia Scher to Banksy and Ai Weiwei, each of whom variously depict the faceless machines of their time: totalitarianism, imperialism, and the contemporary attentional oligarchies. With AI, the next panopticon takes a different shape. The faceless machine is now a machine with a face: smiling, articulate, eager to please. In WATCHING, the pseudonymous artist ripcache asks the question again for a new age – of Chat, of users, of us: Who is watching you?

Who we’re looking at when we look at an LLM is increasingly unclear, but its reciprocal watching is now evident in contemporary telemetric feedback. Telemetry is a method used in AI, astrophysics, and meteorology (among other applications) to compile data from remote sources like satellites and servers, usually to monitor performance and ensure security. For WATCHING, ripcache interprets visual telemetry into newly deconstructed, pixelated, black-and-white images of recursive watching: us seeing the surveillance footage of the many-eyed monster that is always watching back. As technological realities evolve, the motifs in ripcache’s work shift from basic CCTV to the amorphous, uncontrollable figureheads of AI and its jumble of internal systems. This system is notably visualized as the Shoggoth: a shapeless, viscous entity recognizable by those working in AI as a creature with an abundance of eyes, like a modern evolution of Argus. Now, though, the Shoggoth has a smiley-face perched on one of its tentacles, a sign of the growing unknowability behind AI’s sanitized mask of infinite training.

As AI continues to rapidly cycle through its own outputs, the resulting simulations fall further away from reality, collapsing into themselves in a phenomenon known as ‘catastrophic forgetting.’ ripcache’s iconography rematerializes the phenomena of this recursive watching, filled with the overload and obfuscations that they create – and visualized in the vernacular of both surveillance and the unconstrained undergrounds who challenge its control.