STAY AT HOME #07
MARC LEE
TV BOT
Press Release
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PRESS RELEASE
Annka Kultys is pleased to present Marc Lee’s live streaming video TV Bot (2020) as the seventh instalment of the gallery’s online exhibition Stay at home, a presentation of new digital works produced by artists in response to the coronavirus pandemic. On every Sunday of the lockdown during Stay at home, a new artist will be showcased on AKG’s recently launched online platform [The art happens here]. Lee’s video is on show for the seventh week of Stay at home, following on from Alice Bucknell’s video Welcome to Nütropix (2020) last week, Allan Gardner’s Infowars Made Me Hardcore (2020), James Knott’s Crisis Du Jour series, Eggs (2019) and Beans in Isolation (2020), Jillian Mayer’s You’ll Be Okay, Adad Hannah’s Social Distancing Video Portraits, and the opening show, James Irwin’s Surface Collider (23032020).
AKG is also announcing all gallery benefits (i.e., profits after the artist has been compensated in the usual manner) from featured digital works sold via [The art happens here] will be donated to the National Emergencies Trust. The purchasers’ generosity will help to financially support the featured artists during this unprecedented period when non-essential shops are closed, including art museums and commercial galleries, leading to postponed exhibitions for artists, and ensuring at least part of artists’ incomes can be maintained.
The current version of Marc Lee’s TV Bot, an ongoing project started by Marc in 2014, filters the latest Twitter and YouTube posts according to self-definable keywords or hashtags. In this version, items marked with the hashtags for Coronavirus are contrasted with those for COVID-19. The bot weaves the posts into a wild continuous (24/7) feed TV show in which images, tweets and videos flicker across the screen in real time. What counts today are the ‘Likes’ and ‘Retweets,’ which migrate across the work’s screen as icons and indicate the featured posts’ current online market value.
While, as users of social networks we typically only ever see variants of our own opinions mirrored back to us on social media, TV Bot is intended to confront us with views beyond the bounds of these echo-chambers, due to it universally picking up all searched for hashtag posts on a non-critical basis. Since the coronavirus pandemic, the artist records six hours of posts every eight days, at different times of day and night, in order to capture the pandemic news from different parts of the world. It constitutes a historical time-based resource, gathering in a single video world-wide professional broadcasts as well as private content posted by people with either the #Coronavirus and #COVID-19 hashtags.
TV Bot is a flexible platform in which the viewer can replace the current key words with different key words as they wish to create their own online art TV show according to their own preferences and share it with others.
BIOGRAPHY
Marc Lee creates network-oriented interactive art projects using interactive installations, media art, internet art, performance art, video art, augmented reality (AR) art, virtual reality (VR) art and mobile art. He experiments with information and communication technologies and within his contemporary art practice he reflects critically on creative, cultural, social, economic and political aspects.
Marc Lee was born in 1969 in Switzerland. He lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland.
