Boiler World
Every institution has a shadow version of itself somewhere in the world.
An offshore scam centre, also known as a boiler room, in the Philippines. Photo: AFP.
What a long time ago 2024 was. When we curated This Hideous Replica, we were responding to how computationally generative text, images, sounds, and videos — better known now as AI slop — was beginning to saturate the mediascape, creating disquieting doubles of every kind of content, the familiar refracted into forgeries and relentlessly multiplied. “AI cannot create anything new!” was the oft-repeated truism of that moment, and usually that was enough to brush it aside as some kind of sad, aspiring artist. The “real artists” in the exhibition explored different strategies of misfiring replication, sometimes metabolising history, politics, and cultural norms into material and conceptual propositions. Hideous replication was a term that functioned as a diagnosis, a cultural logic, and an aesthetic disposition to learn and misdirect.
Exclusive to the Magazine
Boiler World by Sean Dockray and Joel Stern is featured in full in Issue 5 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Sean Dockray is an artist and writer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Monash University, a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and AAAARG.ORG.
Joel Stern is an artist, curator, and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. His work explores sound and listening as cultural, political, and technical practices shaping contemporary life. He is a Research Fellow at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication, an Associate Investigator at ADM+S, and was Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture from 2013 to 2022.
