1. clustering for similarity in data mining

RPI

Single-board microcomputers
configured with miscellaneous
USB peripherals.

"I get the animism thing. Oh, god, I really love the RPI sculpture with the Himalayan salt crystal lamp; I see myself in it. Or rather, I see the absurdity of the New Age-y ness of the IoT. Unlike the lamp, I don’t buy the notion that my iPhone is purging ions from the atmosphere, but I also don’t always think about the air conditions around Congolese workers mining Coltan while I’m using Signal to frag my text messages. That’s where the animism comes in for me. C-O-M-M-O-D-I-T-Y F-E-T-I-S-H-I-S-M. The IoT simultaneously activates and makes complicit so many political “trends”: mass consumption and horizontal marketing, the fiscalization of the individual above all else, technocracy, the surveillance state, globalization and a lack of workplace regulation. Neoliberalism remaking everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus is late capitalism’s religious order for me, but I feel like the blasé, devil-may-care aesthetic you incorporate in these sculptures is pointing toward the absurdity of this worship, while mirroring the hands-off approach of laissez-faire economics—“if you build it, they will [buy it]” style?"

-Kristi McGuire