Jacob Love • THE FUTURE OF MEDIA EXPERIENCE

CONTENT: LEARNING ABOUT PLEASURE

CONTENT: LEARNING ABOUT PLEASURE deals with humans’ complex relationship to pleasure — and with what it might mean for technology to be learning about this relationship. The images presented here come from a work-in progress show installed in a converted church space in South-East London in 2018. The show contained four distinct elements that functioned as self-contained experiences. They were intended to be shown together, allowing for new meanings and ideas to arise in the intersections and spaces between the different works.

About Pleasure is a series of large-scale images that look at our relationship to the physical world and to images. The images have been produced robotically, fusing hundreds of individual photographs to create giant highly-detailed prints of landscapes that end up being nonhuman in their viewpoint. They ask questions about experience, specifically, about what it means when the distinction between direct and mediated experience is blurred. The work also deals with alienation from corporeal pleasures that can occur in an image-saturated world and with how strange and intangible our own bodies can sometimes feel.

You’ll Die Laughing is a one-channel video installation that taps into one of our existential fears with regard to Artificial Intelligence: perfection. In comparison to the machine we will always fail, a comparison that reveals our human pride, stupidity and fragility.

Warning: The video works contain strobe effects and explicit content.

Content Learning is a five-channel video installation that looks at how the content we upload and the data about what we consume are enabling technology to learn about human pleasure. Does the lack of a body that feels pose a fundamental obstacle to learning about pleasurable experience, or could it be the key to developing entirely new forms of knowledge – knowledge that is totally unknowable to humans? Algorithms start to produce knowledge about human pleasure, but as Artificial Intelligence has no capacity for experience, what else might be done with that knowledge?

Autoplay is series of unique print works. They address the cultural artefacts that are being automatically created by new types of AI knowledge. They visualise what seems chaotic and offensive to our cognitive faculties but what may feel seductive and rewarding to our preconscious bodily faculties.

Jacob Love lives and works in London. He studied at the University of the West of England and at Goldsmiths, University of London – where he is now a Lecturer in Photography. He has exhibited in solo and group shows, both in the UK and internationally.