They Are Watching You
Artist Tony Oursler has spent the past 50 years making eerie installations that pose big questions about humanity’s future. Will artificial intelligence help us or harm us? Is it possible to end our addiction to smartphones? Are we in charge or have machines already taken over? But last year, when the pandemic tore across continents and millions of lives hung in the balance, Oursler took a step into the past.
“I shrunk my studio down to just a table—it was a little bit like going back to the Seventies or Eighties,” Oursler says, speaking over the phone from his home in New York. “Most of the time I was alone, and it was a chance to go back to enjoying creativity in a very classic sense. It was just me and some clay or a piece of paper or a video camera.”
“Television was really a drug, but it was never controlled like a drug. People are realising the same thing about smartphones” —TONY OURSLER
Oursler also spent a large chunk of the year digging through, a retrospective exhibition opening on January 23 at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan. Showcasing pieces made from the 1970s to the present day, is Oursler’s first major museum show in Asia and one of the largest projects of his career. “It is a great honour to have people interested in my work in Asia, and it has been such a journey looking back at my work,” he says.
