Canny

​2013, HD video, stereo, 2:46 loop

An Actroid sits deep inside a data center. She is performing Google and Youtube searches for examples of onscreen mental arithmetic by TV game show hostesses. She searches for calculations performed by Carol Vorderman and Rachel Riley on Britain’s Countdown, and by Lily Serna on the Australian show Letters and Numbers.

​The Actroid vocalises the first-page results of each online search, quoting verbatim from the web and flaunting the fixations of the hive mind.

Canny is part of a suite of works plotting and re-staging the finite gestural vocabulary of hostesses across a range of genres, periods and cultures.

Screenings/Exhibitions
The Female is Future, Gallery Hashimoto, Tokyo 2018
Artificial Intelligence Art and Aesthetics Exhibition, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan 2017–18
Alter, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland 2016
Beyond Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, UNSW Galleries, Sydney 2015
Film Cunst, Brenda May Gallery, Sydney 2014
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Credits
Light and camera: Campbell Drummond 
Assist: Lindsay Webb 
Additional sound: Cinemafia
Robot: Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories 
Permissions: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan, + Creative Robotics Lab, National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW Art & Design, Australia