LONDON.- Gagosian presents Alex Israel’s seven-channel interactive AI-powered video installation REMEMBR (2023), opening at the Davies Street gallery in London on June 6, 2024.
Ever wondered what your life might look like flashing before your eyes? And if you shared this montage as a selection of images from your camera roll—publicly and without control over what exactly would be featured—might the experience make you feel vulnerable in a whole new way? Would it feel like performing karaoke, but in pictures instead of songs? Would you feel like the star of your own movie, or like an influencer posting an #ad? Like a gambler never knowing what card will be drawn next, or maybe even like an artist, exposing your self-portrait to the court of popular opinion?
I have over 100,000 photos and videos on my iPhone. The pocket-sized smart device reports on the weather and tracks my steps, but it’s also become an external hard drive for my brain—allowing me to create and store an ever-expanding abundance of content. I wanted to find an engaging (and maybe even exciting) way to enter the cloud and scroll through these mementos, but without literally having to scroll through them. The Apple Photos app sends me short edited clips culled from this database that, on occasion, remind, surprise, and move me. My goal in building REMEMBR was to create similarly poignant memories for myself and for others, but at a scale and with a degree of drama that ups the emotional stakes for everyone. Could it cover a lot more ground? Could it become exhilarating?”
Each two-minute super-memory created by REMEMBR is made possible with the aid of artificial intelligence. REMEMBR selects and combines multiple categories of each user’s content, edits and synchronizes it all to an infectious pop beat, weaves it together with colorful animation, and choreographs its presentation across seven large screens shaped after my Self-Portrait works.—Alex Israel
Follow these instructions to experience the project, or ask gallery staff for guidance:
1) To access REMEMBR, first connect to the gallery Wi-Fi, scan the provided QR code, and download the app.
2) Allow the app to access your entire camera roll (and don’t worry, our AI will filter out inappropriate photos and REMEMBR saves nothing).
3) Follow the prompts. While your content is being uploaded and rendered, keep the REMEMBR app open.
4) Watch and share your life on the big screens!
Screens: PRG
AI Engineer: Yunus Saatchi
App Engineer: Sirius Valley
Music: Blake Slatkin
Animation: Mindbomb
Sound Effects: Emilie Corpuz
Alex Israel’s art embraces pop culture as a global language. Trafficking in the invisible stardust of Hollywood and the detritus of film production—backdrops, sets, and props—while riding the wave of the Internet and social media as an online talk-show host, eyewear and clothing designer, filmmaker, and hologram, Israel produces art that doubles as a brand, centered around a Southern Californian millennial lifestyle for which his iconic profile-in-shades-logo becomes a sly emblem, mobilized across high-visibility platforms from the worlds of art, entertainment, fashion, and tech. Embedded within each of Israel’s endeavors is not only a landscape (of LA) and a portrait (of himself), but also a cool and savvy meditation on a world fueled by celebrity, product placement, and influence. A sort of sphinx behind dark lenses, the artist provokes an interrogation of the role of contemporary art in this new world.
Alex Israel was born in 1982 in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. Collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Solo exhibitions include Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2013); Sightings, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2015–16); Alex Israel at The Huntington, Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA (2015); #AlexIsrael, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2016); Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings, Jewish Museum, New York (2016–17); Waves, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2018); Alex Israel × Snapchat, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL (2021–22); and Freeway, Fosun Foundation, Shanghai (2021–22).
