Erica Scourti is a London based artist who creates visual art projects mainly consisting of performative actions and audiovisual pieces that deal with the notion of self-mediation. She explores the subject’s construction in the networked regime by means of looking into the not visible structures of the World Wide Web. As a result, she is interested in the patterns that structure language in the Web and their capability to influence the self-determination of the users in a complex context of an individual but networked experience. Indeed, most of her works reflect on image and text associations that, although seeming natural, have an unaware learning process behind; by submitting herself to this fact, Erica creates pieces with an intimate appearance and a very subtle humour.
In this sense Erica constantly explores the idea of the authentic and the true-self, the self-definition in a massive reproduced and commodified system in which we have largely adopted instinctive branding attitudes. This notion of authenticity is well examined in her work “Woman Nature Alone”(2010), an online video project in which she performs actions using titles from stock video sites corresponding to the words “woman”, “nature” and “alone”. For instance she performs the title “Success- Feel the power of your inner Balance” in which Erica appears crossing a fallen tree in the nature. She later uploads up to 201 actions of titles to YouTube and curiously some of them are reused by unknown people to make their own content. What’s more interesting about “Woman Nature Alone” is that she performs each action described in the title as instructions to the performer, playing with this tension between the computational language, the machine, and the natural environment, as human, as a sign of the authentic, of the true-self. This work makes visible the influence of conceptual art on her work and specifically of Sol Lewitt‘s instruction art. Indeed, generally Erica’s work deals with his idea of a machine that makes the art but mixing it with autobiographical content and subjective ideas.
In “Life in AdWords” (2012) she writes a daily diary over almost one year to her Gmail account, performing to her webcam the list of suggested keywords of ads. ”Life in AdWords” makes visible the language algorithms used by Google in order to create ads using personal information. By facing the camera and enouncing the words suggested, Erica defines herself and shows an intimacy filtered by technology and market purposes. Another project that looks into these topics is “Modern War Trilogy” (2011) in which the subtitles for the hard of hearing of three action films about war and conflict in the Middle East are used as starting point for a new search of videos on YouTube. The result is a video mash with all type of content that hardly has any link with the original movies but which makes again visible some of the automated language processes and text associations in which online video is immersed. In one of her last works, Monkey Mind (2013) she makes a meditation Skype video journal with people that belong to Insight Timer app community. She translates both her partners’ and her own meditation journals into computational voice, edits them and inserts them into the meditation video. The result is a meaningless meditation.
We have skyped Erica Scourti and asked about all these issues. Reflecting the nature of her work, in the first part we carried out a kind of performative interview just proposing to her some of the main words found in her writings. She was not aware of the words before the interview so the result is a spontaneous chat arising from the very first ideas that came to her mind (#Authentic-self, #Language, #Algorithm, #Self-commodification, #Online video) In the second part Erica tells us about new media, her last summer project about Instagram Video and her future projects about Google Hangouts. (Sorry for the unexpected permanent mark in the videos “Call Recorder Demo” – although considering Erica’s work, t’s an interesting coincidence-)