Exhibition

Sophia Oppel

I’m sorry, I’m having trouble with the connection, 2023

Video, 10:14 minutes

This 3D-rendered video features Claudia, an embodied AI assistant who considers her complicity within a hostile system of surveillance capitalism. In a pitch-corrected monologue written and vocalized by the artist, she ruminates on feminized labour and deferred desire as she glitches between poetic speculation, generic auto-responses, and a failure to perform basic commands. The work mimics the response style of AI assistants such as Siri and Alexa to reveal the ways in which our intelligent machines reaffirm uneven power distribution and mirror our expectations back to us as subjects within a late-capitalist system.

Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Toronto. She is interested in examining digital interfaces and physical architectures as parallel sites of power. Oppel uses transparent substrates–glass, mirror, and the screen–as a framework to consider the paradoxes of being human within surveillance capitalism.