Your Interest in Tom Cruise

I was recently somewhat relieved to discover that the great AI threat to humanity has been overstated. It can be fooled quite easily I realised, simply by adopting irregular and unpredictable online behaviour. Switching on my phone one morning this week I am faced with a notification for a news item tagged “your interest in Tom Cruise.” I would like to take this opportunity to categorically state that I have absolutely no interest in Tom Cruise (unless it is related in someway to the downfall of that rich white fallacy, The Church of Scientology), and it took me some time to work out how Google’s algorithms had come to the conclusion that I had any desire to know what the diminutive Hollywood prat had been up to. 

Eventually I remembered that one evening a few weeks ago, lost surfing a YouTube tangent, I had watched a video clip of Johnny Vegas being interviewed at some red carpet awards event. Now, I am willing to declare openly, here and now, that I do like Johnny Vegas. He has a brutal honesty and vulnerable openness to his comedy, and often says things that are so tragically truthful that I laugh out loud despite myself. But, standing in a line of celebrities being interviewed, who should Vegas be standing next to in the line, but pixie impossible Tom Cruise, and Vegas was saying to the woman interviewing him how she was only talking to him because she was waiting for Tom Cruise to be free. And also, I remember now, Tom Cruise was mentioned in the title of the clip.

We all know how everything we do online or on any connected device is recorded in someway and fed into an ever-growing store of knowledge with which the big internet companies make their money selling this knowledge of us to advertisers. But it is reassuring to know that they haven’t quite got it right yet. Why else would I get adverts for over 50s holidays, or endless adverts for the thing I just bought and have no need to buy another one of? It helps I guess that I am not on Facebook and have no desire to join (I’m still in the majority. Five billion of us are still not on Facebook). But I suppose it does worry me slightly that in the future our lives, when they end, may be judged by our online history. And if I continue to avoid letting Google and Facebook know who I really am, by refusing to continually feed them real knowledge of what I am really interested in, my Amazon sponsored funeral may well have a large poster of Tom Cruise hanging over the coffin. This is the nightmare future I envisage. You have been warned.

Birth on Google Street View

In Germany the introduction of Google Street View has provoked an interesting response. As in other countries there are many people not happy about it. Numerous complaints have been made concerning the internet giants’ invasion into the German peoples’ public space. Some, however, have seen it as an artistic opportunity. As reported in the Observer on 28th November (Birth on Google Street View) some very striking images have been appearing on the German streets.

On Hubertusallee in the Berlin suburb of Wilmersdorf a live birth can be witnessed. A woman in a purple dress lies on the pavement, her parted legs, knees up, angled away from the camera, a woman in black cradling her head while a man kneels in front of her holding a small baby aloft. Another man stands a little way off, his left arm raised, right hand to his ear speaking animatedly into a mobile phone. The image looks too clean and carefully composed to be real. The story informs us that no birth was ever reported on this street indicating that this is probably an elaborate piece of street theatre.

To me this looks like a new form of artistic intervention, the clever utilisation of a new tool to create memorable images and disseminate them to as wide an audience as possible. Apparently this is not an isolated incident. Many such scenes have been appearing all over Germany. This is another example of how the internet is changing the creative industries in ways which its designers could not possibly have foreseen. It is also an example of how artists (because I consider the anonymous culprits to be artists) continue to respond to new technologies in imaginative and unexpected ways in order to create new forms of expression and new forms of art.

This is one of those moments where, as one interested in issues of contemporary art, I can only look on in admiration at the intelligence and subversive wit of these performances and say humbly: I wish I had thought of that.