Amazon’s Cabinet of Curiosities is the result of my cooperation with Alexa Voice Shopping, the artificial intelligence developed by Amazon. To produce this work I asked Alexa one question: ‘Alexa, can you suggest a product for a new artwork?’. Immediately after buying the recommended product Alexa suggested another one, and then another one, and so on, and on… I followed and acquired every product suggested in this way until my production budget was entirely spent.
In the tension between apparent unpredictability and systematic control, and by submitting my decision-making process to Alexa, Amazon’s Cabinet of Curiosities expands my investigation of the hidden and invisible mechanisms of technological power and of the limits of human autonomy and artistic authorship in a world saturated by autonomous nonhuman agents. From a ‘human’ perspective the products suggested by Alexa were completely unpredictable. However, from the perspective of Amazon, the outcome followed a predefined logic: obscure item-to-item matching filters linked to massive data sets and algorithms optimized for maximum commercial consumption.
