David Aston

ARTWORK DETAILS

David Aston
Attest you are human roll for humanity Brooklyn gamification
Instalation, happening, gamification, Brooklyn, New York
2018

FURTHER DETAILS

The Attest you are human series looks for the humorous, profound and ironic at the point in human evolution where we have to confirm our humanity to machines. The series explores the possible play on the words and multiple interpretations of the request to ‘attest you are human’ as well as the randomness associated with a reverse Turing Test who's method of evaluating humanity is the selection of nine images containing signs, cars, lampposts, shopfronts and bridges.

In 2018 I was awarded a project by Saatchi Art to create Attest you are human (roll for humanity), a work of performance art 'gamification' made as a special project commission for the Other Art Fair and Saatchi Art, New York.

Visitors to the fair were given the opportunity to attest their humanity by rolling for humanity. The game included an online attestation, antique gaming table, antique counter (not unlike the counters used on early websites), engraved glass dice shaker and a large polyptych of nine canvases replicating the nine box grid of the reCAPTCHA.

History and eighteenth century etchings provided the inspiration for the format in order to make a diachronic observation on how random the attestation would appear to an 18th or 19th mind. The search for an appropriate gaming table ended after stumbling upon an 1864 print depicting the contest for the US presidency as a game of bagatelle. What could be more appropriate for an act of human gamification in New York than a gaming table that is said to have set the historical stakes for the US presidency.

A a final “gesture of humanity” the first 50 visitors who completed the online attestation, reCAPTCHA and successfully rolled 6 humans with 3 rolls of the dice were given a work of art.

EXHIBITIONS

2018 - Saatchi Art & Other Art Fair, Brooklyn, New York.