ARTWORK DETAILS
David Aston
Young woman with unicorn (Portrait of our age)
Carved antique mahogany card table, mannequin hands, engraved silver bracelet, working iPhone in record mode
91 H x 91 W x 11 D cm
2024
“Every Unicorn has a Hunter...
Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labour, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labour, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
“16th century renaissance artists understood this and used Petrach allegorical symbolism and mythical beasts in their contemporary portraits.”
FURTHER DETAIL
Early renaissance Petrach poetry used allegory to express the duality and the danger of attraction to forces intent on exploiting your good nature. 16th century renaissance artists understood this and incorporated Petrach’s allegorical symbolism in the form of mythical beasts in their contemporary portraits of women.
Writing in his Bestiary, Da Vinci demonstrates this understanding of mythical creatures and describes the naivety of the unicorn in anthropomorphic terms…
“The unicorn through its lack of temperance...forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it goes up to the seated maiden and goes to sleep in her lap, and in this way the hunters take it. ”
Shoshana Zuboff, in The age of surveillance capitalism and a chapter entitled Every unicorn has it’s hunter, describes surveillance capitalism as “a vampire…that feeds on labour, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labour, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
Young woman with unicorn (portrait of our age) is a contemporary multi-media allegorical portrait of surveillance capitalism in the style of a Renaissance Petrach portrait.
It serves as a reminder to contemporary viewers of the duality of the unicorns of the tech world. The faceless portrait contains no unicorns. The viewer becomes the captive unicorn and it is their privacy that is hunted to extinction in the age of surveillance capitalism.
This Petrach meaning is reinforced by the engraving on her antique silver bracelet, which is engraved with "Virtutem Forma Decorat", meaning Virtue Adorns Beauty, or beauty is found in the things you do for others, not what you appear to be. These words are engraved on the reverse of Ginevra de' Benci, a Petrach portrait by Da Vinci (see detail).
Young woman with unicorn (Portrait of our age), X-Rayed, 2024