From Sep. 25 to yesterday, the Berrie Center’s Pascal Gallery hosted “META EX MACHINA,” a performative exhibition created by Peter Campbell and Nick Walsh. It was a comparison of modern power dynamics with more historical examples presented in Greek tragedies.
Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the symbol of modern power in this exhibition with his involvement in the Big Tech and Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. This crisis involved a courtroom discussion with the CEOs of Meta, X, TikTok, Discord and Snapchat about the exploitation of children on the internet.
During the hearing on Jan. 21, 2024, Zuckerburg apologized to a group of parents and said he and his company are “going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.”
This reminded Campbell and Walsh of the powers present in Greek tragedies who tell victimized women, children and refugees that they are doing the best they can to protect them, despite failing out of negligence.
There were multiple pieces to the exhibition that carried this comparison. The first was a screen hanging from a wooden wall with a pulley system built by Daniel Archibald and Robert Modafferi. On the screen was a fake Instagram feed that scrolled through posts. There were two kinds of posts shared in an alternating pattern.
One was clips of Zuckerberg reading off Section 230, a law that was originally published in the Communications Decency Act that explains that an interactive computer program — like Meta — is not responsible for what is posted on its platform, but rather the person that made the post themselves. The account was called @zuck.ai, as artificial intelligence was used to make Zuckerberg recite passages of Section 230. One example of these clips was Zuckerberg surfing in a loop as he spoke a passage aloud clearly.
The other kinds of posts in between these clips of Zuckerberg were performers with the exhibition reading excerpts from Greek tragedies that related to a victim crying out against injustice done by leaders. One of the accounts was @Clytemnestra, with the location set to Mycenae. The videos of these performers were also altered by filters, some giving them a glitching effect while others messed with lighting.
However, this was just one part of the show. If you were to walk behind the wall, there was a whole separate space to explore. When you first entered on the right, you could find a pile of camera film ranging from Kodachrome slides to film kept at the Ramapo Library. There were also two projectors set up at the back of the room projecting classical paintings against the wall. In between the projections was a physical painting of Zuckerberg speaking at the courtroom hearing.
The performers reciting tragedies weren’t the only performance parts of the exhibition either. Every so often, a performer who sat by the projector would get up and write a quote from one of the books piled on the floor next to them. Many of the quotes were by Euripedes, such as, “Zeus was the cause, Zeus killed my son.”
There were also two performers who would stand at the back corners of the room and dance. “The dance is meant to create some moments of analog, concrete human bodies in actual space, as a contrast to the digital world that the rest of the work involves,” Campbell said in an email interview with The Ramapo News. “The song, “I Am Stretched On Your Grave,” is based on an ancient Celtic poem about grieving a loved one, and it is sung by an artist, Sinead O’Connor, who used her life and her art to speak truth to power, even when the costs were unimaginably high.”
In addition to the physical presentation of the exhibition, “META EX MACHINA” also has an Instagram account, @meta.ex.machina, where they live streamed the fake Instagram feed. It was an exhibit that truly calls to mind the corruption that takes place right before one’s eyes. The internet is central to modern society, but it is also the source of grief and exploitation. “META EX MACHINA” capitalized on the despair of this exploitation and opened the eyes of its audience to the horrors that can await online.
pbortner@ramapo.edu
Featured photo by Peyton Bortner
