#eye #eye



(2024)



This work was first exhibited at UTS Gallery as part of Image, Interrupted, curated by Eleanor Zeichner

Xanthe Dobbie’s video work FutureSex/Love Sounds (2024), proposes a radical scenario in which AI technology is deployed for erotic revolution. Starting with the premise that we have already reached the techno future envisioned by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or of the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) by VNS Matrix, Dobbie asks, where are the sex robots? Deepfake versions of figures such as Morgan Freeman, Hilary Clinton and Cate Blanchett espouse the virtues of completely customisable sex robots that are responsive to any imaginable fantasy. The sex robots don’t just have erotic benefits — though this is ample, according to deepfake Queen Elizabeth II — they have also solved the climate crisis, established universal basic income and discovered intelligent life on other planets. In this version of the future, dating apps are no longer problematic and the arts ‘get so much funding’. Dobbie’s vision of post-labour hedonism, facilitated by the offshoring of societal problems to benevolent cyborgs, flips the anxiety that automation makes human intelligence redundant. Imagine if the machines could free us.
- Eleanor Zeichner, Curator



Install at UTS Gallery, photo: Jaquie Manning




   Xanthe acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which their work is made, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the Widjabul/Wyabul people of the Bundjalung Nation, and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. They pay their respects to elders, past and present.  Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.