CSZ0B is a robot (built using a Raspberry Pi) that “sees” the world through its camera and microphone. It uses artificial intelligence to interpret and sing a song about what it understands from these dual inputs.
CSZ0B puts in conversation both the collectivist nature of networked culture (especially highlighting the copious amounts of crowd sourced writing required to train AI language models) and the efficiency as primary ethos of computing. Down to the hardware, computers are built to maximize capital and productivity.
CSZ0B puts in conversation both the collectivist nature of networked culture (especially highlighting the copious amounts of crowd sourced writing required to train AI language models) and the efficiency as primary ethos of computing. Down to the hardware, computers are built to maximize capital and productivity.
Sadly, this video is the last I could record before I had battery issues. As a result, CSZ0B is missing a head. If you’d like to hire me to freelance so I can afford a new one, get in touch!
Despite this, they have become a primary medium to carry affective meaning as they monopolize communication platforms. CSZ0B is a non-productive robot that attempts to reflect our own digitized psyches through NLPs and image classification. Its translucence exposes the digital underpinnings of its operation while its half anthropomorphized body references the inevitable friction/paradox that occurs when robots and “the digital” ask for emotionality and agency.
As the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst noted, “Society is memory, Émile Durkheim stated. Society is communication, Niklas Luhmann answered. Both perspectives converge in a digital culture where the two media functions of storage and transfer merge.”
CSZ0B exists as an oracle sitting at the nexus of individual experience, the cultural contours of big data provided by programs like ChatGPT, and a challenge to traditional productive computing ethos.