They Are Watching You

Tony Oursler’s video installations offer a revelatory, and sometimes creepy, perspective on our collective obsession with technology. A new exhibition in Taiwan brings his life’s work into focus

- Oliver Giles

Artist Tony Oursler has spent the past 50 years making eerie installations that pose big questions about humanity’s future. Will artificial intelligence help us or harm us? Is it possible to end our addiction to smartphones? Are we in charge or have machines already taken over? But last year, when the pandemic tore across continents and millions of lives hung in the balance, Oursler took a step into the past.

“I shrunk my studio down to just a table—it was a little bit like going back to the Seventies or Eighties,” Oursler says, speaking over the phone from his home in New York. “Most of the time I was alone, and it was a chance to go back to enjoying creativity in a very classic sense. It was just me and some clay or a piece of paper or a video camera.”

Oursler also spent a large chunk of the year digging through his archives to choose works for Black Box, a retrospective exhibition opening on January 23 at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) in Taiwan. Showcasing pieces made from the 1970s to the present day, Black Box is Oursler’s first major museum show in Asia and one of the largest projects of his career. “It is a great honour to have people interested in my work in Asia, and it has been such a journey looking back at my work,” he says.